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Portrait of Agatha Christie

Literature · Novelists

Agatha Christie

1890–1976 · English

Detective fiction; Golden Age of crime fiction

Agatha Christie, born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, is the best-selling novelist of all time, with sales often estimated at over two billion copies. She created the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the village sleuth Miss Marple, and wrote The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in West End history. Her ingenious puzzle plots define the Golden Age of detective fiction.

How to spot them

  • ▸Hercule Poirot, his 'little grey cells', Captain Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp
  • ▸Miss Jane Marple of St Mary Mead
  • ▸The Mousetrap, which opened in London in 1952
  • ▸Her 11-day disappearance in December 1926, ending at a Harrogate hotel
  • ▸Married the archaeologist Max Mallowan; wrote romantic novels as Mary Westmacott

Key works

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

Her first novel and the debut of Hercule Poirot

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Poirot novel famous for its twist: the narrator, Dr Sheppard, is the murderer

The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)

First full-length Miss Marple novel, set in St Mary Mead

Murder on the Orient Express (1934)

Poirot investigates the stabbing of Ratchett on a snowbound train; all the suspects did it

Death on the Nile (1937)

Poirot solves the murder of the heiress Linnet Doyle aboard a Nile steamer

And Then There Were None (1939)

Ten strangers lured to an island die one by one following a nursery rhyme; her best-selling book

The Mousetrap (1952)

Murder mystery play set at Monkswell Manor, the West End's longest-running show

Curtain (1975)

Poirot's last case, written in the 1940s, in which he dies

Key ideas

  • Mastered the fair-play puzzle: all clues given to the reader, with the least likely suspect revealed in a final gathering
  • Her wartime work in a hospital dispensary gave her the knowledge of poisons used in many of her plots

Quick-fire facts

  • •Created other detectives including Tommy and Tuppence (first in The Secret Adversary, 1922), Parker Pyne, Harley Quin and the novelist Ariadne Oliver
  • •Disappeared for 11 days in December 1926 and was found at a Harrogate hotel, registered under the surname of her husband Archie Christie's mistress
  • •Divorced Archie Christie in 1928 and married the archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, joining his digs in Iraq and Syria
  • •Wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott
  • •The Mousetrap began as a radio play, Three Blind Mice, written for Queen Mary's 80th birthday in 1947
  • •Appointed CBE in 1956 and made a Dame (DBE) in 1971
  • •On the publication of Curtain in 1975, The New York Times ran a front-page obituary for Poirot
  • •Her Devon holiday home, Greenway, on the River Dart, now belongs to the National Trust
  • •Died at Winterbrook House, Wallingford, in January 1976

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Sources