Agatha Christie - Classic Literature Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie was born Agatha Miller, at Torquay in Devon, England on September 15, 1890. She was the daughter of Fredrick Miller and Clarissa Miller. Her father was an American who died when she was quite young. At the age of sixteen, Christie went to Paris for studies.
Christie was encouraged to write by her mother and neighbor Eden Philpotts, she began by writing short stories. Agatha Christie was married to Archibald Christie in 1914. Their daughter, Rosalind, was born in 1919. The couple divorced in 1928, two years after Archibald Christie had left his wife Agatha for a younger woman named Nancy Neele.
Agatha Christie’s mother died in 1926. This incident along with the tensions in her married life affected her badly and she was untraceable for eleven days in December 1926. Christie was finally traced to a hotel at Harrogate where she had stayed under the name of Mrs. Neele.
Christie married Max Mallowan, an archaeologist and junior to her by fourteen years. Christie had quoted "An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her." She traveled with Mallowan to the sites of his archaeological expeditions in Syria and Iraq. These locales were frequently the settings for her novels, such as "Murder in Mesopotamia," "Death on the Nile" and "Come Tell Me How You Live," which was an account of her travels with her husband, published in 1946.
Christie had worked in a Red Cross Hospital during the First World War. Her job as a hospital dispenser provided her with information on poisons, she used this knowledge to good effect in her mystery novels. Her first novel was "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" written in 1920. It also marked the debut of one of the most famous of fictional creations, Hercule Poirot.
Christie’s creation Poirot is a former police officer from Belgium who fled Belgium when the Germans invaded in 1914. He is short, with a distinctive egg-shaped head, stiff, waxed moustache and is very particular about neatness. Poirot’s eccentricities and the unique manner in which he solved the cases, exercising "the little grey cells" endeared him to the readers.
Poirot appeared in thirty-three novels and several short stories. Poirot made his screen debut in "Alibi" in 1931. The film was an adaptation of "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," which is one of her most well-received novels. It was written in 1926 and was inspired by "The Shooting party," written by Anton Chekov.
Christie’s other famous creation, Miss Marple was an elderly spinster who lived in the village of St. Mary Mead. She makes her first appearance in "Murder at the Vicarage", which was the first of her seventeen novels. Miss Marple relied more on her acute judgment of human nature and sensitivity to her surroundings to solve her cases. Christie had based the character of Miss Marple on her own grandmother. Miss Marple first appeared on screen in the film "Murder She Said," in 1961.
Poirot’s last case was "Curtain," published in 1975. The last case that Miss marple solved was "Sleeping Murder" published in 1977. It also was the last novel that Agatha Christie wrote. Unlike Poirot, who dies at the end of his last novel, Miss Marple simply returns to her village after solving the case.
Christie wrote six romance novels under the pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. Her first romance novel appeared in 1936. Her short story "Three Blind Mice" was adapted as the play "The Mousetrap". The play had its first performance at the Ambassadors Theatre on November 25, 1952 in London. The play is still running after more than 20,000 shows and is the longest running play in the world.
Christie wrote the play "Akhnaton" in 1937 based on her visit to Luxor, where she met the archaeologist Howard Carter. The play was published in 1973. The New York Drama Critics Circle chose her play "Witness for the Prosecution" as the best play of the year 1954-55. Several of Christie’s novels were adapted for films. Christie herself considered Billy Wilder’s "Witness for the Prosecution" as the best film adaptation of her works.
In the fifty-six years that she wrote, Christie produced seventy-nine novels and collections of short stories. Sixty-six of her novels were detective stories and she wrote over a dozen plays. Her other lesser known characters include Captain Hastings, Poirot’s friend and the narrator in the novel, Miss Felicity Lemon who is Poirot’s secretary, Detective Parker Pyne, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford.
Agatha Christie has sold over a billion copies in the English language alone. Only the Bible and Shakespeare have sold more than her works. She has been translated into more than forty-five languages and has sold another billion copies in these languages combined. Christie launched Agatha Christie ltd in 1955 to look after the financial aspects, i.e. the royalties on her works. The annual royalties on her works are approximately $ 4 million.
The appeal of her whodunits lies in the surprising final denouements that she was able to come up with, where very often it was person who seemed most above suspicion committed the crime. Christie always provided all the necessary information to the readers to enable them to draw their own conclusions. Christie’s characters inhabited a genteel world but would usually be beset by financial troubles that would ultimately lead to a crime.
Agatha Christie was made president of the British Detection Club in 1967. She was awarded the Order of Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1971. She died on January 12, 1976 in Oxfordshire. Her husband, Max Mallowan died in 1978.
