Agatha Christie

Biography

• 1890-1976

• Born Agatha May Clarissa Miller

• English descent

• Born into a “well-to-do” family

• Youngest of three children

Education

• Homeschooled

• Very good at creating games to beat boredom

• Very shy as a child

• To express her emotion, she turned to music at first and then to writing

Going to the Chapel…

• In 1914 at the age of 24, she married Archie Christie.

• While Archie was in WWI, she worked as a nurse

• While working as a nurse, she came up with her first detective novel, and in a year completed it

• The novel was not published for FIVE years!

The Mysterious Affairs of Styles

• Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer

• Hercule Poirot is to Agatha Christie as Sherlock Holmes is to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• Poirot had a waxed mustache, and was a “tiny man”

• Poirot is usually described as “absurd”

Most Popular Stories

• “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” - 1926

• “Murder on the Orient Express” - 1934

• “Death on the Nile” - 1937

Agatha Christie goes MIA

• Archie Christie asked Agatha for a divorce in 1926, because he had fallen in love with another woman

• In that same year, her mother died

• Agatha Christie became MIA, and all of England was looking for her

• She was found in a hotel room three weeks later with no memory

Resolution

• She later married Max Mallowan in 1930

• Mallowan was an architect

• They met while on a trip to Mesopotamia

Miss Jane Marple

• First appearance was in 1930’s “Murder at the Vicarage”

• Marple is an elderly spinster in the English village of St. Mary Mead

• Solved cases through intense concentration and intuition

• Featured in 12 novels

The Golden Age

• Christie was acknowledged as the Queen of the Golden Age

• She wrote over 66 novels, numerous short stories and romantic novels

• She sometimes used the pen name Mary Westmacott

• Became a Dame in the British Empire in 1971