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
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