Dame Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Christie 1890-1976, English detective story writer, b. Torquay, Devon, as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller. Christie's second husband was the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan , and she gained much material for her later novels during his excavations in the Middle East. An extraordinarily popular author, Christie wrote over 80 books, most of them featuring one of her two famous detectives; Hercule Poirot, an egotistical Belgian, and Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster. Her novels, noted for their skillful plots, include The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), And Then There Were None (1940), Death Comes as the End (1945), Funerals Are Fatal (1953), The Pale Horse (1962), Passenger to Frankfurt (1970), Elephants Can Remember (1973), and Curtain (1975); her plays include The Mousetrap (1952), one of the longest-running plays in theatrical history, and Witness for the Prosecution (1954). Christie also published novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. She was named Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, in 1971.

Bibliography: See her memoir, Come, Tell Me How You Live (1944, repr. 2001).

Christie, Dame Agatha, née Miller (1890–1976), writer of detective fiction. During the First World War she worked as a hospital dispenser, which gave her a knowledge of poisons which was to be useful in her fiction. Her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who appeared in many subsequent novels (her other main detective being the elderly spinster Miss Marple). In the next 56 years she wrote 66 detective novels, among the best of which are The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), and Ten Little Niggers (1939). She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, two self-portraits (Come Tell Me How You Live, 1946; An Autobiography, 1977), and several plays, including The Mousetrap, which has run continuously in London for more than 50 years. Her prodigious international success seems due to her matchless ingenuity in contriving plots, sustaining suspense, and misdirecting the reader, to her ear for dialogue, and brisk, unsentimental common sense and humour.