THE QUEEN OF MYSTERIES

Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie is possibly the world’s most famous detective storywriter. She wrote 78 novels, and her sales (4 billion copies of her novels) outnumber those of William Shakespeare. However, behind her 4,680,000 words was a painfully shy woman whose life was often lonely and unhappy.

She was born in 1890 in Devon, the third child of Clarissa and Frederick Miller, and grew into a beautiful and sensitive girl. She didn’t go to school but was educated by her parents. Her father taught her mathematics through stories and games, and her mother encouraged her to write her own stories. Unfortunately her father died in 1901 when she was 11, and both she and her mother were grief-stricken.

When World War I came in 1914, she became a nurse in a hospital dispensary, which proved very useful for her later career. Many of the murders in her books were carried out by a clever use of drugs and poisons, showing how much she had learnt about them as a nurse.

She wrote her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920. In it she introduced Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective who appeared in many subsequent novels. Her other main detective was an elderly spinster called Miss Marple, who was based on Agatha’s grandmother and her circle of friends. Christie’s stories have ingenious plots, and keep the reader guessing who the murderer is until the very end of the story.

In 1914, at the beginning of the war, she married Archibald Christie, but the marriage was unhappy. It didn’t last and they divorced in 1926. It was a very difficult time for her, as her much-loved mother had died earlier that year. Agatha suffered a nervous breakdown and one night she abandoned her car and mysteriously disappeared.

She went missing for eleven days and was eventually found in a hotel in Harrogate, in the North of England. Agatha desperately wanted solitude and felt bitter towards the media because the newspapers had given her a hard time over her breakdown and disappearance. She was determined never to let them enter her private life again.

She enjoyed a very happy second marriage to Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, who she met in Baghdad and married in 1930. Her detective skills were a help to him in his excavations in Syria and Iraq. By successfully staying out of the media’s spotlight, she ultimately found happiness with her beloved husband. Her best novels were written after 1930, and she continued writing until 1973. She died peacefully in 1976.