Her 66 mystery novels (plus numerous collections of short stories) made her the best-selling novelist of all time. During her lifetime and even after her books have outsold all others in English except the Bible (an estimated one billion copies) She has been translated into over 100 languages, and astonishingly, she is the all-time best-selling author in France. Thirty-one years after her death, her books are still best-sellers. Besides mysteries, she wrote approximately 40 other novels, six using the pen-name 'Mary Westmacott'.

Agatha Christie, 1891 - 1976

• Her play, The Mousetrap, has run in London for over 20,000 consecutive performances, a phenomenon without parallel.
  
  
• In 1955, her Witness for the Prosecution was judged Best Foreign Play of the year by the New York Drama Critics Circle. The Hollywood version was nominated for six Academy Awards in 1957, including Best Picture.
  
  
• About 100 movies have been based on her writings.
  
  
• Her two best-known characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, still appear regularly in TV series that are among the most popular in the medium.
  
  
• In 1955, her success had reached such proportions that she became, in effect, a corporation, Agatha Christie Limited, created to manage the world-wide distribution of her works.
  
  

The stream of mystery novels began in 1920 with The Affair at Styles, in which Hercule Poirot made his first appearance; thereafter, for over fifty years, hardly a year went by without one or two new Agatha Christies. Her first big best-seller was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in 1926. Postern of Fate, the last novel she wrote, appeared in 1975, the year before her death. But death did not stem the flow. Two novels written earlier were published after her death, and new collections of short stories continued to appear well into the 1990s. Born in 1890, she had a conventional upper-middle-class upbringing, including finishing school in France. Along the way, she became an accomplished pianist.

In 1914 she married Archibald Christie, an artillery officer. During World War I Agatha worked in military hospitals, and is said to have learned a good deal about poisons, knowledge that she would put to good (if fictional) use.

The Christies had one daughter, but by 1926 the marriage had deteriorated and they divorced. Also in 1926, her mother died. In December of that year Agatha disappeared for ten days. She was eventually found, registered at a hotel, under the name - a nice touch -- of the Other Woman (her husband's lover). While there she had not exactly hidden herself; she even played the piano with the hotel orchestra. Since she was now a celebrity, the press feasted on the story. Was it a nervous breakdown, as her doctors suggested? Was Agatha poking an angry thumb in her husband's wandering eye? Many suspected a publicity stunt. (If so, it was a flop. The publicity was unfavourable, and humiliating for her). In Agatha's autobiography, there is not one word about this escapade.

Whatever Agatha's mental state in 1926, by 1930 she had recovered sufficiently to marry the (much younger) archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. Their travels in the Middle East contributed background to such later novels as Murder on the Nile. Their marriage was happy in the early years, and endured despite Mallowan's affairs in later life. Agatha evidently was better at choosing plot lines than husbands, although she once said 'An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her'.

In 1971, Agatha Christie was named a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 1976, but lives on vigorously in print, on the screen, and - as now at CTF - on stage.

by Frank McGilly

The S.S. Nefertari, a river-steamer that Christie used as the setting for Death on the Nile published in 1937.

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

Agatha Christie

Very few of us are what we seem.

Agatha Christie