SUBJECT FILE NO. IJM-0049
CLASSIFICATION: HISTORICAL ARCHIVE
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Novelist
SECTION I -- SUBJECT PROFILE
| Name | Agatha Christie |
|---|---|
| English | Agatha Christie |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Lifespan | 1890–1976 |
| Gender | Female |
| Century | 20th C. |
| Field | Literature |
| Title | Novelist |
SECTION II -- OVERVIEW
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in 1890 in the seaside resort town of Torquay, on the south coast of England, the youngest child of a comfortably retired American father and an imaginative English mother who refused to send her to school.Educated at home in a sprawling villa full of books and secrets, she read voraciously, invented elaborate imaginary friends, and wrote her first poems and stories before she was eleven.
When her father died suddenly and the family's finances collapsed, she and her mother traveled to Cairo, where at seventeen she attended her first dances and absorbed the colonial world that would later flavor her fiction.The first turning point came during the First World War.
Married in 1914 to the dashing airman Archibald Christie, she volunteered as a nurse and then as a dispenser in the Torquay hospital pharmacy, where she mastered the properties of arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide that would poison so many of her future victims.Challenged by her sister to write a detective novel, she produced The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, introducing the meticulous Belgian refugee Hercule Poirot.
Her second turning point came in December 1926, when her husband asked for a divorce to marry his mistress.Agatha vanished.Her car was found abandoned near a chalk pit, the nation launched the largest search in its history, and eleven days later she was discovered at a spa hotel in Harrogate, registered under the name of her husband's lover and claiming amnesia.
She never publicly explained the episode.Divorced in 1928, she traveled alone on the Orient Express to Baghdad, where she met the young archaeologist Max Mallowan, whom she married in 1930.
Over the next four decades, often writing in a folding chair on his Middle Eastern digs, she produced the novels that made her the best-selling novelist of all time: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, and dozens more, along with the play The Mousetrap, which opened in London in 1952 and has never closed.Created a Dame of the British Empire in 1971, she died quietly in Oxfordshire in 1976.
SECTION III -- CHRONOLOGY
SECTION IV -- NOTABLE STATEMENTS
“The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.”
“Very few of us are what we seem.”
SECTION V -- FIELD NOTES
[A]The eleven-day disappearance
In December 1926, after discovering her husband's affair, Christie vanished. Her car was found abandoned and a national manhunt followed. Eleven days later she was identified at a Harrogate hotel, registered under the name of her husband's lover and claiming amnesia. She never publicly explained what had happened.
SECTION VI -- LEGACY & IMPACT
Christie has sold more than two billion books and been translated into 103 languages, figures exceeded only by the Bible and Shakespeare. The Mousetrap is the longest-running play in theatrical history, and her puzzle plots defined the classic form of the detective novel for a century.
SECTION VII -- MAJOR WORKS
- [01]Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
- [02]And Then There Were None (1939)
- [03]Death on the Nile (1937)
- [04]The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)
- [05]The Mousetrap (1952)
