Agatha Christie is one of the best-known British writers of detective fiction. She contributed to the establishment of the ‘Golden Age’ genre and created two of the most famous literary detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, as well as the investigative couple Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Ariadne Oliver, the police detective Superintendent Battle and many other detectives, amateur and professional, that feature in her stand-alone novels. Often listed with the other Golden Age ‘Queens of Crime’, Allingham, Sayers and Marsh, Christie arguably is Empress in terms of sheer volume and the overall phenomena generated by her work, which is comparable to that of Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories. She wrote sixty-six novels and around 150 short stories, which appeared in various fiction magazines and journals as well as in collected editions. She also wrote six romance novels as ‘Mary Westmacott’, and several works of non-fiction including her autobiography Agatha Christie: An Autobiography (1977). She was a successful playwright, writing a total of seventeen plays, a few of which were either unpublished or unperformed in her lifetime, but which for the most part were well-received, and the most famous of which The Mousetrap (1952), is the longest-running show in the history of British theatre. Her work has been translated into over forty languages and sold billions of copies worldwide. Many of her stories have been adapted for film, television, stage and radio as well as, more unusually, a series of graphic novels by François Rivière (1995–2002; in 2005, along with Anne Martinetti and Philippe Asset, Rivière also published a book of recipes of dishes mentioned in Christie’s novels, Crème et châtiments: recettes délicieuses et criminelles d’ Agatha Christie). Christie’s own life, especially her notorious disappearance in 1926, has also become the focus of dramatic adaptation and she has appeared as a fictional character in two detective novels: Gaylord Larsen’s Dorothy and Agatha (1990) and The London Blitz Murders (2004) by Max Allan Collins.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Ashfield House, Torquay, the youngest of three children; her sister, Margaret Frary Miller (‘Madge’, 1879–1950), was eleven years Agatha’s senior, and her brother, Louis Montant Miller (‘Monty’ 1880–1929), was ten years older than herself, leading to Christie’s childhood being somewhat solitary, but, she always maintained, never lonely. Her mother, Clarissa Margaret Boehmer, was British and her father, Frederick Alvah Miller, American. Christie received a very unconventional education; she taught herself to read at the age of four, but never went to school or received formal home-schooling. Her father taught her mathematics and her nanny taught her French, which she had the opportunity to improve at a series of French ‘finishing schools’ from the ages of fifteen to seventeen. She learned music and composition, and for a while had hopes of a career in this area. She had a large library at her disposal at Ashfield and read an eclectic range of literature, which contributed to an already vivid imagination. In her autobiography, Christie details the various imaginary narratives that she played out involving her toys and various make-believe companions. She also wrote lyrical poetry from childhood (she had two volumes of poetry published in her lifetime: The Road of Dreams, in 1924, and Poems, 1973). Her first attempt at writing prose was encouraged by her mother when Christie was in her late teens and convalescing from influenza. She produced ‘The House of Beauty’, the first of many short stories that, she says, she sent hopefully to various magazines and which came back ‘promptly with the usual slip: “The editor regrets. . .”’. She was, however, hooked on writing and continued trying until her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) was accepted for publication, beginning a career in writing crime fiction that lasted more than five decades.

Before this, however, Christie was to meet and marry her first husband, Archibald Christie (1889–1962). She had, like many girls of her age and class, done the usual round of tennis parties, concerts, formal balls, and country house weekends that appear in many of her detective novels. In 1914, she met Archie at a dance. He had applied to be an aviator in the Royal Flying Core and when he was accepted, he asked her to marry him. At the instigation of Mrs Miller, they agreed to wait, and when war broke out Archie was sent to France. He came back at Christmas, 1914, and they were married by special licence on Christmas Eve before he returned to his duties. During the war, Christie became a V. A. D. (member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment) and served first as a ward-maid and nurse in Torquay hospital, and then in the hospital dispensary. She passed the Society of Apothecaries examination and had an excellent knowledge of drugs and poisons, which was to be useful for her later novels: The Pharmaceutical Journal actually gave a very favourable review of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Much later, Christie also made literary use of one of the pharmacists, ‘Mr. P’, who she recalls as ‘a strange man’ who kept a lump of curare in his pocket because, he explained to her, it made him ‘feel powerful’. She describes how: ‘his memory remained with me so long that it was still there waiting when I first conceived the idea of writing my book The Pale Horse [1961] – and that must have been, I suppose, nearly fifty years later’.

Archie Christie returned home at the end of the war, and the Christies moved to London in 1919 where their only child, Rosalind, was born. In the same year, John Lane took up the manuscript for The Mysterious Affair at Styles and contracted Christie for five more books. Styles introduced Christie’s first serial detective, Hercule Poirot, a former Belgian policeman who finds himself in England as a war refugee. Christie had met quite a few Belgian refugees in Devonshire during the war and had been touched by their plight. Poirot’s key characteristics are established early on; he is fussy, obsessively tidy and fastidious over his appearance, all traits which make him an occasional figure of fun to both the reader and his loyal narrator, Captain Hastings, who chronicles many of Poirot’s investigations. He is also, however, incredibly intelligent (although he is aware of this and boasts endlessly about his ‘little grey cells’), fiercely moral and possessed of kindness and compassion for human suffering, encouraging many people to confide in ‘papa Poirot’. Styles is one of the first classic Golden Age country house murder mysteries, and meets the now clichéd expectations of the genre in many ways. As with many of the other country house novels to follow, however, the household is fragmented by the war and by personal concerns, suggesting a new and discordant world that cannot quite recapture an idyllically remembered past. This is not the only instance of this in Christie’s writing: hers is an often rural, upper-middle-class, quintessentially English domain, but change and modernity do intrude.

Christie’s next novel, The Secret Adversary (1922) introduced another recurring duo of detectives: Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley, two bright young things who meet in London in the economic aftermath of the war, searching unsuccessfully for jobs for ‘ten long, weary months’, before finding themselves doing some unofficial work for British Intelligence. A very different type of story from Styles, The Secret Adversary is one of Christie’s forays into the spy-thriller genre, another notable example of which is the stand-alone novel, The Man in the Brown Suit (1924). Having become engaged at the end of The Secret Adversary, Tommy and Tuppence appeared in a further three novels, and a collection of short stories, Partners in Crime (1929), in which they take it in turns to investigate in the style of famous fictional detectives, a device which demonstrates neatly the self-reflexive nature of the Golden Age genre. The protagonists age with each book: by Postern of Fate (1973), they are retired with grandchildren.

After Styles, Christie found that she was ‘tied to the detective story [and] tied to two people: Hercule Poirot and his Watson, Captain Hastings’ (although several later Poirot stories dispense with the faithful narrator), and she continued to alternate Poirot stories with various stand-alone novels and short story collections for the next decade. Of these, there are two of particular note: the first, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) because it generated heated discussion for not playing fair according to the rules of the Golden Age, and its break with narrative convention marks it out as a significant milestone in the development of the genre; and the second, the collection of short stories The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930) because they mark another genre departure for Christie. The enigmatic, possibly non-human Harley Quin seems to belong more to ghost stories than crime fiction, and the narratives in which he appears are mystical, even supernatural, in quality (some later short stories by Christie are more straightforward ghost stories, such as many of those in the collection The Hound of Death, 1933).

During this decade, the Christies travelled considerably with Archie’s job: Agatha Christie enjoyed travel her whole life, and drew on her experiences around the world for her novels. They also moved from London to Sunningdale, Berkshire, and eventually bought a house there which they renamed Styles. At this point, it seems, their marriage began to go wrong, and Archie met another woman, Nancy Neele. He asked Agatha for a divorce in 1926, and it was at this point that Christie became involved in her own cause célèbre. On 3 December, she left the house having put her daughter to bed and disappeared. Her car was found abandoned at Newlands Corner, near Guildford in Surrey, and a nationwide manhunt began. Christie was eventually found booked into a spa in Harrogate under the name of Mrs. Neele, and claimed to have no memory of the events of the previous ten days. Public response was quite negative, and many saw the whole affair as a publicity stunt, although Christie claimed to have had a breakdown. She never spoke of it again, and omits the entire episode from her autobiography. In 1979, Vanessa Redgrave played Christie in Agatha, a movie about her disappearance, and it continues to be the focus of speculation. Archie and Agatha divorced in 1928, and Christie found herself alone: her mother, a massive presence in her life, had died in 1926, and Rosalind was happy at boarding school. She decided to travel again, and booked herself onto the Orient Express, a journey that arguably resulted in one of her most famous novels, and another in which she departs from the ‘fair play’ genre, Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

Christie continued to write and travel, particularly in the Middle East. In 1930 she went to Ur to visit her archaeological friends, Leonard and Katherine Woolley, and here she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist fourteen years younger than herself. The dig at Ur gave her experiences to draw on in Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), in which Poirot makes a somewhat cameo appearance as detective. Max and Agatha’s marriage appears to have been a happy one; they travelled together a lot and this allowed her to draw on other exotic settings for her novels, such as Death Comes as the End (a historical novel set in Ancient Egypt, 1944), Death on the Nile (an Hercule Poirot novel, 1937; probably Christie’s most frequently adapted novel for film, television and radio), Appointment with Death (a Poirot novel set in Jerusalem, 1938) and They Came to Baghdad (a stand-alone spy novel, 1951). In England, they had homes in London and Christie’s much-loved Devonshire, where they bought Greenway House, Galmpton. Christie often returns to the south west in her settings: ‘Saint Loo’ in Peril at End House (1932) is based on Torquay, and in Five Little Pigs (1942), she uses Greenway as the model for the home of artist Amyas Crale.

1930 saw another significant change for Christie: the first novel featuring her other well-known detective, Miss Jane Marple: Murder at the Vicarage. Miss Marple had appeared in 1927 in a series of short stories in the Sketch Magazine (published as The Thirteen Problems in 1932), and like Poirot, her character is established from the outset. Behind the ‘benign and kindly’ Victorian exterior of a slightly twittery, elderly, spinster lurks a mind of steel and razor-sharp intuition. Unlike Poirot, who relies on a slightly Holmesian ratiocination, Miss Marple’s investigations are driven by an intrinsic understanding of human nature and a capacity to (as Christie explains it) ‘expect the worst of everyone and everything.’ Poirot travels all over the world; Miss Marple rarely leaves St. Mary Mead, which she argues, gives her all the insight she needs as ‘there is a great deal of wickedness in village life’. Most of the Miss Marple novels are set here or similar villages: rural, Home Counties, parochial and tight-knit communities with a similar set of characters and institutions in each. Once or twice Miss Marple ventures up to London: in At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), she stays at a hotel she stayed in as a girl, but is conscious that the idyllic past, like the innocent façade of the hotel, is an illusion, and in A Caribbean Mystery (1964) she finds herself on an all-expenses-paid holiday to St. Honoré. The milieu is exotic, and not to Miss Marple’s tastes – ‘so many palm trees’ – but her recognition of some fundamental human traits helps her solve the crime. One of the characters she encounters in this novel forms the basis of the action for a later Miss Marple novel, Nemesis (1971), in which Miss Marple investigates a twenty-year-old murder while on a tour of English country houses. It is ironic that in this later example of Christie’s work, the country houses of her youth and earlier stories have become preserved relics of the past, as Miss Marple tours the settings she is popularly associated with.

This self-consciousness is to be found more explicitly in the novels featuring Ariadne Oliver, crime novelist and sometime sidekick to Poirot. She also appears as one of Mr. Pyne’s staff in the quirky collection of adventure stories Parker Pyne Investigates (1934). Much has been made of the alter ego aspect of Oliver, who allows Christie to explore, often with humour, the conventions in which she writes: In Cards on the Table (1936), Ariadne Oliver explains: ‘“What really matters is plenty of bodies! If the thing’s getting a little dull, some more blood cheers it up”’. She adds: ‘“Somebody is going to tell something - and then they’re killed first! That always goes down well. It comes in all my books - camouflaged different ways of course”’. Oliver also expresses the same weariness about her Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson, which Christie occasionally seems to have felt about Poirot.

Christie was a prolific writer, and some of her work perhaps suffers from over-use of certain formulas, such as the one outlined by Ariadne Oliver above, but many of her works are groundbreaking in her treatment of narrative convention, such as the aforementioned The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express. Her final Poirot novel, Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975) in which Poirot, an elderly and ill man, is reunited with Captain Hastings at Styles, now a guest house, is similarly challenging of conventions and was well-received critically.

Christie was honoured many times and in many capacities by her peers and her readers: she succeeded Dorothy L. Sayers as president of the Detection Club in 1957, for example, and in 1955 she was awarded the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award – the first one ever. Her play Witness for the Prosecution received the Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America for Best Play, and she received countless other awards for her writing. Her achievements were also recognised on a national level: in 1956, she was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and 1971, she became Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Her stories continue to be performed for screen and radio and she remains one of the most popular and famous British crime writers.