Agatha CHRISTIE , Chart
Born September 15, 1890 at 4:00 AM in Torquay (United Kingdom)
Agatha Mary Clarissa, Lady Mallowan, DBE (15 September 1890—12 January 1976), also known as Dame Agatha Christie, was an English crime fiction writer. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but is chiefly remembered for her 66 detective novels. Her work with these novels, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre.

Christie has been called - by the Guinness Book of World Records, among others - the best-selling writer of books of all time, and the best-selling writer of any kind second to William Shakespeare. An estimated one billion copies of her novels have been sold in English, and another billion in 103 other languages. As an example of her broad appeal, she is the all-time best-selling author in France, with over 40 million copies sold in French (as of 2003) versus 22 million for Emile Zola, the nearest contender.

Her stage play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest run ever in London, opening at the Ambassadors Theatre on November 25, 1952, and as of 2007 is still running after more than 20,000 performances. In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year, Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA, for Best Play. Most of her books and short stories have been filmed, some many times over (Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, 4.50 From Paddington), and many have been adapted for television and radio.

Agatha Christie was born as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, Devon, to an American father and an English mother. She never held or claimed United States citizenship. Her father was Frederick Miller, a rich American stockbroker, and her mother was Clara Bohemer, a British aristocrat. Christie had a sister, Margaret Frary Miller (1879-1950), called Madge, eleven years her senior, and a brother, Louis Montant Miller (1880-1929), called Monty, ten years older than Christie. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother resorted to teaching her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16 she went to a school in Paris to study singing and piano.

Her first marriage, an unhappy one, was in 1914 to Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind Hicks, and divorced in 1928.

During World War I she worked at a hospital and then a pharmacy, a job that influenced her work: many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison. (See also cyanide, ricin, and thallium.)

On 8 December 1926, while living in Sunningdale in Berkshire, she disappeared for ten days, causing great interest in the press. Her car was found in a chalk pit in Newlands Corner, Surrey. She was eventually found staying at the Swan Hydro (now the Old Swan hotel) in Harrogate under the name of the woman with whom her husband had recently admitted to having an affair. She claimed to have suffered amnesia due to a nervous breakdown following the death of her mother and her husband's infidelity. Opinions are still divided as to whether this was a publicity stunt or not. Public sentiment at the time was negative, with many feeling that an alleged publicity stunt had cost the taxpayers a substantial amount of money. A 1979 film, Agatha, starring Vanessa Redgrave as Christie, recounted a fictionalised version of the disappearance. Other media accounts of this event exist; it was featured on a segment of Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story, for example.

In 1930, Christie married a Roman Catholic (despite her divorce and her Anglican faith), the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. Mallowan was 14 years younger than Christie, and his travels with her contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Their marriage was happy in the early years, and endured despite Mallowan's many affairs in later life, notably with Barbara Parker, whom he married in 1977, the year after Christie's death. Other novels (such as And Then There Were None) were set in and around Torquay, Devon, where she was born. Christie's 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Pera Palas hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railroad. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author. The Greenway Estate in Devon, acquired by the couple as a summer residence in 1938, is now in the care of the National Trust. Christie often stayed at Abney Hall in Cheshire and penned two of her novels there: The Tale Of The Christmas Pudding and After The Funeral.

In 1971 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976, at age 85, from natural causes, at Winterbrook House at Wallingford in Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire). She is buried in the nearby St Mary's Churchyard in Cholsey.

Christie's only child, Rosalind Hicks, died on 28 October 2004, also aged 85, from natural causes. Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, now owns the copyright to his grandmother's works.

At the height of her career, Christie wrote two novels that she intended to be published after her death. They were the last cases of her two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple — respectively, Curtain and Sleeping Murder. When she wrote the novels, Christie had not thought she would live so long. Following the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974, Christie authorised the release of Curtain.

In her diary, Christie explained that she had always found him insufferable. She had a great fondness for Miss Marple, on the other hand, who was apparently based on Christie's grandmother. After Miss Marple solves the mystery in Sleeping Murder, she returns home to her regular life in Saint Mary Mead.

Upon seeing the great success of Curtain, Christie gave permission for the release of Sleeping Murder sometime in 1976, but died in January 1976 before the book could be released. This may explain some of the inconsistencies in the book with the rest of the Marple series - for example, Colonel Arthur Bantry, husband of Miss Marple's friend, Dolly, is still alive and well in Sleeping Murder (which, like Curtain, was written in the 1940s) despite the fact he is noted as having died in books that were written after but published before the posthumous release of Sleeping Murder in 1976 — such as, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side. It may be that Christie simply did not have time to revise the manuscript before she died.

On an edition of Desert Island Discs in 2007, Brian Aldiss recounted how Agatha Christie told him that she wrote her books up to the last chapter, and then decided who the most unlikely suspect was. She would then go back and make the necessary changes to 'frame' that person.

Source : Wikipedia

 

 

 

 

 

 

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