Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the “Queen of
Crime”. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English with another
billion in 100 foreign countries. She is the most widely published author of
all time and in any language, outsold only by Bible and Shakespeare. She is the
author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 19 plays and 6 novels
written under the name of Mary Westmacott.Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affairs at Styles, was written towards the end of
the First World War, in which she served as a VAD. In it, she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian
detective who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime
fiction since Sherlock Holmes. It was
eventually published by The Bodley Head
in 1920.
In 1926, after averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie
wrote a master piece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to
be published by Collins and marked an author-publisher relationship which
lasted for 50 years and well over 70 books. The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie’s book to be
dramatised- under the name “Alibi”-
and to have a successful run in London’s West End. The Mousetrap, her most famous play of all, opened in 1952 and is
the longest running play in history.
Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976,
since a number of books have been published posthumously; the bestselling novel
Sleeping Murder appeared later that year, followed by her autobiography and te
short story collections Miss Marple’s
Final Cases, Problem at Pollensa Bay
and While The light Lasts. In 1998,
Black Coffee was the first of her plays to be novelised by another author,
Charles Osborne.
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