Agatha Christie
There was once a little English girl who would listen to her mother read a book together every afternoon and the little girl would come up with her own endings to the stories which were better than their original endings. She also would read detective books (her favourite) in bed until she fell asleep, something we should do instead of reading our devices in bed. One day, this little girl was ordered to stay in bed so she could recover from influenza and to keep herself from getting bored, she wrote what would become her first story called The House of Beauty. That girl was called Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller but the world would come to know her as Agatha Christie and she was born into a rich, upper middle class family based in Torquay in Devon, England to Frederich Alvah Miller and his Irish-born wife Clarissa “Clara”, who was born to a British Army officer. Agatha’s date of birth was 15th September 1890.
When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, Agatha became a nurse for wounded soldiers in a hospital while her husband Archibald “Archie” Christie was on the frontlines fighting for his country. During that time, her imagination refused to rest with all the toxic elixirs and poisons she had to learn about and these had the potential to make someone meet a sticky end. When Agatha’s wartime nursing ended in September 1918 with Archie’s transfer to London, she got to writing her first lot of mystery novels that always started out with a murder and a mystery to solve and that saw the creation of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. He was a detective who had to capability to decipher any despicable deed while solving the mystery. He’s also supposedly the reason why English speakers assume all the French say “Sacre bleu!” as he was fond of saying the phrase. His debut came in Agatha Christie’s 1919 detective story The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Wherever in the world Agatha Christie went with her typewriter, Hercule wasn’t too far behind solving another mystery. One of her most famous novels, Murder on the Orient Express, was inspired by her journey on the real life Orient Express. Agatha even went missing for a whole week which inspired a nationwide hunt for her until she was found alive and well in a hotel. Hercule Poirot appeared in 39 books written by Agatha but there have been more that have been written by other writers.
It was during her travels in the Middle East before it became riddled with wars and human rights violations that Agatha decided that having one detective character wasn’t enough and that was when she came up with another detective character who could crack cases that Hercule Poirot couldn’t crack. That new character was called Miss Marple. Inspired by Agatha’s maternal grandmother, Miss Marple’s appearance would make anyone assume that she was someone’s grandma rather than a detective but Agatha was fond of using the deceptive nature of appearances so she became popular alongside Hercule Poirot! Miss Marple appeared in 14 books.
Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot books became very popular and even Miss Marple became just as beloved as Poirot! People were reading Agatha Christie’s books in bed. They even got stage adaptions and Agatha even wrote an original stageplay called The Mousetrap which is longest running West-End show and the longest run of any play in the entire world! Not even a no non-essential work mandated break during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 stopped it from coming back in 2021!
With the amount of books Agatha Christie wrote, she had created enough murder victims to fill a whole cemetery and that didn’t stop her from wondering what her next mystery would be. Thankfully, she had a brilliant imagination to help solve those mysteries that only stopped when she died on 12 January 1976.