Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time. More than two billion copies of her books have been sold around the world, and her detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, are known almost everywhere. But her first mystery might never have been written without a challenge from her older sister, Madge, who told her, “I bet you couldn’t.”
Agatha Miller was born in 1890 in Torquay, a seaside town in Devon, England. She was raised in a large Victorian house with servants and a close family. Life was not always easy, though. After her father died in 1901, Agatha and her mother struggled with money.
When the First World War began, Agatha volunteered as a nurse at the Red Cross Hospital in her hometown. Soon after, she married an officer named Archie Christie. Later, she started working in the hospital pharmacy, where she was trained to prepare medicines. There, she learned about deadly poisons like arsenic and cyanide. This knowledge was used again and again in her books: more than 80 of her characters are killed by poison!
Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1921. It was praised by critics, and one journal for pharmacists said, “Agatha Christie knows her job,” because the poisons in the story were described so accurately.
In 1926, her life fell apart. Her mother died, and then Archie told her that he had fallen in love with another woman. One cold night in December, Agatha left home. Her car was found abandoned miles away, and a huge search was organized across the country. Newspapers everywhere reported the story. Eleven days later, she was recognized by staff at a spa hotel in Harrogate, where she had checked in under the name of the other woman. She seemed to have amnesia. Agatha never talked about those missing days, so they are still a mystery today.
After her divorce, she wrote six novels about love and heartbreak under a different name, Mary Westmacott. In 1930, she met Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, at an excavation in Ur, Iraq, and they were married the same year. In 1928, she had finally ridden the famous Orient Express train, and her journeys were later turned into famous plots, like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.
Still, her favorite place was Devon, and many of her stories were set there. Burgh Island became “Soldier Island” in And Then There Were None. In 1938, she bought a holiday home in Devon called Greenway. It was used as the model for a house in her novel Dead Man’s Folly. Today, Greenway is owned by the National Trust and can be visited by fans.
Agatha Christie died at her home in Oxfordshire on January 12, 1976, at the age of 86. Besides her 66 crime novels, she wrote more than 150 short stories and over 25 plays. Her books are still read by millions of people. Not bad for someone who was told, “I bet you couldn’t!”