Jump to content

Agatha Christie

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 125.63.139.142 (talk) at 05:20, 3 November 2006 (corrected date). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Agatha Christie
File:Agatha Christie.jpg
Born15 September 1890
Torquay, Devon, England
Died12 January 1976
Cholsey, Oxfordshire, England
OccupationNovelist
Genrecrime fiction
Literary movementGolden Age of Detective Fiction
Website
www.agathachristie.com

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 remembered for her 80 mystery novels, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, which 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 mystery novel.

Her appeal is so huge that Christie is often called - by the Guinness Book of World Records, among others - the best-selling writer of fiction of all time, and the best-selling writer of any kind second to William Shakespeare. An estimated billion copies of her novels have been sold in English, and another billion in 103 other languages. [1]. 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 2006 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 most have also been adapted for television and radio.

Biography

A plaque from the Agatha Christie Mile at Torre Abbey in Torquay.

Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, Devon, to an American father and a British mother. She never claimed or held United States citizenship.

Her first marriage, a n 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 also influenced her work: many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison. (See also cyanide, thallium.)

In December 1926 she disappeared for ten days, causing quite a storm in the press. Her car was found in a chalk pit. She was eventually found staying at a hotel in Harrogate, where she claimed to have suffered amnesia due to a nervous breakdown following the death of her mother and her husband's confessed infidelity. Opinions are still divided as to whether this was a publicity stunt or not. 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), the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. Mallowan was 14 years younger than Agatha, and her travels with him 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 Agatha'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.

Agatha Christie's room at the Pera Palas hotel where she wrote Murder on the Orient Express.

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

Agatha Christie died on January 12, 1976, at age 85 from natural causes, at Winterbrook House, Cholsey near Wallingford, Oxfordshire. She is buried at St. Mary's Churchyard in Cholsey, Oxon.

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

Template:Spoiler

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 which Poirot is killed off.

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 didn't give permission to release Sleeping Murder sometime in 1975, but died in January 1976 before the book could be released. That may explain some of the inconsistencies of the book with the rest of the Marple series - for example, Colonel Arthur Bantry, husband of Miss Marple's friend, Dolly, whose library had the body in it in 1942, is still alive and well in Sleeping Murder (which, like Curtain, was written in the 1940's) 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. It may be that Christie simply did not have time to revise the manuscript before she died. Template:Endspoiler

Works

Novels

Collections of Short Stories

Co-authored works

Plays adapted into novels by Charles Osborne

Works written as Mary Westmacott

Plays

Radio Plays

Television Plays

Movie Adaptations

Agatha Christie is no stranger to the cinema. Over the last 78 years, Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence, Mr. Quin, Parker Pyne, and many others have been portrayed on numerous occasions:

Television


Agatha Christie's Poirot television series

Episodes include:

Video games

Published by Spinnaker Software and Telarium

Animation

In 2004, the Japanese broadcasting company Nippon Housou Kyoukai turned Poirot and Marple into animated characters in the anime series Agatha Christie's Great Detectives Poirot and Marple, introducing Mabel West (daughter of Miss Marple's mystery-writer nephew Raymond West, a canonical Christie character) and her duck Oliver as new characters.

Agatha Christie in fiction

Dame Agatha appears as one of the title characters, with Dorothy L. Sayers, in the fictional murder mystery Dorothy and Agatha by Gaylord Larsen.

The movie Agatha (1979) is about a fictional solution to the real mystery of Agatha Christie's disappearance in 1926.

Spurious Quotation

Dame Agatha is frequently quoted as saying that an archaeologist is an ideal sort of husband, because the older his wife gets the more interesting he finds her. However, she vehemently denied ever making this remark, saying that she did not find it at all amusing.

See also

References

  1. ^ http://uk.agathachristie.com/site/about_christie/queen_of_crime.php

Further reading

  • Barnard, Robert. A Talent to Deceive - An Appreciation of Agatha Christie. London : Collins, 1980; New York: Mysterious Press, 1987.
Wikiquote has quotations related to Agatha Christie.

Template:Persondata

Template:Link FA

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Agatha_Christie&oldid=85417640"