British writer of some 67 detective mystery books that are universally popular. Her novels have sold more than a billion copies in English and another billion translated in more than 100 languages. By the time she was 40, Christie was a plain and matronly Englishwoman with hair forever locked in a marcelled wave, wearing dowdy housedresses; a deeply religious teetotaler who loved to putter in her garden.
With a solitary childhood, Agatha was so painfully shy that she never did get accustomed to public appearance and seldom gave interviews. Her mother was not keen on education but in spite of her, five-year-old Agatha taught herself to read. She was 11 at the death of her easy-going dad, whom she adored. For her coming out, she traveled with her widowed mom to Cairo where the expense was less, all the while writing “stories of unrelieved gloom.”
There were several suitors before the handsome Archibald Christie appeared and captured her heart. They married on Christmas Eve, 1914, just before he left to fight the Hun two days later. For the war effort, Agatha became a dispenser (pharmacist). Over the next four years she barely saw her husband; their one daughter, Rosalind, was born in 1919. On a dare from her sister, she wrote “The Mysterious Affair of Styles” in two weeks, introducing for the first time her protagonist Hercule Poirot. The book was uniformly rejected by publishers.
In 1920, someone inadvertently opened the book and recommended it for publication. Agatha was given a five-book contract and Poirot went on to solve crime in 33 more novels. Her popularity was close to immediate.
The year 1926 was immeasurably difficult. Agatha’s mother died in the spring and soon after, Archibald announced that he loved another. Agatha fell apart. On 12/03/26, while Archibald was living with his lover, she disappeared. While she was checked into a grand hotel in Harrogate under an alias, an all-out search turned up her abandoned car on a deserted road and a discarded fur coat. Police dragged the pond for her body while the plot thickened. Some bizarre letters turned up or were rumored.
When she was found at the hotel, Christie never really explained the episode, thank you, and it was accounted for by stating that she had stress-related amnesia – or a secret affair was considered as a possibility.
In 1928, recovering from her divorce, Christie took the Orient Express to Baghdad. On a second such trip, she met the scholarly archeologist Max Mallowan, 14 years her junior. He joined her on the return trip to England and proposed shortly after. Though she gave every possible reason to not marry him, she nonetheless did so on 11 September 1930. She was just short of 40 and Max was 26. The “most unsuitable match” lasted very happily for 45 years. When Max was on an expedition, Agatha accompanied him, living in a tent and sorting and cataloguing bits and bones in 120-degree heat.
Between 1939 and 1945, she turned out 15 mysteries, many featuring Miss Jane Marple, since she had come to despise Poirot. In the ‘50s, she wrote for the theater and in 2000, her play, “The Mousetrap,” is still running in the West End.
In the 1956 New Year Honours she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Christie was Knighted and made a Dame of the British Empire in January 1971.
On 12 January 1976, Christie turned to the man she’d thought it so foolish to marry and said, “I’m going to meet my maker.” Later that day she quietly died, Wallingford, England.
Link to Wikipedia biography