Agatha Christie
The Queen of Crime
Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time. She has sold over two billion books worldwide and has been translated into over 45 languages. In a writing career that spanned more than half a century, Agatha Christie wrote eighty novels and short story collections. She also wrote over a dozen plays, including The Mousetrap, which is now the longest running play in theatrical history.
Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was the first to feature her eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. One of the most famous fictional creations of all time, Poirot's 'little grey cells' triumphed over some of the most devious criminal minds ever created in crime fiction. Christie’s last published novel, Sleeping Murder, featured her other world-famous sleuth, the shrewdly inquisitive Miss Jane Marple of St. Mary Mead. Miss Marple appears in twelve novels, and twenty short stories; the first novel to feature her was The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.
The Poirot and Marple novels have been widely dramatized in feature films and television movies. Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), And Then There Were None (1945), and Death on the Nile (1978) are a few of the successful films based on her works.
Agatha Christie also wrote six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. She also wrote non-fiction; one book Come Tell Me How you Live, describes her archeological travels with her husband Max and the other two are collections of poems, stories and verses, some with a religious theme. She also wrote her Autobiography which she completed in 1976. Although synonymous with crime fiction, the breadth of themes in her novels is quite extraordinary and she deserves her place as one of the best-loved writers of all time.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling writer of books of all time and, with William Shakespeare, the best-selling author of any kind. Only the Bible has sold more than her roughly four billion copies of novels.[1] According to UNESCO, Christie is the most translated individual author, with only the collective corporate works of Walt Disney Productions surpassing her.[2] Her books have been translated into at least 103 languages.[3]
Click on picture above for link to the official Agatha Christie website
Click image above for link to The New Yorker article about Agatha Christie...fascinating!
Cool link to a timeline of Agatha Christie's life: Click here.