It is often said that Agatha Christie’s life was as dramatic as any of her detective stories. Apart from being one of the best-loved writers in history, Christie endured two difficult marriages and famously "disappeared" for 10 days at the height of her celebrity.
More than 30 years after her death she is still regarded as the queen of crime. But why?
Christie has sold an estimated two billion books worldwide, half of them in English. It is thought that only the Bible and the works of Shakespeare have exceeded that total.
Her writing career spanned more than 50 years and she produced 80 novels and short story collections. She also wrote more than a dozen plays, including The Mousetrap, which is running in London to this day.
Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, from 1920 was the first to feature her eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. His right-hand man, Captain Hastings, describes him as having a “head exactly the shape of an egg”.
He notes that Poirot also has a “very stiff and military moustache” and that he would be almost mortally wounded if a speck of dirt were to be found on his clothing.
Christie is alleged to have said that she never liked Poirot and persevered with him only because of public demand for Poirot books.
She is thought to have preferred Miss Marple, who was modelled on her own grandmother and her friends. Marple made her debut in 1930 and appears in 12 novels and 20 other stories.
Most great writers have endured troubled lives and Christie is no exception. Her first marriage to a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps ended in divorce in 1928.
One of the most bizarre incidents in her life took place in December 1926 when she vanished for 10 days. A nationwide police hunt was launched and it caused a furore in the press. She had dumped her car and was eventually tracked down to a hotel in Harrogate.
In true style, she had booked in the name of the woman with whom her husband was having an affair.
Christie claimed that she had mentally disintegrated in the previous few months due to the death of her mother and her husband's cheating. But she was still well enough to travel to Yorkshire and book into a hotel.
Perhaps she thought she might as well earn publicity by exploiting and exposing her husband’s behaviour. If so, it was a truly clever stunt.
In 1930, Christie married Sir Max Mallowan. Mallowan was 14 years her junior. They travelled widely, just like the aristocratic characters of her novels. Hers was an age when foreign travel was the preserve of the very rich and genuinely glamorous.
Her experiences of the Middle East inform many of the Poirot books; Murder on the Orient Express was written in a hotel in Istanbul, Turkey.
Other novels and TV adaptations are set in and around Torquay, Devon, where she was born.
Christie died in January 1976, aged 85, from natural causes. Her only child, Rosalind Hicks, died in 2004, also aged 85. Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, now owns the copyright to his grandmother's works and appears on the official Agatha Christie website.
