Agatha Christie was born to write: her work consists of 72 novels and countless collections of short stories, as well as poetry, memoirs, children’s stories, and plays. This compulsion to create has made her one of the most popular and widely read writers in the world. Her mystery novels about crimes have been successfully adapted for television, film, and theater, and have served as the basic tools for many thriller authors to construct their absorbing plots.
Agatha Christie was the author of light-hearted and absorbing plots that have caused more than one reader to stay up all night to reach the resolution of the mystery presented in any of the books of the “Queen of Crime.”
She was born on September 15, 1890. Her mother, a strong-willed woman with outdated ideas, refused to send her daughter to school or even teach her to read until she was eight years old. Agatha then decided to teach herself how to read. When she turned 15, her parents sent her to study in Paris.
Hercule Poirot is the author’s most popular creation: a refined and handsome detective who appears in 33 novels and 54 short stories by the British author. It is said that Christie was inspired by a man from Belgium whom she saw getting off a bus in 1910. Poirot’s first appearance was in the novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
However, as everything has a beginning and an end, the last appearance of this famous detective was in the novel Curtain (1975). Christie had already written this story since 1940 and had kept it hidden for over three decades until she knew that both her character’s and her own career had to end.
On December 3, 1926, her husband Archie confessed to having a secret affair. Agatha Christie was devastated and in shock. She then disappeared until she was found eleven days later. During those days, there was intense police mobilization after her car was found abandoned. The press discovered that Christie had stayed at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogate under the alias Mrs. Theresa Neele, curiously the name of her husband’s mistress.
In addition to her mystery and crime novels, Agatha Christie wrote some romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. One of them is titled Unfinished Portrait (1934), a story about a novelist’s suicide attempt who falls into a deep depression after learning that her husband is cheating on her with another woman. Many critics see clear autobiographical signs in the story.
She was an honorary president in 1956 of the London Detection Club, or Famous Detection Club, a kind of association to which the best mystery writers in England belonged, and which was founded in 1928 by the writer Anthony Berkeley. The only condition that Agatha Christie imposed to assume the presidency was not to give speeches, a demonstration of her extreme shyness.
After her divorce from Archie, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930. Archaeology was another of Agatha’s great passions: with her husband, she traveled to carry out excavations in places like Syria and Iraq. As a result of these trips, her long-forgotten chronicle Tell Me How You Live was rescued and published until 2015 by Harper Collins.
Thanks to notebooks and diaries that have been discovered over the years, it has been revealed that Agatha Christie suffered from dysgraphia, a problem of muscular coordination that led her to have illegible handwriting.
Essential works by Agatha Christie:
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
And Then There Were None (1939)
Easy to Kill (1942)
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva.
