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Agatha Christie (1890-1976)
 Agatha
Mary Clarissa, Lady Mallowan, DBE (15 September 1890 – 12
January 1976), better known as Dame Agatha Christie, was an
English crime fiction writer. She also wrote romances under the
name Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie is the world's best-known mystery writer and,
apart from William Shakespeare, is the all-time best-selling
author of any genre. Her books have sold over two billion copies
in the English language and another billion in over 103 foreign
languages (as of 2006). 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. She is famously known as the
'Queen of Crime' and is, arguably, the most important and
innovative writer in the development of the English mystery
novel.
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.
Christie published over eighty novels and stageplays, mainly
whodunnits and locked room mysteries, many of these featuring
one of her main series characters, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.
Although she delighted in twisting the established detective
fiction form - one of her early books, The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd, is renowned for its surprise denouement - she was
scrupulous in "playing fair" with the reader by making sure
information for solving the puzzle was given.
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). The BBC has produced television and radio
versions of most of the Poirot and Marple stories. A later
series of Poirot dramatizations starring David Suchet was made
by Granada Television. 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.
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