AGATHA CHRISTIE
English Author (1871-1976)
Biography:
Agatha Christie was born in Devon in 1871. She is known worldwide as the Queen of Mysteries, for her brilliant plots and her lively writing have delighted fans all throughout the world.
In a writing carreer that spanned more than half a century, Agatha Christie wrote 79 novels and many short-stories, together with a dozen plays among which we find her excellent The Mousetrap (played in London in 1952 and considered to be the longest continuosly-running play in theatrical history) and Black Coffee.
Agatha Christie's first detective novel was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), where her eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot first featured. This curious character has triumphed over devious criminals in 33 novels and many dozens of short-stories.
In 1930, she published The Murder at the Vicarage, where her other world-famous sleuth is presented. The shrewdly inquisitive Miss Jane Marple of St. Mary Mead will also appear in other 12 novels, like Sleeping Murder, the last of Agatha Christie's novels, published in 1976.
Best-selling mystery stories like And Then There Were None (1939) have been highly recomended for young readers. She also wrote nonfiction and some romantic novels under the pen name Mary Westmacott. She died in 1976 and her books have been successfully translated to more than 40 languages.
From her extense bibliography, her best-known detective novels were The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Lord Edgware Dies (1933), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1936), Death on the Nile (1937), And Then There Were None (1939), The Moving Finger (1942), Crooked House (1949), A Murder is Announced (1950), A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) and Ordeal by Innocence (1958).
Both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple have been widely dramatized in films and TV series. The most successful ones were Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), And Then There Were None (1945) and Death on the Nile (1978).