Christie, Agatha Mary Clarissa (1890-1976)

English detective novelist. She is best known for her ingenious plots and for the creation of the characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. She wrote more than 70 novels, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and The Body in the Library (1942). Her play The Mousetrap, which opened in London in 1952, is the longest continuously running show in the world.

Her first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. She often broke purist rules, as in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in which the narrator is the murderer. She was at her best writing about domestic murders in the respectable middle-class world. A number of her books have been filmed, for example Murder on the Orient Express (1934; filmed 1975). She was created a DBE in 1971.

Life She was born in Torquay, Devon, and educated privately and in Paris. She married Col Archibald Christie in 1914, and served as a nurse during World War I. She caused a nationwide sensation in 1926 by disappearing for ten days, possibly because of amnesia, when her husband fell in love with another woman. After a divorce in 1928, she married in 1930 the archaeologist Max Mallowan (1904-1978).

Work Agatha Christie's finest works are those written in the 1920s and 1930s, including The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Peril at End House (1932), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The ABC Murders (1935), Dumb Witness (1937), and Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938). Although Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were her best-known detectives, she created several others: Parker Pyne, Tommy and Tuppence, and Harley Quinn.

Among her other novels were Sparkling Cyanide (1945), Mrs McGinty's Dead (1952), 4.50 from Paddington (1957), Caribbean Mystery (1964), and Nemesis (1971).

Under the name Mary Westmacott she wrote several successful romantic novels.