Agatha Christie

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Standard Name: Christie, Agatha
Birth Name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller
Married Name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie
Married Name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Mallowan
Titled: Lady Mallowan
Pseudonym: Mary Westmacott
Pseudonym: Mac Miller
Pseudonym: Nathaniel Miller
Pseudonym: Mostyn Grey
Pseudonym: Martin West
Used Form: Agatha Christie Mallowan
AC , the Duchess of Death, produced eighty books, including sixty-six novels and detective fictions, and fourteen of short stories as well as poetry and suspense drama. At the height of her career she published two or three books a year; they have been sold and translated in more than a hundred countries, with sale reaching a billion in the original English and another billion in translation.
Lanchester, John. “The Case of Agatha Christie”. London Review of Books, Vol.
40
, No. 24, pp. 3-8.
3
Her work is identified with meticulously constructed plots and ingenious misdirection. UNESCO reported in August 1961 that she was the world's best-selling author writing in English.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
13
Morgan, Janet. Agatha Christie: A Biography. Collins, http://Rutherford HSS.
216, 326
Her famous sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, hide their amazing ability beneath an unimpressive exterior.
Black and white photo of Agatha Christie as a child. Her hair is in curls and her face is amusingly expressionless. It is unclear what she is wearing, however we believe it is a dress, because of the fabric visible on her shoulder.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Textual Features Joan Aiken
JA also published a number of adult thrillers, romantic novels, and hybrids between these two genres. For these, as for her children's fiction, she favours settings in time or place which are either exotic or...
Intertextuality and Influence Louisa May Alcott
Following her death, G. K. Chesterton in a laudatory (if sexist) review classed LMA with Austen as an early realist, and praised her apt depictions of human truths.
Chesterton, G. K. “Louisa Alcott”. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, G. K. Hall, pp. 212-14.
213-14
She was a favourite writer...
Reception Margery Allingham
Early critics of MA 's work saw her as a young revitaliser of the detective form, along with Nicholas Blake and Michael Innes. Later she was linked with the slightly older Dorothy Sayers and...
Literary responses Margery Allingham
The reviewer for Time and Tide was moved by this book to declare MA the equal of Agatha Christie in construction and character-drawing; the Sunday Times called it a book for the connoisseur of detective...
Reception Margery Allingham
This honour was one she shared with Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh . Penguin sold nearly a million copies of this edition, to add to the half million of her titles they had sold already...
Textual Features Phyllis Bentley
PB 's protagonist is an amateur detective, as was standard for the genre at this date. She follows by twenty years on Agatha Christie 's Miss Marple (born in 1930) and precedes by the...
Education Malorie Blackman
MB was shaped by her reading outside school. She never entered a bookshop until she was fourteen, but relied on libraries. Early favourites were C. S. Lewis 's Narnia books, Johanna Spyri 's Heidi books...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Elizabeth Braddon
His article, Sensation Novelists: Miss Braddon, which covered seven novels she had published since 1862, made a famous personal attack in asserting that her work evidenced familiarity with a very low type of female...
Textual Production Clemence Dane
CD , with eleven more members of the Detection Club (including Dorothy L. Sayers , Agatha Christie , G. K. Chesterton , Anthony Berkeley , Freeman Wills Crofts , G. D. H. and M. I. Cole
Textual Production Antonia Fraser
AF again invited comparison with a classic of the detective genre by titling her first collection of short fiction Jemima Shore's First Case and Other Stories.
The title suggests Agatha Christie 's Curtain: Poirot's...
Textual Features Antonia Fraser
In her detective-story guise, Fraser sees herself as part of a women's tradition in the genre, and names as influences a number of writers who are known for interest in human psychology and a high...
Textual Features Antonia Fraser
The Dictionary of Literary Biography calls Jemima Shore a new kind of woman detective.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
276
Her independence, intelligence, and literary sensibility are nothing new, but her rejection of marriage and her cheerful sexual promiscuity are...
Reception Antonia Fraser
Interviewed about this play, AF said: I don't think I could write the way I do without Agatha Christie or Patricia Highsmith .
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(9 November 1985): 20
Reception Susan Hill
The play's initial success may have been helped by the tradition of spooky shows for Christmas; its durability, however, defies explanation. In December 2018 it had celebrated thirty years, and was still running at the...
Textual Features P. D. James
The result, as Ashby noted, falls somewhere between the cosy settings of Agatha Christie 's Miss Marples novels and the gritty urban dystopias of contemporaries like Ruth Rendell . PDJ 's imagined worlds tend to...

Timeline

By late 1931: Twelve certain members of the Detection Club...

Women writers item

By late 1931

Twelve certain members of the Detection Club (including Agatha Christie , Dorothy L. Sayers , G. K. Chesterton , Clemence Dane , G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole ) published a collaborative detectivenovel called...

July 1935: An educated, married woman with small children,...

Building item

July 1935

An educated, married woman with small children, living at Ballingate in Ireland, wrote to the magazine Nursery World about her loneliness and depression, seeking suggestions for some affordable occupation.

30 July 1935: Penguin Books issued its first ten titles:...

Writing climate item

30 July 1935

Penguin Books issued its first ten titles: sixpenny paperbacks with a characteristic penguin logo.

9 March 1950: Timothy Evans, a van-driver in his early...

Building item

9 March 1950

Timothy Evans , a van-driver in his early twenties, was hanged for the murders of his wife and baby daughter, who were more likely killed by the family's landlord, John Reginald Halliday Christie .

October 1950: A Gallup Poll found that 48 percent of respondents...

Writing climate item

October 1950

A Gallup Poll found that 48 percent of respondents read detective fiction; among the favourite authors were Edgar Wallace , Conan Doyle , and Agatha Christie .

1979: US game designer Roberta Williams authored...

Building item

1979

US game designer Roberta Williams authored and designed the first graphics-based computer game, the hugely successful Mystery House (inspired by Agatha Christie 's And Then There Were None).

16 April 2007: Novelist Yann Martel began a project of sending...

Writing climate item

16 April 2007

Novelist Yann Martel began a project of sending a book every two weeks to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper together with an admonitory letter; on a website he recorded the books sent and gave the...

Texts

Christie, Agatha. A Murder is Announced. Collins; Dodd, Mead, 1950.
Christie, Agatha. Absent in the Spring. Collins, 1944.
Christie, Agatha. Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: fifty years of mysteries in the making. Editor Curran, John, HarperCollins, 2009.
Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. Collins, 1977, http://Rutherford HSS.
Christie, Agatha. Come, Tell Me How You Live. Collins; Dodd, Mead, 1946.
Christie, Agatha. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. Collins; Dodd, Mead, 1975.
Christie, Agatha. Five Little Pigs. Collins; Dodd, Mead, 1942.
Christie, Agatha. Giant’s Bread. Collins, 1930.
Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. Collins; Dodd, Mead, 1934.
Christie, Agatha. Sleeping Murder. Collins; Dodd, Mead, 1976.
Christie, Agatha. The Grand Tour. Editor Prichard, Matthew, HarperCollins, 2012.
Christie, Agatha. The Mousetrap. French, 1954.
Christie, Agatha. The Murder at the Vicarage. Collins; Dodd, Mead, 1930.
Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Collins; Dodd, Mead, 1926.
Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. John Lane for Bodley Head, 1920.
Christie, Agatha. The Rose and the Yew Tree. Heinemann, 1948.
Sayers, Dorothy L. et al. “The Scoop: Parts I-XII”. The Listener, Vol.
5
.