Agatha Christie

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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.

Milestones

15 September 1890

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller (later AC ) was born at her family's home, Ashfield, in Torquay.
Benstock, Bernard, and Thomas F. Staley, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 77. Gale Research.
68, 72

1926

AC published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a detective novel which pioneered the device whereby the narrator turns out to be the murderer.
Others, like Marie Belloc Lowndes , had used a murderer's narrative viewpoint, but not in novels posing the murderer's identity as a mystery to be solved.
Benstock, Bernard, and Thomas F. Staley, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 77. Gale Research.
68

25 November 1952

AC 's play The Mousetrap opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London: adapted from the title story in her Three Blind Mice, and Other Stories, 1948. It was still playing in 2014, as the longest-running show in the world.
The title, perhaps coincidentally, is that of the play within a play in Shakespeare 's Hamlet.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
13
Sanders, Dennis, and Len Lovallo. The Agatha Christie Companion. Delacorte.
412-14

12 January 1976

AC died at her home, Winterbrook House in Wallingford.
Benstock, Bernard, and Thomas F. Staley, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 77. Gale Research.
82

Biography

Birth and Family

15 September 1890

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller (later AC ) was born at her family's home, Ashfield, in Torquay.
Benstock, Bernard, and Thomas F. Staley, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 77. Gale Research.
68, 72

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