Born On This Day: Agatha Christie September 15, 1890
- Library Zest Team
- Sep 15, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: Sep 30, 2021
Many modern readers know Agatha Christie as the quintessential Queen of Crime. During her writing career, Christie wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections which introduced us to her famous detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
On September 15, 1890, Christie was born in Devon, England to an upper-middle-class family. She was the youngest of three children. As a child, Christie was homeschooled despite the fact that her older sister was enrolled in boarding school. The young Christie had shown promise from an early age, teaching herself to read by the age of 4.
While The Great War and Second World War ravaged England and much of Europe, Christie served the war effort in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of poisons which she’d later use in her short stories, plays, and novels.
Christie wrote her first detective story in 1916 titled The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in which she introduced the world to Detective Hercule Poirot, a former Belgian police officer with "magnificent mustaches", who had taken refuge in Britain after Germany invaded Belgium. Christie said her inspiration for the character came from the Belgian refugees and the Belgian soldiers she helped to treat as a volunteer nurse during the First World War.
Christie is also known for having written the world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which had been performed for audiences since 1952 in London’s West-End theatres. The play opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on November 25, 1952, and by September 2018 had been performed more than 27,500 times. Unfortunately, the play closed in March 2020 due to the spread of the coronavirus and the resulting public health measures.
In addition to that achievement, Christie’s novel, And Then There Were None, ascended to become one of the top-selling books of all time, selling approximately 100 million copies since initial publication. In total, her books have sold more than two billion copies.
In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America. And in 1971, her contributions to literature were recognized when she was made a Dame of the British Empire. Christie died in 1976 at the age of 85, after having made an indelible mark on the world of fiction and defining the crime novel as we know it today.
Agatha Christie Books In Our Collection…
Detective Hercule Poirot Series
Sad Cypress
Appointment with Death
Evil under the Sun
Murder on the Orient Express
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Hollow
Murder in Mesopotamia
Five Little Pigs
Death on the Nile (also available in Large Print)
Peril at End House
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
The A.B.C. Murders
The Mystery of the Blue Train
The Monogram Murders (Also available in Audiobook)
Closed Casket
Miss Marple Mysteries
The Tuesday Club Murders
The Body in the Library
Murder at the Vicarage
A Caribbean Mystery
A Murder is Announced
4:50 from Paddington
Nemesis
The Moving Finger
Other stories
The Lost Plays (audiobook)
Towards Zero (Large Print)
The Mysterious Mr. Quin (Large Print)
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (Large Print)
The Pale Horse (Audiobook)
The Secret Adversary
The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural
Midwinter Murder: Fireside Tales from the Queen of Mystery
Movies Based on her novels
And Then There Were None (DVD 2015)
Murder on the Orient Express (DVD 2018)
By Tracy Ward
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