Torquay's home-schooled writer still tops translations
Agatha Christie, born 15 September 1890 in Devon, produced sixty-six detective novels and fourteen Poirot or Miss Marple short-story collections under her first married name. UNESCO's Index Translationum ranks her the most-translated individual author. And Then There Were None sits among history's bestselling novels.
She was the youngest child of a comfortable Torquay household at a villa called Ashfield. Her mother wanted her kept from reading until eight, but she taught herself by four and was schooled mostly at home, with later piano and voice training in Paris before she abandoned hopes of performing. Her father died when she was eleven, and the family's money thinned. Early stories about dreams and the paranormal went out under pseudonyms such as Mac Miller and came back rejected, as did her Cairo-set first novel.
She married Archie Christie on Christmas Eve 1914 and logged 3,400 hours at a Torquay Red Cross hospital, first nursing and then dispensing, where she learned the poisons that later killed so many characters. The Mysterious Affair at Styles introduced Hercule Poirot in 1920; Tommy and Tuppence followed in 1922 and Miss Marple in 1930. In 1926, after her mother's death and the collapse of her marriage, she vanished for eleven days and made headlines worldwide. Marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930 brought yearly seasons on Middle Eastern digs.
The numbers are outsized: more than two billion books sold, about 100 million copies of And Then There Were None, and top place in UNESCO's translation index. The Mousetrap opened in the West End on 25 November 1952 and had passed 27,500 performances by 2018. She also wrote six novels as Mary Westmacott.
Honours followed the sales. She was the first Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1955, became a Dame in 1971, and in 2013 a poll of some 600 fellow crime novelists put The Murder of Roger Ackroyd at the top of the genre.
Source: Agatha Christie
