Agatha Christie

By Tom Kirvan

“Very few of us are what we seem.”

The quote seemed quite apropos for Agatha Christie, a meek young English girl who as an adult became known as the “Queen of Mystery” for her string of books that made her the best-selling novelist of all time with more than 2 billion sold.

Born on September 15, 1890 in Torquay, Devon, England, Christie reportedly began making up stories as a child. It took her until she was 30 years old to produce her first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” a book featuring Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, a character who would appear in 25 more novels during the next quarter century. In 1926, she wrote her first bestseller, “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” a book that appeared just before she entered a period of emotional turmoil following the death of her mother and a divorce from her first husband, Colonel Archibald Christie.

“Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master,” Christie said. “Everyone is a potential murderer – in everyone there arises from time to time the wish to kill, though not the will to kill.”

Christie, who married archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan in 1930 and accompanied him on expeditions to the Middle East, created one of her beloved detectives, Miss Marple, that same year.

Agatha Christie

“An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have,” she said. “The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.”

Over the course of her writing career, Christie penned some 80 novels, 30 short story collections, and 15 plays. By the time she died in 1976, nearly a half-million of her books had been sold in more than 100 languages. The number would climb astronomically after her death.

One of her most enduring quotes was “time is the best killer,” noting that it often is the most effective “murderer” in creating suspenseful stories. As time passes, she mused, it inevitably destroys, kills, or exposes, serving as the ultimate, unstoppable force in her mystery novels.

When she killed off Poirot in her 1975 novel, “Curtain: Hercule Poirot’s Last Case,” Christie included this cynical observation as a fond farewell: “Good advice is certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it.”

^{*Joop van Bilsen for Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons}