Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller (Torquay, September 15, 1890-Wallingford, January 12, 1976), known as Agatha Christie, was a British writer and playwright specialized in the detective genre, for which she gained international recognition. Throughout her career, she published 66 detective novels, 6 romance novels, and 14 short stories —under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott—, in addition to venturing as a playwright in works such as The Mousetrap or Witness for the Prosecution.
Born into an upper-middle-class family, she received a private education until her adolescence and studied at various institutes in Paris. While working as a nurse during World War I, she wrote her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), where she first introduced the character of detective Hercule Poirot. Other creations were Miss Marple and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford.
In 1914, she married Archibald Christie, from whom she divorced in 1928. In 1926, affected by a supposed depression, she mysteriously disappeared after her car was found abandoned on the side of the road. She was found eleven days later with a possible case of amnesia, in a hotel where she registered under the name of her husband's lover. In 1930, she married archaeologist Max Mallowan, whom she accompanied for long periods on his trips to Iraq and Syria. Her stays inspired several of her later novels such as Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), Death on the Nile (1936), and Appointment with Death (1938), many of which were adapted into theater and film with high acceptance. In 1971, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. She died of natural causes in 1976.
With between two and four billion copies of her works sold, Christie is considered the best-selling novelist of all time, and, along with William Shakespeare, the first or second author to do so (albeit with twice as many works). According to the Index Translationum, she is the most translated individual author, with editions in at least 103 languages. In 2013, her work The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was chosen as the best crime novel of all time by 600 members of the Crime Writers' Association.
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