Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie is the world's best-known mystery writer and all-time best selling author of any genre other than William Shakespeare. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and another billion in over 45 foreign languages. Christie published over eighty novels and stageplays, mainly whodunnits and locked-room mysteries, many of these featuring one of her series characters, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. She claimed that she detested Poirot, and she eventually killed him off in 'The Curtain', originally intended by her to be published posthumously, but she lived longer than she thought she would! Miss Marple, on the other hand, she liked, as the character was based on her grandmother. She also wrote romances under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1926 she caused a stir after disappearing for ten days; her car was found abandoned in a chalk pit, and she later claimed amnesia as a result of her mother's recent death and the discovery of her husband's affair. She died of natural causes at the age of 85 on 12 January, 1976. "I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing." - Agatha Christie