How to Get Away with Murder: A Look at the Magic of Agatha Christie

* She learned to read at the age of four and studied the works of Louisa May Alcott, Edith Nesbit, and Lewis Carroll, among others. He also loved dogs from the beginning. His first dog was a Yorkshire Terrier puppy that he received as a fifth birthday present.

* His first published work was a poem about the recently introduced trams in the London suburb of Ealing. He wrote it in 1901, at the age of 11, while visiting his grandmother, who both lived in the same city. It was published in a local magazine.

* Agatha attended a girls’ school in Torquay for a while, but then moved to Paris, where she also studied music, mainly playing the piano and singing. His early dream was to become a musician, but this became impossible due to stage-fright.

* In 1908, at the age of 18, she wrote her first short story, The House of Beauty. He called it “the first thing I wrote that showed any kind of promise”. She then went to Cairo with her mother for a three-month debutante season, returned and wrote her first novel, a romance called Snow Upon the Desert, under the pseudonym Monosyllaba. It was rejected by six publishers, but author and family friend Eden Philpotts encouraged him to keep writing.

* Soon after her return from Egypt, she agreed to marry her friend Reginald Lucy. Two years into their two-year engagement, at a party in 1912, she met a daring young aviator named Archibald Christie. He broke off his engagement with Lucy and married Christie two years later, on Christmas Eve, 1914.

* By now the First World War had broken out. He went off to serve in the war. She worked as a nurse with the Red Cross in Torquay, caring for wounded soldiers returning from the front lines. By 1917, she trained in pharmacy, passed the Apothecaries’ Hall examination, and became a certified apothecary’s assistant (or dispenser).

* It was at the insistence of her older sister Margaret that Agatha Christie eventually wrote her first murder mystery, the first Hercule Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. He sent it to several publishers. The seventh person to receive it, John Lane of the publishing house Bodley Head, accepted it with the condition that he change the setting of the ending. Christie wrote the final reveal as a courtroom scene. Lane asked him to set up in the country house where the murder took place, where all the suspects were gathered. Christie would follow this formula in most of the 66 novels she would write over the next 50 years.

* The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) was released to generally positive reviews. What pleased him most was being published in the trade magazine The Pharmaceutical Journal and Pharmacist. It reads, “The matters which we pharmacists find on the cover of a novel are, as a rule, apt to offend our professional instincts,” but “This novel has the rare merit of being well written – so well written, in fact, that we are tempted to believe that the author had pharmaceutical training.”

* By this time Christie had become a mother. Her husband returned from the war and their first and only child, Rosalind, was born in 1919.

* His second novel came three years later. The Secret Adversary (1922) was a light-hearted affair involving a detective, a suspected master criminal, espionage, and some charming heroes: Tommy and Tuppence, who would return in later books.

* While traveling with her husband at this time, she discovered that she loved surfing, and was considered a pioneering female surfer. In his autobiography (published posthumously in 1977), he wrote, “Nothing like it. You think there is nothing like running through water at nearly two hundred miles an hour… It is one of the most exquisite physical pleasures I have known.”

* 1926 saw the publication of one of his most famous and controversial novels: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It had an unreliable narrator and a shocking twist (she did it!) that would shock her readers. Among the many successful adaptations: a radio play by Orson Welles in 1939.

* Despite all her successes, 1926 marked the beginning of a dark period for Christie. In April, his beloved mother died, and he was faced with cleaning the family home alone, while struggling to meet his writing commitments. Separated by distance and strained by grief, Archibald and Agatha’s relationship breaks down. He fell in love with fellow golfer and family friend Nancy Neale, whom he later married.

* By December, Christie was in trouble. She left her daughter and the house in the care of the staff and disappeared. The next morning his car was found abandoned miles away. A nationwide search began. Eventually 11 days later she was found in a hotel in the city of Harrogate, 300 km away. She had registered with the name Theresa Neeley.

* Later he claimed that he had no memory of the 11 days. Doctors at the time put it down to a fugue state caused by emotional trauma, grief and exhaustion, although the episode remains a subject of debate and fascination. The next two years saw Christie struggle with grief, writing weak novels consisting of short stories such as The Big Four (1927) and The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928).

* In 1928, he canceled a trip to the West Indies and instead traveled on the Orient Express.

* His next novel, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), was a return to form, heavily influenced by a contemporary whose work he liked: PG Wodehouse. (Decades later, when she was 70 and he was 80, he dedicated his 1967 novel Halloween Party to her.)

* Her first Miss Marple book: The Murder at the Vicarage came out in 1930. The female detective had already appeared in 1927’s The Tuesday Night Club, and was believed to be based on…Roger Ackroyd’s Caroline Hubbard.

* That same year, she released Giant’s Bread, her first novel under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. It was about the life and love of a tortured musical genius.

* This was the year she met her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan. At the age of 39, he found love again. She and Mallowan, who was 14 years her junior, married on September 11, 1930, a few months after meeting.

*Christie was most productive in her 30s. She wrote Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), Death on the Nile (1937; inspired by a trip with Max and Rosalind) and Appointment with Death (1938), as well as a number of short stories, including several stories by Parker Pine, about a civil servant turned happiness consultant, which was strongly influenced by her travels through the Middle East with her husband.

* In 1939, on the eve of the war, he published what was his best-selling work, and remains the best-selling crime novel in the world, And Then There Were None (about 10 strangers picked up one by one on a remote island). Its disappointment reflected the mood of the British public at the time.

*His next novel, N or M? (1941), he had a visible contribution to the war effort with Tommy and Tuppence in the search for German spies in England. Due to one of her characters being named Major Bletchley, MI5 briefly investigated Christie, concerned that she might have an informant at the codebreaking center Bletchley Park.

* In 1944, his holiday home Greenway in Devon was requisitioned by the US Coast Guard, adding a series of toilets. He struggled to remove them.

* In 1946, he published his first non-fiction work, Come, Tell Me How You Live, an autobiographical account of his travels before World War II.

* In 1947, the BBC approached her to write a radio play for the 80th birthday of Queen Mary, who was a great admirer of Christie. The result was Three Blind Mice, which he later expanded and developed into The Mousetrap. Before its 1952 premiere (which starred Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim), he gave the rights to the play as a gift to his nine-year-old grandson, Matthew Prichard. It has since become the world’s longest-running play, still being staged in the West End after 73 years.

* The volume of his output meant that Christie was heavily taxed, so in the post-war years he slowed down the pace of tax-taxing. He also founded Agatha Christie Limited in 1955, becoming an employee. Matthew Prichard’s son, James Prichard, now runs the company, which manages the rights to all his books.

* While Christie is often associated with cozy country-house mystery, her books, especially the Miss Marple novels, vividly reflect the passage of time. The old houses have been replaced by council estates, modernization and even the Swinging London of the 1960s, examined in the late Poirot mystery, The Third Girl (1966).

* In 1971, Christie along with several notable others wrote a letter to Pope Paul VI asking for a papal order to preserve the traditional Latin Mass with new versions. It is said that Paul looked at the list of signatories and exclaimed “Ah, Agatha Christie”. He gave the offense (or decree). Since then it has come to be known as Agatha Christie’s Indult.

* That year, she was also made a Dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. But Christie remained extremely private and uncomfortable with the idea of ​​celebrity. She even fought with publishers to keep her photo off book jackets.

*His last public appearance was in 1974 for the premiere of the film Murder on the Orient Express starring Albert Finney. Although she generally disliked adaptations of her work, she approved of this one, noting that Finney’s Poirot was closest to her vision, although she jokingly complained that his mustache was not quite “brilliant”.

* In 1975, Christie’s authorized the publication of Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. The book was a huge success. The New York Times published a front-page obituary for the Belgian spy, the only fictional character to be honored in this way.

* Agatha Christie died peacefully at her home Winterbrook in Oxfordshire at the age of 85. He is buried in the churchyard of nearby St Mary’s, Cholsey.

* The Sleeping Murders, the final Miss Marple mystery, was published nine months later, in October 1976.

* According to Guinness World Records, Christie remains the best-selling fiction author of all time. His novels have sold more than two billion copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 100 languages.

* He made another interesting, if tangible, contribution to literature. After meeting Christie in 1934, the publisher Alan Lane (nephew of Bodley Head native John Lane) was waiting for a train at Exeter St Davids station and found there was nothing worth reading. This led him to believe that paperback editions of classics and well-known titles could be cheap enough to stock a railway stall, and Penguin Books was born.

(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and sometimes technology. Views expressed are personal)