Agatha Christie’s most exotic murder mystery, reissued with a striking new cover designed to appeal to the latest generation of Agatha Christie fans and book lovers. Download PDF Buy at Amazon. AGATHA CHRISTIE € € €CHAPTER 1 € €IN THE CORNER of a first-class smoking carriage, Mr. Justice Wargrave, lately€retired from the bench, puffed at a cigar and ran an interested eye through the€political news in the Times. €He laid the paper down and glanced out of the window. They were running now €through Somerset.
Agatha Christie, known as the ‘Queen of Crime’, was a renowned English writer who wrote over 66 detective novels. She is best known as the creator of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and village lady Miss Marple. She is credited for writing world’s longest running play ‘The Mousetrap’. Her first successful publication was ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ that introduced the character of Poirot. According to Index Translationum, her books have been translated into 103 different languages, and her works rank third rank after the works of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the world’s most widely published books.
Her novel ‘And Then There Were None’ deserves special mention as her best-selling novel. Around 100 million copies of this novel have been sold till now. For her noteworthy contribution in the field of detective stories, she received several awards, such as, Grand Master Award and an Edgar Award. A number of films, television series, video games and comics have been made based on her stories. Her created character Poirot is the only fictional character for which The New York Times published an obituary, which is a clear indication of the character’s popularity.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, in the United Kingdom, the daughter of a wealthy American stockbroker. Her father died when she was eleven years old.
Her mother taught her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16, she went to Mrs. Dryden's finishing school in Paris to study singing and piano. In 1914, at age 24, she married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. While he went away to war, she worked as a nurse and wrote her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which wasn't published until four years later. When her husband came back from the war, they had a daughter. In 1928 she divorced her husband, who had been having an affair.
In 1930, she married Sir Max Mallowan, an archaeologist and a Catholic. She travelled with her husband's job, and set several of her novels set in the Middle East. Most of her other novels were set in a fictionalized Devon, where she was born. Agatha Christie is credited with developing the 'cozy style' of mystery, which became popular in, and ultimately defined, the Golden Age of fiction in England in the 1920s and '30s, an age of which she is considered to have been Queen. In all, she wrote over 66 novels, numerous short stories and screenplays, and a series of romantic novels using the pen name Mary Westmacott.
She was the single most popular mystery writer of all time. In 1971 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.