It is by some considerable margin the longest of her works, the UK first edition running to 544 pages.

Their marriage was especially happy in the early years and remained so until Christie's death in 1976. The Mallowans also took side trips whilst travelling to and from expedition sites, visiting Italy, Greece, Egypt, Iran, and the Soviet Union, among other places. In October 1912, she was introduced to Archibald "Archie" Christie at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford at Ugbrooke, about 12 miles (19km) from Torquay. The agency's fears were allayed when Christie told her friend, the codebreaker Dilly Knox, "I was stuck there on my way by train from Oxford to London and took revenge by giving the name to one of my least lovable characters. It was also at that time - when she wrote to pay the rent - that she admits to writing some of her worst books - like Mystery on the Blue Train.This best-selling author of all time wrote 66 crime novels and story collections, fourteen plays, and six novels under a pseudonym in romance. In addition to Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Christie also created amateur detectives Thomas (Tommy) Beresford and his wife, Prudence "Tuppence" née Cowley, who appear in four novels and one collection of short stories published between 1922 and 1974. Both Marple and Miller "always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right". Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020. She was the youngest of three children born to Frederick Alvah Miller, "a gentleman of substance", [3] and his wife Clarissa Margaret "Clara" Miller, née Boehmer.

The disappearance quickly became a news story, as the press sought to satisfy their readers' "hunger for sensation, disaster, and scandal". Before marrying and starting a family in London, she had served in a Devon hospital during the First World War, tending to troops coming back from the trenches. Christie frequently stayed at Abney Hall, Cheshire, which was owned by her brother-in-law, James Watts, and based at least two stories there: a short story, " The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding", in the story collection of the same name and the novel After the Funeral.The publisher's preface anticipates any disappointment felt when they admit to this omission on the first page but state, "the references elsewhere to an earlier attack on amnesia give the clue to the true course of events. During her first marriage, Agatha published six novels, a collection of short stories, and a number of short stories in magazines. When Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976, she was known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime, unrivalled as the best-selling novelist of all time with two billion books sold in more than 100 languages. At the end, in a Christie hallmark, the detective usually gathers the surviving suspects into one room, explains the course of their deductive reasoning, and reveals the guilty party; but there are exceptions where it is left to the guilty party to explain all (such as And Then There Were None and Endless Night). Collins included a preface to the book in which they admitted that repetitions and inconsistencies had been “tidied up” [1] but they continued to impress on readers that the text had been composed over a fifteen-year period and was then left untouched by Christie for the remainder of her life.

Photograph: Bettmann Archive ‘Suspected of duplicity and lies’ even now: Agatha Christie at home in Devon, January 1946. Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled. I've loved all of her books that I've read over the years, and now I feel like I know the author herself as a real person. Like her, I appreciate a simple black dress; it doesn’t show dirt, is neat and can be worn on all occasions, anywhere.Reitz, Caroline (2006), "Christie, Agatha", The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, Oxford University Press, doi: 10. Other portrayals, such as the Hungarian film Kojak Budapesten (1980), create their own scenarios involving Christie's criminal skills. Naturalisation Papers Archived 24 October 2019 at the Wayback Machine: Miller, Nathaniel Frary, from the United States. She married off Poirot's " Watson", Captain Arthur Hastings, in an attempt to trim her cast commitments.

Historical records of the 91st Argyllshire Highlanders, now the 1st Battalion Princess Louise's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, containing an account of the Regiment in 1794, and of its subsequent services to 1881. The literary critic Edmund Wilson described her prose as banal and her characterisations as superficial. Of necessity, the murderer had to be known to the author before the sequence could be finalised and she began to type or dictate the first draft of her novel. She felt differently about the 1974 film Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Sidney Lumet, which featured major stars and high production values; her attendance at the London premiere was one of her last public outings.According to Index Translationum, people translated her works into 103 languages at least, the most for an individual author. Clara suggested that her daughter ask for advice from the successful novelist Eden Phillpotts, a family friend and neighbour, who responded to her enquiry, encouraged her writing, and sent her an introduction to his own literary agent, Hughes Massie, who also rejected Snow Upon the Desert but suggested a second novel. c] Christie's disappearance made international headlines, including featuring on the front page of The New York Times. The other Westmacott titles are: Unfinished Portrait (1934), Absent in the Spring (1944), The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948), A Daughter's a Daughter (1952), and The Burden (1956).