Dame
Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller), who passed away on 12 January 1976, was an English writer.
She is known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections,
particularly those revolving around her fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and
Miss Marple. Christie also wrote the world's longest-running play, a murder mystery,
The Mousetrap, and, under the pen name Mary Westmacott, six romances. In 1971
she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for
her contribution to literature.
She was
initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this
changed when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Hercule Poirot, was
published in 1920. During the Second World War, she worked as a pharmacy
assistant at University College Hospital, London, acquiring a good knowledge of
poisons which feature in many of her novels.
Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling
novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly 2 billion copies, and her
estate claims that her works come third in the rankings of the world's
most-widely published books, behind only Shakespeare's works and the Bible.
According to Index Translationum, she remains the most-translated individual
author, having been translated into at least 103 languages. And Then There Were
None is Christie's best-selling novel, with 100 million sales to date, making
it the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of
all time. Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the world record for
longest initial run. It opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End on 25
November 1952, and as of April 2019 is still running after more than 27,000
performances.
In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honour, the Grand Master Award. Later the same year, Witness for the Prosecution received an Edgar Award by the MWA for Best Play. In 2013, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was voted the best crime novel ever by 600 fellow writers of the Crime Writers' Association. On 15 September 2015, coinciding with her 125th birthday, And Then There Were None was named the "World's Favourite Christie" in a vote sponsored by the author's estate. Most of her books and short stories have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics, and more than thirty feature films have been based on her work.
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