In 1919 Agatha decided the time was right to publish her first novel and entered into a contract with the Bodley Head publishing company. When the war ended the couple moved to London for Archie to take up a post at the Air Ministry. At the encouragement of her older sister, Margaret – herself a writer who was often published in Vanity Fair – Agatha wrote the first of her many detective novels, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. During this time, a number of Belgian refugees had settled in Torquay and were said to have provided the inspiration for the fledgling writer’s most famous Belgian Detective one Hercule Poirot. Whilst Archie continued to fight across Europe for the next few years, Agatha kept busy as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in Torquay’s Red Cross Hospital. Archie was sent to France when the First World War broke out in 1914 but the young couple married on Christmas Eve the same year when he returned on leave.

In 1912, 22-year-old Agatha attended a local dance where she met and fell in love with Archibald ‘Archie’ Christie, a qualified aviator who had been posted to Exeter.

Although she was also a successful playwright responsible for the longest-running play in theatre history – The Mousetrap – Agatha is best known for the 66 detective novels and 14 collections of short stories written under her married name ‘Christie’. It turns out that her play The Mousetrap is the longest running West End show in history, having had a continuous run since it opened in 1952 and an accumulated audience of more than 10 million people.Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890 in Torquay, Devon, the youngest of Clara and Frederick Miller’s three children.And, if all of this were not enough, Christie is also the most successful female playwright of all time. In her life, Christie wrote 66 crime novels, 6 other novels, 24 plays, and more than 150 short stories. 30% of readers in the US mark Christie as their introduction to the mystery genre.Her novels have been translated in more than 100 languages, making her the world’s most-translated writer.Her books are outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.

An estimated 32 million Americans have read one of Christie’s books.Here are some other statistics about her legacy, courtesy of this study: According to a commemorative study recently commissioned by Harper Collins and completed by an independent research group, Agatha Christie’s novels have sold more than one billion copies in the English language and another billion internationally. It is 100 years since Agatha Christie published her first novel, the droll Hercule Poirot whodunit The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Agatha christie novels