Christie is widely acknowledged to be the best-selling author in the world after Shakespeare. Her books have sold more than two billion copies and translated into more than languages. His age was unknown. First performed in , the play is still running on the at the St. Martins Theater in London. She was also the first female playwright to have had three plays running on the West End simultaneously.
Support Provided By: Learn more. Thursday, Nov It was not published until , after several failed submissions and, eventually, a publishing contract that required her to change the ending of the novel and that she later called exploitative. The novel was the first appearance of what would become one of her most iconic characters: Hercule Poirot , a former Belgian police officer who had fled to England when Germany invaded Belgium. Her experiences working with Belgian refugees during the war inspired the creation of this character.
Over the next few years, Christie wrote more mystery novels, including a continuation of the Poirot series. In fact, over the course of her career, she would write 33 novels and 54 short stories featuring the character. In between working on the popular Poirot novels, Christie also published a different mystery novel in , titled The Secret Adversary , which introduced a lesser-known character duo, Tommy and Tuppence.
She also wrote short stories, many on commission from Sketch magazine. On the evening of December 3, Christie and her husband argued, and she disappeared that night. At the time, the public largely suspected that it was either a publicity stunt or an attempt to frame her husband, but the real reasons remain forever unknown and the subject of much speculation and debate.
In , Christie published the short story collection The Thirteen Problems. Although Miss Marple would not take off quite as quickly as Poirot did, she was eventually featured in 12 novels and 20 short stories; Christie reputedly preferred writing about Marple, but wrote more Poirot stories to meet public demand. The following year, Christie filed for divorce, which was finalized in October While her now-ex husband almost immediately married his mistress, Christie left England for the Middle East, where she befriended archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katharine, who invited her along on their expeditions.
In February , she met Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan, a young archaeologist 13 years her junior who took her and her group on a tour of his expedition site in Iraq. The two fell in love quickly and married just seven months later in September Christie often accompanied her husband on his expeditions, and the locations they visited frequently provided inspiration or a setting for her stories.
During the s, Christie published some of her best-known works, including her Poirot novel Murder on the Orient Express. In , she published And Then There Were None , which remains, to this day, the best-selling mystery novel in the world. Christie later adapted her own novel for the stage in As a matter of fact, her pharmacy work ended up benefitting her writing, as she learned more about chemical compounds and poisons that she was able to use in her novels.
Her novel N or M? During the war, she also wrote Curtains and Sleeping Murder , intended as the last novels for Poirot and Miss Marple, but the manuscripts were sealed away until the end of her life. Christie continued writing prolifically in the decades after the war. It is the longest-running play in history and has been running continuously on the West End in London since its debut in In fact she is penetrating the gentlemanly persona with cool-eyed accuracy.
So it is not Agatha Christie, but Nevile himself, who is faking character; insofar as that phrase means anything at all. Surely not; surely this is an absurd idea, positively sixth-form, thrown at Agatha Christie by critics who disapprove of her on other grounds.
And, as with Nevile Strange, the books are at least as intent upon subverting stereotypes as upholding them: in fact Agatha Christie often uses stereotypes to mislead us, because she knows that we believe in them, or at least that we believe her to believe in them. In Evil Under the Sun the line throughout is that the murdered vamp Arlena has been killed in consequence of her irresistibility to men. In fact, as Hercule Poirot realizes, the opposite is the truth.
It was not she who fatally attracted men—it was men who fatally attracted her. And so the twist slots the whole book into position. It solves the puzzle because it solves the character: that is why it is satisfying. It also tends to go unnoticed, because the writer has no special desire to draw attention to it. Whereas in Ruth Rendell—a writer whom the modern world admires—the mysteries of character are the object of morbid scrutiny, in Agatha Christie they are a given: she assumes we know the ways of the world.
Adultery, for example, is taken for granted. Henrietta Savernake is not condemned in any way for her love affair with John Christow. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles it is accepted that both partners in the central marriage are amusing themselves elsewhere.
In Sparkling Cyanide there is no question but that the young, beautiful Rosemary Barton will cheat on her older, duller husband. In , she made her last public appearance for the opening night of the play version of Murder on the Orient Express. Christie died on January 12, We strive for accuracy and fairness.
If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives. Mamie Eisenhower was first lady of the United States when her husband, Dwight Eisenhower, was president from to She was canonized in Mary Tudor was the first queen regnant of England, reigning from until her death in
0コメント