I was in grade school when my grandmother introduced me to the writer whose more than 2 billion books sold makes her the bestselling novelist of all time. She used the info in her post-war novels.I’ve had the good fortune to fall in love with Agatha Christie’s murder mysteries twice. During the Second World War, Christie worked in the pharmacy at University College Hospital, where she gained a real insight into poisons and their effects. (Some think she’d planned the whole thing to thwart her husband’s plans to spend the weekend with his mistress in a house nearby. Agatha never offered an explanation, but today it’s thought she may have been in the grips of a fugue state, a sort of trance brought on by depression or trauma. She was eventually found in a spa in Harrogate, under an assumed name. Had she drowned herself in the nearby pool? Was her unfaithful husband, former first world war fighter pilot Archie to blame? Or was it simply an elaborate publicity stunt? As the world speculated about what had happened to her, various scenarios were picked over. The press went into a frenzy and it even made the front page of The New York Times. The car was later found down a slope near Guildford. At 9.45pm on the evening of Friday 3rd December, she kissed her daughter goodnight and drove off in her Morris Cowley. Like a character in her own book, Agatha Christie went missing from her Berkshire home for 11 days in 1926 and never offered an explanation of where she was. Mousetrap, the world’s longest-running theatre production, is in its 63rd year and looks set to continue more or less forever.
She’s the only woman to have ever had three plays running in London’s West End simultaneously. Her best-selling And Then There Were None was originally published under the titles of Ten Little Indians, and even Ten Little N-words… Seriously. While she has many English villains in her books, Johnny Foreigner is always under suspicion from the start (and nobody seems to challenge this). Anyone who isn’t English is ‘foreign/exotic’ or makes someone feels ‘uneasy’. She’s been accused of racism – frequently. The TV adaptation of the film was shot in the rather beautiful Burgh Island Hotel at Bigbury on Sea, a place where Agatha Christie herself actually stayed, and which inspired possibly one of her most famous tales, And Then There Were None (see below). Unpopular socialites were just as likely to get bumped off in art deco hotels in Devon ( Evil Under The Sun).
But it wasn’t just faraway locations that were deemed dangerous places. The most famous are Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile. In fact, over 30 films have been made of her books.
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