Young Agatha Christie

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In 1971 Agatha was made a DBE, and the same year she released her final Miss Marple novel (save for Sleeping Murder), Nemesis. Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled.

She did so, and signed a contract committing her next five books to The Bodley Head, which she later felt was exploitative. She was buried in the nearby churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey, in a plot she had chosen with her husband 10 years previously. MGM followed with a series of movies in the 1960s based on the Miss Marple stories starring Margaret Rutherford; Agatha was disappointed in these interpretations and deemed Rutherford miscast.The couple had no children together, but Nathaniel had a 17-year-old son, Fred Miller, from his previous marriage.

Film and television productions were also beginning to make their mark, including the 1945 classic telling of And Then There Were None from René Clair. Christie’s plays included The Mousetrap (1952), which set a world record for the longest continuous run at one theatre (8,862 performances—more than 21 years—at the Ambassadors Theatre, London) before moving in 1974 to St Martin’s Theatre, where it continued without a break until the COVID-19 pandemic closed theatres in 2020, by which time it had surpassed 28,200 performances; and Witness for the Prosecution (1953), which, like many of her works, was adapted into a successful film (1957). Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB. During both World Wars, she served in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the poisons that featured in many of her novels, short stories, and plays.Christie's first published book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was released in 1920 and introduced the detective Hercule Poirot, who appeared in 33 of her novels and more than 50 short stories. Shortly before the publication of Curtain, Poirot became the first fictional character to have an obituary in The New York Times, which was printed on page one on 6 August 1975. Following her marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, she spent several months each year on digs in the Middle East and used her first-hand knowledge of this profession in her fiction. Christie had long been a fan of detective novels, having enjoyed Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone, and Arthur Conan Doyle's early Sherlock Holmes stories.

Despite not being able to travel, Agatha continued her interest in the Middle East and Ancient Egypt, and with input from close friend and Isokon neighbour Stephen Glanville, an Egyptologist, she penned Death Comes As The End, a murder mystery novel about an Egyptian priest. After living in a series of apartments in London, they bought a house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, which they renamed Styles after the mansion in Christie's first detective novel. As Christie herself said, "Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer being obvious. Agatha broke off her engagement to Reggie, and married Archie on Christmas Eve 1914 after both had experienced the atrocities of the First World War – Archie in France and Agatha on the Home Front, working as a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment in a Red Cross Hospital in Torquay.

This latter, published at the onset of war in 1939, reflects the sombre mood of the population with its dark subject matter and claustrophobic atmosphere. From the late 1940s until the end of the 1950s, Agatha and Max would spend each winter living and working at the site of Nimrud in Iraq, which they chose after living in Baghdad for five months (this period inspired 1950’s adventure novel They Came to Baghdad).

Max proposed on the last evening of his visit to Agatha's family home of Ashfield, and they were married on 11th September 1930 at St Cuthbert's Church in Edinburgh.Further trips in the 1960s included a break in Upper Egypt where Max could recover from a bout of flu after finishing a book of his own on Nimrud; a visit to Belgium to see a museum named after Hercule Poirot; and a tour of the US where Max was giving a series of lectures. MI5 was concerned that Christie had a spy in Britain's top-secret codebreaking centre, Bletchley Park. Also, many pages have Young Agatha re-writing traditional fairy tales with her own detective like view, and they are humorous. The definitive study of Agatha Christie's stage plays is Curtain Up: Agatha Christie, a Life in Theatre by Julius Green. The family's share of the company allowed them to appoint 50% of the board and the chairman, and retain a veto over new treatments, updated versions, and republications of her works.