On This Day In History: Agatha Christie Known As ‘Queen Of Crime’ Died – On Jan 12, 1976

AncientPages.com - On January 12, 1976, the ‘Queen of Crime’, Agatha Christie died.

She was a detective mystery writer whose work sold over two billion copies and was translated into over a hundred languages.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Miller was born in 1890 in Torquay, UK, to parents of the upper middle class, and she was educated at home. Laterr, she was sent to a finishing school in Paris.

In 1914, she married Colonel Archibald Christie, a colonel in the Royal Flying Corps. Soon after her marriage, Christie became involved in war work, first at a hospital and then at a pharmacy. Here she learned of drugs, poisons, their properties, and the uses they could be put, either for good or evil.

Agatha Christie had no ambition to be a writer, but she made her debut in print at eleven with a poem in a local London newspaper.

So what did inspire her?

“Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop...suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head,” Agatha Christie said in “An Autobiography.”

Finding herself in bed with influenza, her mother suggested she write down the stories she was so fond of telling. And so a lifelong passion began.

She did not spend much time with people but was a natural observer, and her descriptions of local rivalries, family jealousies, and village politics are very accurate. By her late teens, she had had several poems published in “The Poetry Review” and had written a number of short stories. But it was her sister’s challenge to write a detective story that would later spark her brilliant career.

Christie used to dictate her stories into a Dictaphone, and then, a secretary typed this up into a typescript and later corrected it. She wrote quickly, and it is known that in the 1950’s one book only took her a couple of months.

She was also involved in a real-life mystery when she suddenly disappeared in 1926. Her car was found abandoned at a chalk pit, and a search by the local police gave no clues as to her whereabouts. After a week, Christie was discovered residing in a Harrogate hotel registered in the name of the woman her husband planned to marry. This event has never been explained.

The Famous ‘Queen of Crime’ wrote several best-selling books and inspired many authors. She remains the most-translated individual author, whose books appeared in at least 103 languages.

The Guinness Book of World Records lists Christie as the best-selling novelist of all time.

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