It is 120 years since Agatha Christie was born and search engine Google is celebrating with a doodle on its home page. Do you want to know about this woman?
Agatha May Clarissa Miller (1890-1976) was born in Devon, England in 1890, the youngest of three children in a conservative, well-to-do family.
As a child Agatha Christie never attended school and learned at home with the help of a tutor. She became adept at creating games to keep herself occupied at a very young age. A shy child, unable to adequately express her feelings, she first turned to music as a means of expression and, later in life, to writing.
In 1914, at the age of 24, she married Archie Christie, a World War I fighter pilot. While he was off at war, she worked as a nurse. It was while working in a hospital during the war that Christie first came up with the idea of writing a detective novel. Although it was completed in a year, it wasn't published until 1920, five years later. "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" gave the world the inimitable Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer, Christie wrote more than 30 novels featuring Poirot. Among the most popular was "Murder on the Orient Express" (1934) and "Death on the Nile" (1937).
In 1926, her husband asked for a divorce and Agatha, already upset by the recent death of her mother, disappeared. All of England became wrapped up in the case of the now famous missing writer. She was found three weeks later in a small hotel, explaining to police that she had lost her memory. Thereafter, it was never again mentioned.
She later found happiness with another marriage to a young archaeologist who she met on a trip to Mesopotamia.
Another of Christie's most well-known and beloved characters was introduced in "Murder at the Vicarage" in 1930. Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster, solved all manner of mysteries with intense concentration and intuition.
In all, she wrote over 66 novels, numerous short stories and screenplays, and a series of romantic novels using the pen name Mary Westmacott. Several of her works were made into successful feature films, the most notable being Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Her work has been translated into more than a hundred languages. In short, she is the single most popular mystery writer of all time.
In 1971 she was awarded the high honor of becoming a Dame of the British Empire.
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