Christie was finally found ten days later in a spa hotel in Harrogate apparently suffering from amnesia. The resulting manhunt occupied a thousand police officers and fifteen thousand volunteers, with suspicion falling on Archie. Her husband, handsome aviator and womaniser Archie Christie, finally declared he wanted a divorce and intended to spend the weekend with his mistress: the same evening Christie kissed her sleeping daughter and drove out into the darkness. Success however lay in the shadow of a weak and disintegrating marriage. Poirot remains the only fictional character to have ever had an obituary in The New York Times. 33 novels, a play and more than 50 short stories followed, with Christie ultimately killing off her most enduring creation in the final novel Curtain. Standing at just five foot four inches tall, pompous, incurably vain, with famously full and expertly coifed moustaches, Poirot preferred to outwit his opponents purely by use of his ‘little grey cells’, rapidly cementing the sleuth into the public consciousness. With it the book introduced one of the most famous literary figures of all time, the former Belgian Police Officer turned detective, Hercule Poirot. It was also around this time she began her first detective novel.Īlthough completed in 1916, it took four more years for her debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, to finally see print.
A wartime spell at a Red Cross hospital dispensary provided yet more invaluable lessons, with Christie developing a fascination for poisons and their effects.
Born in Torquay in 1890, the largely home-educated Christie continued to live in Devon for much of her life, the county and its coastline looming large in the later crime fiction that brought her almost unparalleled global fame.įrom faded Paris pensions to the grand palaces of Cairo, an early peripatetic existence brought her into contact with the many locations that would soon furnish her stories and simultaneously inspiring her desire to begin writing. “There’s nothing like boredom to make you write.” - Agatha Christieįew could challenge Agatha Christie’s reign as the eternal queen of crime fiction.
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