Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was born Agatha Miller in the seaside town of Torquay, in the south of England, in 1890. Hers was a comfortable middle-class childhood, and a strikingly private one: she was educated largely at home, was often shy, and filled long hours by inventing stories in her head. During the First World War she volunteered as a nurse and then worked in a hospital dispensary, handing out medicines — and, crucially, learning about poisons. That knowledge would one day make her the most convincing murderer in English fiction.

In 1914 she married Archie Christie, a dashing aviator, and took the surname the world would come to know. On a dare from her sister — who bet she could not write a good detective novel — she produced The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Several publishers rejected it before one accepted, and in 1920 it introduced readers to a small, egg-headed Belgian refugee with an immaculate moustache and an extraordinary mind: Hercule Poirot.

Book by book, Christie built a career. She wrote crisp, ingenious puzzles in which every reader was handed the same clues as the detective and challenged to solve the crime first. She was not, at this point, a household name. But her craft was sharpening, and the sales were beginning to climb.

By December 1926, Christie's life was quietly collapsing. Her beloved mother had died that year, and her husband Archie had told her he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. She was grieving, exhausted and, by every account, at breaking point. Then, on the cold evening of 3 December, she kissed her sleeping daughter goodnight, got into her car, and drove off into the dark.

The next morning her Morris Cowley was found abandoned above a chalk pit near Guildford, its headlights still burning, her fur coat and a suitcase left inside. Of Agatha Christie herself there was no trace. What followed was one of the largest searches Britain had ever seen: over a thousand police officers, thousands of volunteers, aeroplanes overhead and dogs through the woods. Because she was already famous, the newspapers seized on the story, and for eleven days the whole country asked the same question — was she dead, had she been murdered, or had she staged the entire thing?

She was found at last, alive and well, more than two hundred miles away at a spa hotel in Harrogate. Extraordinarily, she had checked in under the surname of the very woman her husband loved — and the staff, who had noticed nothing wrong, said she had spent the days dancing, reading and taking the waters like any other guest.

Christie never publicly explained what had happened. Her family spoke of a nervous breakdown and amnesia, brought on by grief and shock; sceptics muttered that it had been a publicity stunt, or an attempt to punish her unfaithful husband by making him a suspect. Doctors at the time diagnosed memory loss. The truth was never established, and — in a fitting irony for the queen of the whodunit — the one mystery with her own name attached to it stayed unsolved. She left it out of her autobiography entirely.

Her life, though, went on to become a triumph. She divorced Archie, and in 1930 married the archaeologist Max Mallowan, travelling with him across the Middle East to the very digs that would colour books like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. She created a second immortal detective — the deceptively gentle Miss Marple — and wrote the stage play The Mousetrap, which opened in London in 1952 and has run, without a break, for over seventy years: the longest-running play in the world.

By the time she died in 1976, Agatha Christie had written some sixty-six detective novels and been translated into more than a hundred languages. Estimates of her sales run to around two billion copies, a figure so staggering that she is routinely called the best-selling novelist of all time. The shy girl from Torquay had left a legacy that still fills bookshelves, cinemas and theatres — and an eleven-day gap in her own story that no one has ever been able to close.