The Life and Creative Activity

She refined and left a lasting imprint on the detective formula. An "Agatha Christie" became a shorthand description for an unadomed display of crime unmasked by perceptive and relentless logic. She dared readers to outwit her, and few resisted the challenge. Shortly after her death in 1976, one estimate put the world-wide sale of her books at 40 million copies. Given such glittering evidence and the clues provided by her fiction, a mystique was bound to develop around the one whodunit: Agatha the enchantress, the proper Englishman with a power to murder and create. When she insisted that the truth was far less exotic, armchair sleuths who had been trained by her books recognised a false lead when they saw one.

She was right, of course, as this biography, Agatha Christie, the first written with the blessings of Christie's heirs and estate, conclusively proves. Author Janet Morgan does a through job of getting the facts in the Christie case straight and on the record. But the story, even when demystified, seems almost as unbelievable as the guessing games it prompted.

Her childhood could have been written by Jane Austen. Agatha miller, beloved by her parents and an older sister and brother, grew up in an English seaside village surrounded by Edwardian privileges and leisure. Her American father lived off a trust fund that dwindled steadily, and his death when Agatha was eleven left family finances more unsteady. Still, breeding and manners meant as much as money, and the young woman, largely educated at home, moved in a circle of eligible bachelors. She turned down three proposals and took a flier instead. After a stormy courtship, she married Archie Christie, a dashing aviator with few expectations of living through World War I.

While he fought, his new bride stayed at home working in a hospital. Her sister suggested that Agatha who was both exhausted and bored during her free time, try to write the sort of detective novel they both enjoyed reading. She did, but by the time The Mysterious Affair at Styles appeared in print, the war was over and Agatha had a daughter and a husband, grounded at last, who seemed chiefly interested in making money and playing golf.

The year 1926 changed her prospects and her life. For one thing, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which caused a stir because it broke the rules of detective fiction: the narrator did it. Something more shocking followed. In December Agatha left her husband and child and disappeared for ten days, setting off a nation-wide search and a carnival of speculation. Morgan's recreation of this drama is meticulous, but it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, the tight resolution that Christie gave her invented plots.

Grieving over the death of her mother and staggering under the burden of sorting out the state, the heroine learns from her husband that he is in love with another woman. She drives off one night, her abandoned car is discovered the next morning. Questions multiply. Is he seeking publicity, has she joined her lover, is she embarrassing her husband, or has she been murdered?

When she is discovered at a Yorkshire hotel, registered under the last name of the woman, Archie now wants to marry, Agatha Christie has nothing to say. Her biographer gives all the available details but suspends judgement: " There are moments in people's lives on which it is unwise, as well as impertinent, for an outsider to speculate, since it is impossible to be certain about what actually took place or how the participants felt about it."

Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot would accept such an alibi, but truth is messier than the fiction. Whatever may have happened to Christie in 1926, she recovered admirably. Two years after the divorce, while visiting friends on expedition in Iraq, she met Max Mallowan, an archaeologist nearly 14 years her junior. Eventually he proposed, fretting at the same time that she might find his line of work boring. She reassured him: " I adore corpses and stiffs." They lived happily ever after.

Morgan is candut about the weakness in her subject's work. Chrisries stories were ingenious but her writing is pedestrian. She intentionally offered stereotypes instead of rounded characters and grew annoyed when Poirot, her Belgian detective, began to assume a life of his own in the popular imagination. She once privately described him as 'an egocentric creep'. She constructed puzzles, not literature; she devoted what energies she could spare from a busy life to craft rather than art. To list real liabilities in this manner is, ultimately, to beg a question: why among so talented competitors in a small field, did Agatha triumph? Responsible biography can suggest but never prave the probable verdict: she was the best at what she chose to do.

Agatha Christie is one of the best known and most widely-read writers of all times. Her books have delighted readers over for more than half a century. She is the most widely-translated British author in the world in addition to her great success as a best-selling novelist, Agatha Christie also wrote the longest-running play in the history of modern theatre. The mousetrap and originally written as a radio play, It opened in London in 1952 and is still running today. She is also well-known for a number of other plays and dramatisation of her novels and short stories, and has written two books of poetry, six novels of romance under the pseudonym Marry Westmacott.

Agatha Christie's best-known works are: The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The ABC Murders, Crooked House, Murder in the Calais Coach, The Seven Dials Mystery and others.

Agatha Christie's novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is considered to be one of her best works. This novel brought the author success and fame thanks to its most original concept, non-traditional for detective novels. Roger Ackroyd, a rich and respected man, was going to marry Mrs. Ferrars, a widow. But a short time before their marriage Mrs. Ferrars committed suicide living a letter with Dr. Sheppard, the local doctor, but the conversation did not take place. Soon after coming back home Dr. Sheppard was informed by a telephone call that Roger Ackroyd had been found murdered. The whole story is narrated by Dr. Sheppard.