Agatha Christie is perhaps the best-known mystery writer in the world, and her novels, short stories, and plays have been translated into numerous languages, reprinted many times, presented on film and television, and remain important and widely read works to this day. She created numerous popular characters, with the two most important of these being the Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, and the elderly woman of a small English village who solves crimes because she knows human nature, Miss Marple. Agatha Christie came to typify the English murder mystery of the Golden Age of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and her style and range would have a major influence on the development of the mystery novel in both England and America that continues as writers try either to emulate her or differentiate themselves from her as a way of making their own mark.
Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay on September 15, 1890, the third child of American born Franklin Alvah Miller and English-born Clarissa Margaret Beochmer Miller. Her childhood was passed in a fairly affluent household. She had an older sister and brother who were away at school during her early years, so she was for all practical purposes an only child indulged by an agreeable father and a sensitive mother. She also had two eccentric grandmothers who influenced her. Her parents enjoyed entertaining, and their guest list included a number of literary figures such as Henry James and Rudyard Kipling. Christie would later characterize her parents' views as Victorian, and her family thought the child needed to confront duties, disappointments, and her own limitations. The child was always subject to a variety of lessons on different things a lady should know:
While the mature Agatha Christie could look back with amusement at these lessons, they surface in the detective-fiction writer's confident assumptions that society's rules must be the basis for ...