The mystery behind Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was one of the greatest crime writers of all time but her greatest mystery was not one she wrote but rather one which involved herself – her disappearance.
To this day, people do not know whether she stage-managed the entire episode or whether, as she claimed afterwards, she was actually suffering from depression. When her first husband admitted to infidelity and announced he wanted a divorce, Christie left home and, in spite of a nationwide search, could not be found. She was eventually located after 11 days in the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate in Yorkshire.
Surprisingly, for an author who wrote more than 80 detective novels together with short stories, plays and romances (under the name Mary Westmacott) she had no formal early schooling. Christie taught herself to read and her education was completed by her mother and a number of tutors.
Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, she married Archie Christie on Christmas Eve, 1914. He returned to the war two days later and she volunteered as a nurse with the Red Cross. There, she passed the exam for the Society of Apothecaries, which led her to use poison in many of her crime plots. Her older sister challenged her to write a novel but after it was rejected by six publishers it took several years to eventually get Mysterious Affair at Styles published. This marked the first appearance of Hercule Poirot, possibly her most famous character. Poirot appeared in 30 of her novels. His last was Curtain, published in 1975, in which he dies. Following its publication, Poirot became the first fictional character to be given an obituary in the New York Times. 
Her other great creation was Miss Marple. She first appeared in the novel Murder at the Vicarage in 1930 but she had earlier featured in a short story The Tuesday Night Club.
Poirot and Marple stories were all filmed and gave some memorable entertainment. Her play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest-running play of all time – continuously on stage in London since its opening in 1953. When the film rights to the play were sold, there was a clause in the contract that it could not be made into a film until the first stage run ended.
After her divorce, she travelled a lot and on one of her trips to Baghdad she met Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, whom she married. She accompanied him on many of his field trips and one of her romance novels – Absent in Spring was said to have been written over a weekend in Syria. Her travel experiences gave background for her writing. She used the Orient Express, travelling to Baghdad, and on another occasion was stranded on the same train when bad weather washed away part of the track. One of the archaeological trips was to the River Nile, which gave the background for Death on the Nile.
During the course of her career she won many awards and honours. It is claimed that she is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, has sold over two billion books and has been translated into nearly 50 languages.
After a very successful career, Agatha Christie died peacefully on January 12, 1976 – 35 years ago this week.
n Michael Torpey