Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976), was an English author known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers, particularly in the mystery genre. A writer during the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction”, Christie has been called the “Queen of Crime”—a nickname now trademarked by her estate—or the “Queen of Mystery”. She wrote the world’s longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. She is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed in 1920 when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published. Her first husband was Archibald Christie; they married in 1914 and had one child before divorcing in 1928. Following the breakdown of her marriage and the death of her mother in 1926, she made international headlines by going missing for eleven days. During both world wars, she served in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the poisons that featured in many of her novels, short stories, and plays. Following her marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, she spent several months each year on archaeological excavations in the Middle East and used her first-hand knowledge of this profession in her fiction.
According to UNESCO’s Index Translationum, she remains the most-translated individual author. Her novel And Then There Were None is one of the top-selling books of all time, with approximately 100 million copies sold. Christie’s stage play The Mousetrap holds the world record for the longest initial run. It opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End on 25 November 1952, and by 2018 there had been more than 27,500 performances. The play was temporarily closed in 2020 because of COVID-19 lockdowns in London before it reopened in 2021. In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. Later that year, Witness for the Prosecution received an Edgar Award for best play. In 2013, she was voted the best crime writer and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the best crime novel ever by 600 professional novelists of the Crime Writers’ Association. In 2015, And Then There Were None was named the “World’s Favourite Christie” in a vote sponsored by the author’s estate.Many of Christie’s books and short stories have been adapted for television, radio, video games, and graphic novels. More than 30 feature films are based on her work.
In 1946, Christie said of herself: “My chief dislikes are crowds, loud noises, gramophones and cinemas. I dislike the taste of alcohol and do not like smoking. I do like sun, sea, flowers, travelling, strange foods, sports, concerts, theatres, pianos, and doing embroidery.”
Christie was a lifelong, “quietly devout”: 183 member of the Church of England, attended church regularly, and kept her mother’s copy of The Imitation of Christ by her bedside.: 30, 290 After her divorce, she stopped taking the sacrament of communion.
The Agatha Christie Trust For Children was established in 1969, and shortly after Christie’s death a charitable memorial fund was set up to “help two causes that she favoured: old people and young children”.
Christie’s obituary in The Times notes that “she never cared much for the cinema, or for wireless and television.” Further,
Dame Agatha’s private pleasures were gardening – she won local prizes for horticulture – and buying furniture for her various houses. She was a shy person: she disliked public appearances, but she was friendly and sharp-witted to meet. By inclination as well as breeding, she belonged to the English upper middle class. She wrote about, and for, people like herself. That was an essential part of her charm.
Christie died on 12 January 1976 at age 85 from natural causes at her home at Winterbrook House. Upon her death, two West End theatres – the St. Martin’s, where The Mousetrap was playing, and the Savoy, which was home to a revival of Murder at the Vicarage – dimmed their outside lights in her honour. 373 She was buried in the nearby churchyard of St Mary’s, Cholsey, in a plot she had chosen with her husband 10 years previously. The simple funeral service was attended by about 20 newspaper and TV reporters, some having travelled from as far away as South America. Thirty wreaths adorned Christie’s grave, including one from the cast of her long-running play The Mousetrap and one sent “on behalf of the multitude of grateful readers” by the Ulverscroft Large Print Book Publishers.
Mallowan, who remarried in 1977, died in 1978 and was buried next to Christie.
Christie was unhappy about becoming “an employed wage slave”, 428 and for tax reasons set up a private company in 1955, Agatha Christie Limited, to hold the rights to her works. In about 1959 she transferred her 278-acre home, Greenway Estate, to her daughter, Rosalind Hicks. In 1968, when Christie was almost 80, she sold a 51% stake in Agatha Christie Limited (and the works it owned) to Booker Books (better known as Booker Author’s Division), which by 1977 had increased its stake to 64%. 355 Agatha Christie Limited still owns the worldwide rights for more than 80 of Christie’s novels and short stories, 19 plays, and nearly 40 TV films.
In the late 1950s, Christie had reputedly been earning around £100,000 (approximately equivalent to £3,000,000 in 2023) per year. Christie sold an estimated 300 million books during her lifetime. At the time of her death in 1976, “she was the best-selling novelist in history.” One estimate of her total earnings from more than a half-century of writing is $20 million (approximately $110.5 million in 2024). As a result of her tax planning, her will left only £106,683 (approximately equivalent to £970,000 in 2023) net, which went mostly to her husband and daughter along with some smaller bequests. Her remaining 36% share of Agatha Christie Limited was inherited by Hicks, who preserved her mother’s works, image, and legacy until her own death 28 years later. The family’s share of the company allowed them to appoint 50% of the board and the chairman, and retain a veto over new treatments, updated versions, and republications of her works.
In 2004, Hicks’ obituary in The Telegraph noted that she had been “determined to remain true to her mother’s vision and to protect the integrity of her creations” and disapproved of “merchandising” activities. Upon her death on 28 October 2004, the Greenway Estate passed to her son Mathew Prichard. After his stepfather’s death in 2005, Prichard donated Greenway and its contents to the National Trust.
Christie’s family and family trusts, including great-grandson James Prichard, continue to own the 36% stake in Agatha Christie Limited, and remain associated with the company. In 2020, James Prichard was the company’s chairman. Mathew Prichard also holds the copyright to some of his grandmother’s later works including The Mousetrap.427 Christie’s work continues to be developed in a range of adaptations.
In 1998, Booker sold its shares in Agatha Christie Limited (at the time earning £2,100,000, approximately equivalent to £4,700,000 in 2023 annual revenue) for £10,000,000 (approximately equivalent to £22,200,000 in 2023) to Chorion, whose portfolio of authors’ works included the literary estates of Enid Blyton and Dennis Wheatley. In February 2012, after a management buyout, Chorion began to sell off its literary assets. This included the sale of Chorion’s 64% stake in Agatha Christie Limited to Acorn Media UK. In 2014, RLJ Entertainment Inc. (RLJE) acquired Acorn Media UK, renamed it Acorn Media Enterprises, and incorporated it as the RLJE UK development arm.
In 2014, the BBC acquired exclusive TV rights to Christie’s works in the UK (previously associated with ITV) and made plans with Acorn’s co-operation to air new productions for the 125th anniversary of Christie’s birth in 2015. Since then the BBC has broadcast Partners in Crime, And Then There Were None, The Witness for the Prosecution. Ordeal by Innocence , ‘The A.B.C. Murders starring John Malkovich and Rupert Grint, The Pale Horse, Murder Is Easy and Towards Zero. A Sarah Phelps version of Endless Night is set to air at Christmas 2025.
Since 2020, reissues of Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot novels by HarperCollins have removed “passages containing descriptions, insults or references to ethnicity”.In her prime, Christie was rarely out of the bestseller list. She was the first crime writer to have 100,000 copies of 10 of her titles published by Penguin on the same day in 1948. As of 2018, Guinness World Records listed Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time. As of 2020, her novels had sold more than two billion copies in 44 languages. Half the sales are of English-language editions, and half are translations. According to Index Translationum, as of 2020, she was the most-translated individual author.
Christie is one of the most-borrowed authors in UK libraries. She is also the UK’s best-selling spoken-book author. In 2002, 117,696 Christie audiobooks were sold, in comparison to 97,755 for J. K. Rowling, 78,770 for Roald Dahl and 75,841 for J. R. R. Tolkien. In 2015, the Christie estate claimed And Then There Were None was “the best-selling crime novel of all time”, with approximately 100 million sales, also making it one of the highest-selling books of all time. More than two million copies of her books were sold in English in 2020.
In 2016, the Royal Mail marked the centenary of Christie’s first detective story by issuing six first-class postage stamps of her works: The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, The Body in the Library, and A Murder is Announced. The Guardian reported that, “Each design incorporates microtext, UV ink and thermochromic ink. These concealed clues can be revealed using either a magnifying glass, UV light or body heat and provide pointers to the mysteries’ solutions.”
Her characters and her face appeared on the stamps of many countries like Dominica and the Somali Republic. In 2020, Christie was commemorated on a £2 coin by the Royal Mint for the first time to mark the centenary of her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
In 2023 a life-size bronze statue of Christie sitting on a park bench holding a book was unveiled in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
Some of Christie’s fictional portrayals have explored and offered accounts of her disappearance in 1926. The film Agatha (1979), with Vanessa Redgrave, has Christie sneaking away to plan revenge against her husband; Christie’s heirs sued unsuccessfully to prevent the film’s distribution. The Doctor Who episode “The Unicorn and the Wasp” (17 May 2008) stars Fenella Woolgar as Christie, and explains her disappearance as being connected to aliens. The film Agatha and the Truth of Murder (2018) sends her undercover to solve the murder of Florence Nightingale’s goddaughter, Florence Nightingale Shore. A fictionalised account of Christie’s disappearance is also the central theme of a Korean musical, Agatha. The Christie Affair, a Christie-like mystery story of love and revenge by author Nina de Gramont, was a 2022 novel loosely based on Christie’s disappearance.
Other portrayals, such as the Hungarian film Kojak Budapesten (1980), create their own scenarios involving Christie’s criminal skills. In the TV play Murder by the Book (1986), Christie (Dame Peggy Ashcroft) murders one of her fictional-turned-real characters, Poirot. Christie features as a character in Gaylord Larsen’s Dorothy and Agatha and The London Blitz Murders by Max Allan Collins. The American television program Unsolved Mysteries devoted a segment to her famous disappearance, with Agatha portrayed by actress Tessa Pritchard. A young Agatha is depicted in the Spanish historical television series Gran Hotel (2011) in which she finds inspiration to write her new novel while aiding local detectives. In the alternative history television film Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar (2018), Christie becomes involved in a murder case at an archaeological dig in Iraq. In 2019, Honeysuckle Weeks portrayed Christie in “No Friends Like Old Friends” (September 16, 2019), episode 1 of season 3 of the Canadian television period detective series Frankie Drake Mysteries when Christie helps visiting private detective Frankie Drake solve the disappearance and poisoning of an old friend.
In 2020, Heather Terrell, under the pseudonym of Marie Benedict, published The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, a fictional reconstruction of Christie’s December 1926 disappearance. The novel was on the USA Today and The New York Times Best Seller lists. In December 2020, Library Reads named Terrell a Hall of Fame author for the book. Andrew Wilson has written four novels featuring Agatha Christie as a detective: A Talent For Murder (2017), A Different Kind of Evil (2018), Death In A Desert Land (2019) and I Saw Him Die (2020). Christie was portrayed by Shirley Henderson in the 2022 comedy/mystery film See How They Run.
| Book | Author | Original language | First published | Approximate sales | Genre |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| And Then There Were None | Agatha Christie | English | 1939 | 100 million | Mystery |
Agatha she is fifth best seller after J. K. Rowling and with her book named Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.