Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890 in Torquay, Devon, South West England. Agatha loved to read English poetry and began writing poems when she was a child.

In 1912 Agatha met Archie Christie, a qualified aviator who had applied to join the Royal Flying Corps, they soon married. It was war time and Agatha became a nurse at the Red Cross Hospital in Torquay. When the Hospital opened a dispensary, she accepted an offer to work there and completed the examination of the Society of Apothecaries. Thus began her life long interest in the use of poisons. From this came her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles.  The method of death in this novel is poison and was so well described that Agatha received an unprecedented honour for a writer of fiction – a review in the Pharmaceutical Journal.

During the First World War there were Belgian refugees in most parts of the English countryside, Torquay being no exception.  Although he was not based on any particular person, Agatha thought that a Belgian refugee, a former great Belgian policeman, would make an excellent detective for The Mysterious Affair at Styles.  Hercule Poirot was born.

1919 was a momentous year for Agatha.  With the end of the war, Archie had found a job in the City and they had just enough to rent a flat in London and later that year on the 5th August, Agatha gave birth to their daughter, Rosalind.  Also that year the publisher, John Lane, who had liked The Mysterious Affair at Styles contracted Agatha to produce five more books. She went on to be one of the first authors Penguin ever published.

Following the war Agatha continued to write and to travel with Archie, though sadly they were later to divorce and Agatha would remarry, Max Mallowan, the world famous archaeologist – a marriage that would last forty-six years.

By 1930, having written several novels and short stories, Agatha created a new character to act as sleuth.  Miss Jane Marple was an amalgam of several old ladies Agatha used to meet in villages she visited as a kid. When she created Miss Marple, Agatha did not expect her to become Poirot’s rival, but with The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple’s first outing, it appeared she had produced another popular and enduring character.

One of Agatha’s lifelong ambitions had been to travel on the Orient Express; her first journey took place in 1928. The atmosphere of the Middle East was not lost on Agatha, as can be recognised in books such as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, Appointment With Death and They Came to Baghdad as well as many short stories.

After a hugely successful career and a very happy life Agatha died peacefully on 12 January 1976.

Every year Agatha Christie Ltd runs Agatha Christie week around the 15th September celebrating the life and works of Agatha Christie with events in her home town Torquay and around the country.

A selection of the Agatha Christie signature range below

Description

The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man’s search for safety, of a man torn beween the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s McCarthyite America. Born in the U.S. and reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salomé. Making himself useful in the household of the famed Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky, young Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution. A violent upheaval sends him north to a nation newly caught up in World War II. In the mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina he remakes himself in America’s hopeful image. But political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach – the lacuna – between truth and public presumption. A gripping story of identity, loyalty and the devastating power of accusations to destroy innocent people. The Lacuna is as deep and rich as the New World.

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