On September 15, 1890, a baby girl named Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, into a comfortable family with a big house and a garden full of mysteries to invent. Her mother decided not to send her to school, so Agatha taught herself to read by age five and spent her days making up stories with imaginary friends. Nobody guessed that the dreamy little girl would one day sell more books than anyone except Shakespeare and the Bible.
Agatha started writing seriously during World War I while working in a hospital pharmacy, where she learned a lot about medicines and especially about poisons. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introduced the world to a tidy Belgian detective with an enormous mustache named Hercule Poirot. Later she invented Miss Marple, a sweet elderly lady who solves crimes by knitting and gossiping. Christie went on to write 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, including Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None, which is the best-selling mystery novel of all time. She also wrote the play The Mousetrap, which has been running on London's West End since 1952, making it the longest-running play in history.
In total Christie's books have sold over two billion copies in 100 languages. Detectives in modern shows and movies, from Sherlock-style mysteries to puzzle box films like Knives Out, still copy her tricks: the suspicious dinner party, the locked room, the surprise ending that makes you flip back through the whole book. She wasn't a fan of the spotlight, but more than 50 years after her death, the world still can't stop turning her pages.
