Top 10 facts about Agatha Christie

Top 10 facts about Agatha Christie

This year’s Agatha Christie Festival begins today in Torquay.

 

1. This year’s festival continues until September 20 and includes a celebration of the 125th anniversary of her birth in Torquay on September 15, 1890.

2. Her maiden name was Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller. Her first husband was Archibald Christie.

3. Her second husband was the prominent archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan…

4. …following his knighthood in 1968 she could be addressed as Lady Mallowan but she became a Dame in her own right in 1971.

5. An estimated two billion Agatha Christie books have been sold worldwide, a figure surpassed only by Shakespeare.

6. According to Unesco she is also the world’s most translated novelist, having been translated into more than 100 languages.

7. Hercule Poirot was introduced in 1920. Miss Marple followed in 1927.

8. By 1930, Christie wrote in her diary that she found Poirot “insufferable”.

9. Miss Marple is said to have been based on Agatha Christie’s grandmother.

10. Hercule Poirot is the only fictional character to have had an obituary in the New York Times.