Her Life:

Once she mastered reading, she was allowed to read voraciously. Since she did not attend school, she had time to give her imagination free rein, and she created in her head a whole school of her own peopled by girls to whom she gave vivid and distinctive characters that were remembered later whenb she wrote her autobiography. She also began to write stories and at the age of eleven a poem that was published in the local newspaper. Yet she had no youthful ambition to become a writer and did not think of herself as a writer.

Christie's quiet days in Torquay ended when she went to France where she studied singing and piano. However, she was too shy to begin a career performing and she remained shy with strangers all her life.

Back in Torquay, she fell in love with Archibald Christie, who was about to join the hazardous Flying Corps. They were married on Christmas Eve in 1914 (when Agatha was 24 and the First World War began), and Archibald Christie immediately returned to his duties while she resumed her nursing work at Torquay in a Voluntary Aid Detachment.

Before long she began working in the dispensary of a local hospital. While she was there, her sister challenged her to write a mystery story and Agatha created the plot and characters for The Mysterious Affair at Styles(1920). There were Belgian refugees living in the vicinity, and they were the inspiration for Hercule Poirot. Six publishers rejected it, but it was finally bought for the sum of twenty-five pounds. It was not published in America until 1927.

During this time, She had to deal with the death of her motherThe task of cleaning up the home in Torquay required her to undergo a long separation from her husband and their young daughter. When she returned home, she learned that Colonel Christie wanted a divorce so that he could marry someone else. These problems brought on a nervous breakdown and afterward she would rarely appear in public. She was divorced in 1928.

In 1929 she took the Orient Express to the Middle East, where she met the eminent archaeologist Leonard Woolley at Ur of the Chaldees. Returning to the dig the following season, Christie met Woolley's young assistant, Max Mallowan. Christie and Mallowan were married six months later, in September 1930.

Her Detectives: Hercule Poirot

Christie "was aware of the faintly ridiculous figure cut by Poirot when she baptized him. She named him after a vegetable--the leek (poireau, which also means a wart, in French). In order to maintain the tension in a mystery story, there must be some doubt as to the detective's ability to solve the crime. Because Poirot is often "patronizingly dismissed" by other characters, his eventual solution of the crime is that much more entertaining.

Her Detectives: Miss Marple

In Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime, Julian Symons gave Christie's own views of her two famous detectives: "Miss Marple, she said, was more fun [than Poirot], and like many aunts and grandmothers was 'a splendid natural detective when it comes to observing human nature.'" In contrast to Poirot, a professional detective who attributes his successes to the use of his "little grey cells," Miss Marple is an amateur crime solver who often "owes her success to intuition and nosiness. Operating on the theory that human nature is universal, she ferrets out the criminal by his resemblance to someone she has known in her native village of St. Mary Mead, since her knowledge of life extends little farther."

Miss Marple is "self-sufficient, possessing a zest for life depending in no way on a man's support or approval." Some observers compared Miss Marple to Christie herself, but Christie rejected the idea. "I don't have Jane Marple's guilty-till-proven-innocent attitude," she said. "But, like Jane, I don't accept surface appearances."