Agatha Christie was born on 15.09.1890 as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay (UK) and had an older sister (Margaret, born in 1879) and an older brother (Montand, born 1880). Her father, Alyah Frederick Miller (American) did business overseas, whose context is not known. Nevertheless, these transactions allowed the Miller family to lead a comfortable life in prosperity. He was married to his English wife Clarissa Margaret Boehmer.

Agatha Miller grew up in Torquay and was taught by her mother in the parental mansion Ashfield until she was 16. Her parents recognized her writing talent early. Agatha Miller published her first poem in a local newspaper at 11. In 1901, when Agatha was still 11 years old, her father died.

In 1912, Agatha Miller met Colonel Archibald Christie, a pilot in the Royal Air Force, whom she married later, in 1914, at a ball. When World War II began, Agatha Christie worked as a nurse at the British Red Cross at a local hospital and later in a pharmacy, where she gained a lot of experience with poisons, which would play a major role in her later works. Her mother made ??the suggestion to write a novel that was never published. She was inspired to write the character of Hercule Poirot by Belgian refugees. The order-loving detective who solved his cases with his grey cells investigated in 33 novels and 50 short stories.

Agatha Christie and her husband moved to London, where their daughter, Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie, was born in August 1919. The following year, the first Agatha Christie mystery was released, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, portraying the investigations of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

With her The Murder of Roger Ackroyd she suddenly became famous because she never used the crime thriller cliches that the reader would expect from a detective story. The book ended with a never before used solution and shocked the readers. This novel is considered today one of her best books.

Although very successful as a writer, Agatha Christie had not been so lucky in her private life. Due to her husband's career as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, she was often alone. In 1926, her mother Clarissa died, so they had to vacate their villa in Ashfield. After her husband admitted having an affair with a golf partner, she broke down completely and left the house with an unprecedented goal. 10 days later, she was found by a spectacular search party comprised of several hundred police officers and assistants in a hotel in Harrogate. However, she had an almost complete loss of memory and could remember almost nothing of those 10 days, so that to this day nothing was revealed. She divorced Colonel Christie in 1928.

About 50 years later, director Michael Apted produced the film Agatha, which dealt with her disappearance and starred Vanessa Redgrave.

After her divorce, Agatha Christie went on an extended trip to the Middle East, which would have a major impact on her literary activity. First, she travelled with the Orient-Express to Baghdad and from there to Ur, a city in Iraq, where she met the couple Katharine and Leonard Woolley. Leonard Woolley was engaged here in excavations and since Agatha Christie befriended the Wolley couple, she later dedicated the short story collection The Thirteen Problems to them, remaining for a long time with the excavation team.

The main characters in the novel Murder in Mesopotamia are based on Katharine and Leonard Woolley, where Agatha Christie added the main characters some character traits that the Wolley couple did not possess.

In 1930, Agatha Christie was again in Ur and got to know the archaeologist Max Mallowan. The 14 years younger Mallowan was working as an assistant to Leonard Wooley at the time. While Mallowan was showing Agatha Christie the excavation and the area, both fell in love to each other. Due to an illness of her daughter Rosalind, Agatha Christie had to return back to England in the same year. She was accompanied by Max Mallowan, whom she married in September 1930 in Edinburgh.

Agatha Christie also published in 1930 her novel Murder at the Vicarage, her first novel about the spinster Miss Marple, an elderly woman with an open mind, living in the peaceful village of St. Mary Mead.

In subsequent years, Agatha Christie accompanied her husband Max Mallowan in his excavations including in Syria and northern Iraq.

The work of the Queen of Crime has been translated into 100 languages, amounting to circa 2 billion. Agatha Christie is therefore likely to be the best-known mystery writer in the world. Many of her novels have been made ??into movies. Probably the best-known films are:

The Murder on the Orient Express (Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot)

Death on the Nile (Sir Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot)

Evil Under the Sun (Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot)

The Mirror Crack'd (Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple)

Murder She Said (Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple)

Murder at the Gallop (Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple)

Murder Ahoy (Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple)

Ten Little Indians (And then there was none)

There is a great selection of books, audio books and DVDs about both Hercule Poirot andMiss Marple.

With the play The Mousetrap, which premiered on November 25^th 1952, she was also pursuing a theatre career. The play has since been performed non-stop in England and has had more than 20,000 performances. The Mousetrap has thus becomethe longest uninterrupted piece and was listed as the most played piece of crime even in the Guinness Book of Records.

Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime, died on 12.01.1976 after a stroke in Winter Brook House in the county of Oxfordshire.