agatha christie the death of roger ackroyd

After the war, her husband went into business in London, while Christie remained at home with their daughter, Rosalind, born in 1919.Ĭhristie wrote her first novel after her sister challenged her to try her hand at writing a mystery story. Her knowledge of poisons, evident in many of her mysteries, developed through these experiences. She volunteered as a nurse and worked as a pharmaceutical dispenser in local hospitals.

Agatha Christie continued to live at Ashfield, her family's Victorian villa in Torquay. The couple was separated for most of the war years. She attended finishing school in Paris and initially considered a musical career.īegins Career on a Dare In 1912, Agatha Miller became engaged to Archibald Christie, a colonel in the Royal Air Corps they were married on Christmas Eve, 1914. She became an avid reader as a child, enjoying mysteries and often improvising them with her sister, Madge. Her father died when she was a child, and until she was sixteen she was educated at home by her mother. She was the youngest of three children of Frederick Alvah Miller, an American from New York, and Clarissa Boehmer Miller. Works in Biographical and Historical ContextĬhristie was born by the name of Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 13, 1890, in the English seaside resort of Torquay, in Devon. Her ingenious plots, usually involving a mysteriousĭeath among a group of upper-middle-class British characters, invariably stumped crime buffs and largely defined the popular genre of the whodunit. Her drama The Mousetrap opened on the London stage in 1952 and has yet to close it is the longest-running play in theater history. A master of the murder mystery, her dozens of novels, stories, and plays have been translated into more than one hundred languages and have sold a phenomenal two billion copies-a record topped only by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. Witness for the Prosecution (1953) OverviewĪgatha Christie is the most commercially successful woman writer of all time and probably the most widely read author of the twentieth century.

Agatha christie the death of roger ackroyd