Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was an English author who became the best-selling novelist in history, with an estimated two billion copies of her books sold worldwide — a sales record beaten only by the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. Starting with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, she introduced the fastidious Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who went on to star in 33 novels and dozens of short stories, and in 1930 she created the shrewd elderly amateur sleuth Miss Marple, lead of 12 further novels. Christie also wrote celebrated standalone mysteries, including And Then There Were None, still the best-selling standalone mystery novel ever published, and the West End's The Mousetrap, the longest continuously running play in theatre history. Her ingenious plotting and mastery of the least-likely-suspect twist defined detective fiction's Golden Age and continue to shape the genre. Poirot was played by David Suchet across 25 years of ITV adaptations and, more recently, by Kenneth Branagh in a run of star-studded films including Murder on the Orient Express and A Haunting in Venice, while Miss Marple has had her own long run of BBC television adaptations. New readers typically start with And Then There Were None for a self-contained shock, or Murder on the Orient Express to meet Poirot at his most iconic. Christie died in 1976, but her estate has since authorised novelist Sophie Hannah to continue writing new, officially sanctioned Poirot mysteries.