Agatha Christie: May The Best Detective Win Quiz

Answer:

Agatha Christie was a prolific author with over two billion unit sales making her the best-selling fiction author when she died in 1976. In addition to 66 detective novels, 14 collections of short stories and several volumes of poetry. She wrote an additional six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Her play "The Mousetrap" played continuously at the same West End theatre from 1952 and was only stopped by the COVID lockdowns in 2020.

Two of the world's best known fictional detectives, Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot were prominent characters in many of her novels but some of her strongest novels (Eg "And Then There None" [1939]; "Endless Night" [1967]) had neither of these characters. Prudently she wrote novels killing off these characters whilst she was still writing ("Curtain" [1975], "Sleeping Murder" [1976]) so that when she passed the characters could not 'live on' through other authors. She was well travelled and this may be the reason trains featured heavily in her resume ("The Mystery of the Blue Train" [1928], "Murder on the Orient Express" [1934], "4.50 from Paddington" [1957]) as does the Middle East which is where her second husband spent much of his time as an archaeologist ("Death On The Nile" [1937], "They Came To Baghdad" [1951].

Poisoning seemed to be her murder weapon of choice, perhaps as she worked in a dispensary in both World Wars (though she was not a trained pharmacist. Certainly, she used this method far more frequently than any of her contemporaries. Her description om the use of strychnine was even mentioned favourably in a review in the "Pharmaceutical Journal" in 1961, much to Ms Christie's pleasure. She is purported to have said "Give me a decent bottle of poison and I'll construct the perfect crime." Very few of her novels involve ballistics or firearms.

There are more than thirty movies based on her work. In 1955, Ms Christie was the inaugural recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award. She was granted a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1956 New Year Honours List. In the 1971 List, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). Three years after her husband's knighthood, Christie could also be called Lady Mallowan.