Agatha Christie - The Queen of Crime.
"Her achievement was absolutely astonishing" PD James
The Queen of Crime wrote 80 novels and short story collections and 19 plays.
She's sold an estimated two billion copies of her works in over 70 different languages and is only outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. Awareness of Christie is universal: 97% of people surveyed in the UK, 85% in Japan, 71% in the US, 90% in Germany and 75% of under 49 year olds in France, where she is the most read author for young readers. Four million books are sold worldwide every year.
Her best-known detectives are Poirot, Miss Marple, and Tommy & Tuppence, and book titles such as Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile are amongst the most famous in publishing history.
Hercule Poirot, the diminutive Belgian professional detective famed for his meticulous style and judicious use of his 'little grey cells' features in Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and appears in 37 novels and short story collections in total. He is widely recognised as one of the most popular detectives in the history of crime fiction. His powers of deduction are off-set against his almost comic eccentricity. He is obsessed with beauty, precision and symmetry in both his own immaculate attire and his environment.
Key Poirot Titles
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Peril at End House
Lord Edgware Dies
Murder on the Orient Express
Death in the Clouds
The ABC Murders
Death on the Nile
Appointment With Death
Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
The Hollow
Cat Among the Pigeons
Miss Marple, the unobtrusive English spinster sleuth who lives in the sleepy village of St Mary Mead, is one of Agatha Christie's most endearing creations. Her frail and innocent appearance conceals a brilliant, cynical mind - she draws on her knowledge of human nature and experiences of everyday village life to solve murder mysteries that baffle the local police. She appears in 12 novels and 20 short stories in total, written over a period of 41 years, beginning with The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and continuing to the end of Christie's writing career.
Miss Marple titles
Murder at the Vicarage
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder is Announced
A Caribbean Mystery
They Do it With Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4:50 From Paddington
The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side
At Bertram's Hotel
The Thirteen Problems
Miss Marple's Final Cases
Sleeping Murder
The engaging crime solving couple from Young Adventurers Ltd, Tommy and Tuppence first meet and marry in The Secret Adversary, Christie's second novel, and age gracefully through a series of detective stories culminating in Postern of Fate.
Tommy and Tuppence titles
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of my Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Agatha Christie's masterpiece And Then There Were None, remains the best-selling mystery novel of all time and sells over a 100,000 copies a year in the USA alone.
Books: 4 million books sold worldwide each year.
Merchandising: PC games, jigsaw puzzles, mugs, pencils, cushions, deckchairs and more are available at retail and online.
Stage: We license first class productions worldwide and actively oversee the hugely successful Agatha Christie Theatre Company's ongoing professional tours in the UK.
Online: The official website at www.agathachristie.com features blogs, games, downloadable content, information on Agatha Christie and every story she wrote, newsletters and a very popular forum for her fans.