Agatha Christie

The Pianist Who Never Was

Agatha Miller never wanted to be the queen of anything. As a young woman in Torquay, she only wanted a way out of her shyness, and the piano seemed like the best option. But nerves in front of an audience derailed that career before it began. So she started writing, because her sister challenged her to create a story where the reader couldn't guess the culprit.

She published The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 after being rejected by six different publishers.

That book already featured Hercule Poirot. The Belgian detective was inspired by observing refugees during World War I and ended up becoming a burden for his creator.

Christie came to hate him.

She called him egotistical and tiresome in her private diaries. She sold more than two billion copies across all her works, and only the Bible and Shakespeare rival her worldwide sales. She wrote for money and followed an almost military discipline, which required her to produce at least one book a year to meet her contracts.

The Mystery of the Eleven Days

In December 1926, reality outdid her plots. Her car was found abandoned near a lake, and the entire country joined the search for her. Arthur Conan Doyle even took one of the writer's gloves to a medium in an attempt to find her. She was found staying at a hotel in Harrogate under the surname of her husband's mistress.

She never explained that.

She married archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930 and spent much of her life on excavations in the Middle East. Those trips inspired titles such as Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. She didn't write in a luxurious office. She wrote at side tables or in her room while the rest of the team cleaned pottery.

Her creative process was purely logistical. She jotted ideas down in cheap notebooks and didn't start writing until the mechanics of the crime were worked out in her head. The structure of her novels is pure engineering applied to popular literature.

The Obsession With Staging and Adaptation

The movies always had a rocky relationship with her work. Christie disliked adaptations because she felt they lost the essence of the intellectual game. In 1974, she saw Sidney Lumet's version of Murder on the Orient Express and admitted it was the only one she liked. But she had one technical quibble: Albert Finney's mustache wasn't majestic enough for her Poirot.

And the business keeps going strong decades after her death.

In 2017, Kenneth Branagh brought the detective back for a new generation with a bold visual style. In 2022, it released Death on the Nile, and in 2023, it wrapped up a trilogy with A Haunting in Venice. Studios know that the clockwork plotting Christie devised is a surefire box-office hit. The play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest-running show in London, where it has played continuously since 1952.

In 2023, the film A Haunting in Venice grossed more than $120 million worldwide. The production had a budget of $60 million and shot much of its scenes at Pinewood Studios in London.