Agatha Christie’s “Hercule Poirot” Now 100 Years Old

Hercule Poirot

2016 is the 100th anniversary of a literary game changer.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles” was the first book by Agatha Christie starring her Belgium detective, Hercule Poirot. She finished the writing of “Styles” in 1916 even though it wasn’t published until 1920 in the U.S., 1921 in the U.K, after being rejected several times.

Christie wrote it on a dare. Her older sister said she couldn’t write a mystery novel. She set out to prove her wrong, and never looked back.

Over her lifetime, she published 80 novels and short stories with exotic backdrops – Egypt, the Canary Islands, and, of course, England. She also wrote plays, such as And Then There Were None and The Mousetrap, which is still running at the St. Martin’s Theatre in London.

Christie created classic characters in her detectives. Poirot was a former policeman influenced by WWI refugees she’d met in Torquay. She grew less-fond of Poirot over the years, calling him a “ego-centric little creep”. Nonetheless readers loved him.

Then there was an elderly lady with a sharp eye and even sharper mind – Miss Marple. Both characters have been reinterpreted over and over again in movies and on television by actors such as David Suchet (Poirot) and Joan Hixon (Miss Marple).

In 2011, Christie’s publisher, HarperCollins, reissued her 1977 “An Autobiography”. It covered her childhood during the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, a time of rich enjoyment. She taught herself to write at 5.

Christie learned about poisons during World War I. As a nurse, she was assigned to a pharmacy at the Red Cross Hospital in Torquay dispensing drugs, and understanding the deadly danger of overdoses. She put this information to good use throughout her writing career.

In 1914 Agatha married to dashing Royal Flying Corps pilot, Archibald Christie. By the mid-1920s the marriage struggled over his infidelity. In 1925, she “vanished” for 10 days, causing a manhunt by both the public and the police. The marriage failed, the divorce being finalized in 1928.

She met her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan on a visit to Iraq in 1930 where they bonded over a love of travel and writing. In 1955 she established Agatha Christie Limited to manage the media and literary rights to her works. Christie passed away in 1976 at 85.

Her works have never gone out of print. According to her publisher her books have sold more than a billion copies in English, and another billion in foreign languages.

The question is why? Partly because they are character-driven puzzles. Even if they are set in the 1920-1930s, the motivations that drive men, women and families to murder remain depressingly modern.

On August 24, Agatha Christie Productions and the BBC announced a deal for new productions of seven Christie novels beginning with Ordeal by Innocence. Also, actress Gillian Anderson (X-Files) and Glenn Close will star in a movie adaptation of Crooked House. The adaption is being written by Julian Fellows (Downton Abbey), Tim Rose Price and Gilles Paquet-Brenner.

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