The Queen of Crime. Outsold worldwide by only The Bible and Shakespeare. Dame Agatha Christie’s first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 and her last, Postern of Fate, in 1973. Known best for her detective mysteries, Christie also wrote plays, one of which, The Mousetrap, ran in London from 1952, becoming the world’s longest running play, closing only in March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic (but re-opening this year in May).
Christie’s most famous detectives are Hercule Poirot (a Belgian and former police detective) and Miss Marple (a little old lady who has lived in the same small village all her life, providing her with plenty of insight into human nature).
If you haven’t sampled Christie’s ‘cozy’ mysteries yet, a good place to start is with And Then There Were None (one of the top selling books of all time) or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, voted the “best ever novel” ever by 600 professional novelists of the Crime Writers Association in 2013.