Agatha Christie

This article is about the writer. For the Russian band, see Agatha Christie (band) .

Plaque with a photo in honor of Agatha Christie on the outside wall of Torre Abbey in her native Torquay

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan , DBE [ ˈæɡəθə ˈkɹɪsti ] (born September 15, 1890 in Torquay , County Devon , † January 12, 1976 in Wallingford , born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller ) was a British writer . Her books are said to have sold more than two billion copies worldwide, making her one of the most successful authors in literary history.

She is best known for a large number of detective novels and short stories , which have also been filmed several times with great success for cinema and television and adapted for the stage. Her most famous creations are the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot with his friend Arthur Hastings and the young girl Miss Marple . There are also other recurring characters such as the married couple Tommy and Tuppence Beresford or Inspector Battle, Sir Henry Clithering or the crime writer Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. In addition to her literary work, Christie supported her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan , with his excavations in northern Iraq and Syria , in particular with the restoration of prehistoric ceramics and the photo documentation of the finds. She contributed significantly to the financing of these expeditions.

Life

Childhood and youth

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was the youngest child of the American Frederick Alvah Miller and his English wife Clarissa Margaret Boehmer. She had a sister, Margaret Frary Miller (1879-1950), called "Madge" and a brother, Louis Montant Miller (1880-1929), called "Monty".

Agatha Christie grew up in the Victorian villa Ashfield in Torquay and was not taught in a school until she was 16, but was taught by her parents (or mother), who recognized her talent as a writer at an early age. At the age of eleven she published her first poem in a local paper.

Agatha Christie as a young girl

Her father earned his income from overseas businesses, about which nothing is known, but which enabled the family to lead a prosperous life. Agatha Christie herself mentions in her autobiography real estate in New York and assets invested in trusts , on whose interest income the Miller family lived. However, there was embezzlement by the American asset managers, which put the Miller family in financial difficulties. As was common at the time, the house was rented out to guests for the summer, while the Miller family spent the time in Pau and Cauterets or on the Channel Islands . Frederick Alvah Miller died in 1901 when Agatha was eleven years old. Clarissa Margaret Miller raised her children on her own and tried to let them feel as little as possible of the financial situation, which was aggravated by the death of her father.

Agatha Miller gave up her music studies in Paris at the beginning of World War I and worked as a nurse ( Voluntary Aid Detachment ) for the British Red Cross in the local hospital and later in a pharmacy. During this time she gained a lot of experience about poisonous substances and substances that later played a role in her works.

In 1914 she married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Air Force. With him she had a daughter, Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie, who was born on August 5, 1919.

1920s

In 1920 her first crime novel was published : The Missing Link in the Chain ( English The Mysterious Affair at Styles ) with the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, initially in the USA, then in England. Christie became suddenly famous with the work Alibi ( The Murder of Roger Ackroyd ) published in 1926 .

In her private life, the 1920s were rather unhappy: Her husband often left her alone for work, and her mother died in 1926 - an event that affected her greatly; Ashfield also had to be evacuated. Christie exhausted this situation. In August 1926, her husband confessed to having an affair with his golf partner, Nancy Neele. Despite several attempts at reconciliation, the couple fell apart more and more. After a heated argument on December 3, 1926, Agatha Christie left the house. Her car was found abandoned by a lake a few days later. The Berkshire Police Department search report dated December 9, 1926 showed a photo of the missing and read (translated from English):

Agatha Christie, 1925

“MISSING is Mrs. Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, wife of Colonel A. Christie. Age: 35, height 5'7, hair color red (short), natural teeth, gray eyes, light skin color, well built. She wears a gray skirt with silk stockings, a green sweater, a dark gray vest, and a small green hat made of velor. She may have a purse with 5-10 pounds of cash. Left home in a four-seater Morris Cowley at 9:45 a.m. on the evening of December 3rd. Left a note that she was going to take a trip by car. The next morning the car was found in Albury, Surrey, on the corner of Newlands. If you have seen this woman or if you have any information about her whereabouts, report to any police station or directly to Charles Goddard, Wokingham Director, Tel. 11 Wokingham. "

After a spectacular search operation, which was also reported in the New York Times and in which Arthur Conan Doyle also took part, the writer was found ten days after her disappearance in a hotel in Harrogate , where she was given the name of her husband's mistress as Mrs. Neele had dismounted. As a result, the question of the cost of the search also preoccupied the British Parliament. Her family spread the story that she had suffered almost total memory loss for those days. Agatha Christie herself never said anything about her motivations, not even in her memoirs. In 1928 her marriage to Archibald Christie was divorced.

The story of the disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1979 by director Michael Apted cinematically put into the mystery of Agatha Christie (Engl. Agatha ), with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role.

1930s

Christie with Max Mallowan in Tell Halaf , 1930s

In order to recover from the hardships of the past few years, she decided relatively spontaneously in the autumn of 1928 to go on an extended trip to the Middle East and took the Orient Express to Baghdad . This spontaneous decision (she had actually thought of the Caribbean as a travel destination) was to change the life of Agatha Christie significantly and exert a great influence on her literary work.

It was not her first encounter with the Middle East, as she had already been to Cairo with her mother as a young woman. From Baghdad she traveled on to Ur , where the archaeologist Leonard Woolley was busy with excavations, which at that time caused a sensation in England. He and his wife Katharine Woolley were delighted to receive the celebrity Agatha Christie; she stayed with the dig team for a long time and befriended the Woolleys. She later dedicated the short story collection The Tuesday Night Club to them . The Woolley couple also modeled the main characters in the novel Murder in Mesopotamia , with Agatha Christie adding some very unsympathetic traits to the Woolleys.

When she returned to London, she did so with an invitation from Katharine Woolley to return to Mesopotamia in the spring of 1930. During this second stay in Ur, she also met the archaeologist Max Mallowan , who was 14 years her junior , who was working as an excavation assistant at Woolley and who had been absent from her first visit due to appendicitis. Mallowan has now been "assigned" by the Woolleys to show Christie the digs and the area. On this occasion, the two fell in love. Agatha Christie had to return to England very soon (in the spring of 1930) due to an illness of her daughter, Max Mallowan already accompanied her on this return trip. Reluctantly, Agatha finally accepted the marriage proposal of the 14 years younger Mallowan and they married on September 11, 1930 in Edinburgh .

In 1930, a new detective had her first appearance in the novel Mord im Pfarrhaus (English. The Murder at the Vicarage ): The young girl Miss Marple , who was to take on the lead role in twelve other crime novels and some short stories by Christie. Christie wrote many of the numerous novels up to 1958 during archaeological expeditions with her husband in northern Iraq and northern Syria. She describes her experiences on one of the expeditions in memory of happy days ( Come, tell me how you live ).

Late career

In the 1940s, Christie wrote two detective novels, which she withheld for later publication, shaped by the existence-threatening events after the separation from her first husband. Curtain , Hercule Poirot's last case, was preparing her for publication when it became apparent that she would not be able to write another novel. He appeared shortly before her death, and it is, in fact, Poirot's last case, as he dies at the end of the investigation. Poirot, however, was Agatha Christie's main source of income, and so it was necessary for him to solve a few other cases before the appearance of the curtain . Rest rude (English Sleeping murder ), with Miss Marple as a detective, was the second novel withheld by Christie and appeared only after her death.

In 1970, on her 80th birthday, the novel Passenger to Frankfurt , atypical for Christie , was published, which deals with a world conspiracy by neo-Nazis . The controversial book was translated into German in 2008. In 1971, Agatha Christie was accepted by Queen Elizabeth II as a Dame Commander in the order of the British Empire and thereby raised to the personal nobility . She wrote her last novel Age Does Not Protect You From Acumen between 1973 and 1974.

Agatha Christie died of a stroke on January 12, 1976 at Winterbrook House in Wallingford , Oxfordshire , aged 85 . Her grave is in the nearby St Mary's Cemetery in Cholsey. In 1977 Christie's autobiography My Good Old Time ( An Autobiography ) was published posthumously , largely from 1950 to 1965, a reminder of things that were important to Agatha Christie, with an emphasis on her childhood. In addition to her autobiography, the biography of Janet Morgan can be used. Agatha Christie's daughter Rosalind asked Morgan to write an authorized biography of her mother. Extensive source study and questioning of Christie's friends resulted in a detailed description of her life.

plant

Career as a writer

Agatha Christie wrote a total of 66 detective novels , but also short stories and plays . Current estimates, according to the heirs and publishers, assume a total sold circulation of over two billion books worldwide. According to the UNESCO Translationum Index , it is by far the first place on the list of the most translated authors. She is considered the most successful crime writer in the world. Because of this success she is also called the Queen of Crime .

Her most famous creations are the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the old-boy amateur detective Miss Marple . Less known is the investigative duo Tommy and Tuppence Beresford , to whom she dedicated four novels and a short story collection. She also wrote six romantic short stories under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott .

Agatha Christie also made a career in the theater, because due to bad experiences she decided to edit her pieces only for the stage herself and was enthusiastically involved in the production. One of her stage plays is Die Mausefalle , the longest uninterrupted play in the world.

Locations

Agatha Christie let numerous stories take place in real locations. Most famous within this group is her novel Murder on the Orient Express . The novel The Blue Express is also set on a historical train. Death in the Clouds , in the first part of the murder, takes place in a passenger plane on a flight from Paris to London. Two of the novels Christie play in important passages on a passenger ship: The Man in the Brown Suit on a passenger ship from Southampton to South Africa , Death on the Nile on a Nile - steamer for tourists.

Agatha Christie's own country estate Greenway was used as a backdrop for three novels : Shortly before midnight as well as The Unfinished Portrait and Reunion with Mrs. Oliver make the special geography of Greenway with jetty, greenhouse, tennis court, former gun range , proximity to the bank of the Dart own. Agatha Christie's parents' house Ashfield was the model for the setting for her novel Age does not protect against acumen , and she also used features from her own childhood, including the tool shed called "KK" (pronounced: "Kai-Kai") and the Truelove toy horses and Mathilde and a Chilean araucaria .

Agatha Christie fulfilled a lifelong dream in 1958 when she visited Greece

Some of the novels such as Thirteen at the Table and Bertram's Hotel are set in London . The character Hercule Poirot also lives in London. The novels And Then There Was No More And Evil Under The Sun are set on a small island in Devon: Burgh Island . In contrast, the amateur detective Miss Marple lives in the fictional typically English village of St. Mary Mead. Numerous other Christie thrillers are also set in English villages or small towns, for example The Dog Playing Ball or The Dying in Wychwood . The only novel set in Devon , their homeland, is The Secret of Sittaford ; the eerie landscape of Dartmoor plays a special role here, as does the city of Exeter . A step into the void takes place partly in Wales and in Hampshire , The House on the Dune on the Cornwall coast .

Some of the novels are set in the Middle East , where Christie often stayed, for example You Came to Baghdad or Murder in Mesopotamia . Death is waiting takes place in Jerusalem and Transjordan . Egypt is the scene of events in three stories: Death on the Nile , the short story The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb and the novel Avenging Spirits . The latter occupies a special position, as it is set in ancient Egypt during the time of the pharaohs and not, like her other works, during Agatha Christie's lifetime.

The novel Caribbean Affair is set on the fictional island of St. Honoré in the Caribbean , for which, however, the island of Barbados served as a template.

Murder on the Golf Course is Christie's only novel to be set entirely in France, on the French Channel coast and in Paris. In other novels, the setting is partially relocated to France for investigators' trips, for example in The Count's Memoirs , which plays in some chapters in Paris and Dinard . Large parts of the novel The Blue Express also take place in France, especially on the Côte d'Azur .

Working method

With reference to John Curran's publication of Agatha Christie's notebooks, Zoë Beck describes Agatha Christie as a writer who wrote around the clock and was inspired by many everyday things about her characters or entire storylines. From the moment she came up with ideas, she demonstrated her qualities as a tireless worker. She was constantly taking notes and working on and with them. She not only wrote down ideas, but made lists for characters, motifs, types of murder, or locations. Often she reevaluated old notebooks and drew from her rich fund. With all the shadowiness of her works that could be criticized, she tried not to repeat herself, and showed a talent for variation. The different perspectives of the novels in the authorial, personal or first-person narrative situation show a willingness to experiment. Beck interprets this as playfulness and an attempt not to let boredom arise despite high productivity.

Christie's novel titles were often borrowed from poems or nursery rhymes. Some biographers and interpreters see literary and psychological depth in it. Particularly significant is the high recognition value of the works, which the audience can achieve with simple, typical props. With her style, Christie was able to put her stamp on subsequent generations of crime writers and audiences and sparked a veritable Christie myth. According to Beck, Christie also directed her work commercially and, in addition to high quality craftsmanship, also showed strong discipline in her work. When she got tired of the fictional character Poirot after a particularly intensive creative phase, she let him pause in order to gain distance. But she didn't kill him as Arthur Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes , only to have him resurrected afterwards. She stuck to her character because her readership liked and asked her.

Interpretations of their work

In a 1992 auctioned letter, Christie stated that her detective stories were a “ direct descendant of the old morality play, representing a battle against evil and a combat on behalf of the innocent ” (German: “direct descendant of the well-known moral piece , which is a fight against the Portrays evil and for the innocent ”). She was responding to a question from a follower who feared that her novels could encourage crime.

In her many published works, Christie, whose stories are rightly considered to be models for so-called classic crime literature, remained true to this moral claim. The basic structure of your novels is closely based on the short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle , writes the German literary scholar and didactic specialist Sascha Feuchert .

"An apparently perfect murder (or - in a few exceptions - another crime), the decisive circumstances of which (perpetrator, mode of crime, motive) are unknown, is followed by an investigation section in which all the essential elements of the solution already appear, but through numerous other puzzles and wrong contextualization remain hidden from the reader in their meaning. In the solution part, all sub-puzzles that occurred during the investigation and the main question about the perpetrator are solved. "(Sascha Feuchert)

What makes her works extraordinary is that the author, like no other, “pursues the game of riddles with tremendous busyness on all three levels, as a perpetrator riddle, an incident riddle and a revelation game.” ( Ulrich Suerbaum ).

In her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles ( The mysterious crime in Styles , 1929, later title The missing link in the chain ), she and Hercule Poirot represent an unprecedented type of investigator. This retired high-ranking Belgian police officer was in appearance and Behaved very in-English and usually conducted his investigations among the British upper class. This was a deliberate trick of hers, as one of the fundamental problems in the detective novel of the 19th and early 20th centuries was the social class of the investigator. Although police officers usually came from the lower social classes, in Great Britain, where class barriers were still to be found until after the end of World War II, it would have been inconceivable that a member of the “lower” classes would or could easily investigate the “upper” classes. At the same time, crime novels with a setting in the milieu of the “upper” classes met with strong demand. The American writer of Victorian detective novels Anna Katharine Rohlfs found a workaround in her detective novel That Affair Next Door (from 1897) in that the investigating policeman was assigned an amateur detective who belonged to the "upper" class. With the protagonist Poirot, Christie has devised another elegant and also original workaround - as the author Martha Halley Dubose points out. Because this is an outsider due to his origin, for whom the high British class barriers had no validity. The memorable detective figure seems almost made to provide the reader with information on how to investigate the perpetrators in the novels, but at the same time to lure them on the wrong track. However, as Christie's techniques became more sophisticated over the course of her time as a crime writer, Poirot's contribution to the confusion became less.

It seems like a trick from the outset that Christie locates her puzzle fun in most of her stories in the social circles of the gentry . The background for this is not so much the portrayal of an "ideal world" as was assumed by many early critics of their crime literature. According to the German Anglist Ulrich Suerbaum, the social class of the not precisely defined class of the upper bourgeoisie and the lower nobility primarily provides a useful background for Christie's expansion and complication of the puzzle structure. In practical terms, social contacts between members of this class are usually limited to formal and superficial ones. Since they often hide their true face behind a mask, so to speak, the plausibility of the stories in this milieu remains intact for the readership, despite Christie's veiling game.

As a writer, she showed a generally sensitive sociological feeling for class differences and, for example, in Death on the Nile , she tells of worlds on the verge of collision, of colonialism in Africa, of the self-confident American culture in conflict with the European culture shaken by the First World War, and often of the whole different images of women. On board the Nile steamer Karnak, a self-confidently acting half-American heiress collides with a fellow traveler trapped in the conventions of class society. The political horizon of the time is also mentioned, for example when an ardent Marxist gets into discussion at the scene.

In 1930 she invented in The Murder at the Vicarage ( Mord im Vicarage , German title since 1952) with the seventy-four-year-old Miss Jane Marple a, from a forensic point of view, completely non- technical chief investigator in her novels, whose main weapon in the investigation of crimes the apparently insignificant Small talk represented. As it were with Poirot, she is a grown character, she works because of her loving quirks, but he for completely different reasons, and both because they did not correspond to stereotypical investigators. Her murderous characters are mostly desperate, broken figures, which she drew with sympathy. This took her to extremes in Murder on the Orient Express and represents an essential contrast.

Contrary to what is often claimed, in her detective novels Christie did not break all known conventions in the history of crime fiction, but mainly with some of the so-called limitation rules . Christie varied the social position of the perpetrator, but occasionally broke through the expectations of the readership resulting from knowledge of the genre in order to surprise them. In Hercule Poirot's Christmas , the perpetrator is a supposedly unsuspecting police superintendent. He comes from the group of investigators who should be excluded from suspicion according to the limitation rules . Christie made it a habit to break through the limitation in several areas and thus created uncertainty among readers who had previously trusted the conventions of the genre.

Especially The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from the Year 1926 is considered to be an extremely successful work, but which caused an extensive controversy including as many fans Christie. Because at the end of the novel - contrary to previous conventions - the first-person narrator of the novel turns out to be the murderer. Which before and also initially in this novel had something like a trust bonus from the readership.

The German writer - especially in the field of crime literature - Zoë Beck writes about Christie's “much vaunted rule violations” and also about the functionalization of the narrator, in the plot of one of her novels, as a murderer: “(...) nice variations, but no expansion of the Genres ".

Veronika Schuchter from the Institute for German Studies at the University of Innsbruck writes: “Nobody has shaped the genre more strongly (...). She has perfected the claustrophobic chamber play as an image of human abysses. Exotic locations only served as a backdrop. Nothing is more terrifying than the closed space. It is small crimes that grow out of private tragedies, the ordinary makes the murderer, not the extraordinary that drives the serial killers rampant in crime novels today. (...) "

reception

Critics often accuse Christie of anti-Semitism . Such tendencies were particularly evident in her early work. The murder victim Carlotta Adams was portrayed as a greedy Jew in Thirteen at Table (1933) . The use of stereotypes such as bearded, dark and angry foreigners or " gypsies " is also criticized. In the course of the stories, they usually did not turn out to be perpetrators, but their very existence should make them suspicious and lure them on the wrong track.

Memorial to Agatha Christie in London's West End

In general, Christie's work also reflects the anti-Semitic and racist era. Her novel Ten Little Niggers was translated as Ten Little Niggers in 1934 . The original title of the novel was borrowed from a well-known children's song title . In the USA, the detective novel appeared in consideration of the Afro-American population in January 1940 under the title And Then There Were None , which has also been used in Great Britain and internationally since 1985 . After various designations in Germany , the title And then there was none for new editions was chosen for the new translation of the work by Sabine Deitmer in 2003 . The publisher, which distributes Christie's novels, obscured the facts by claiming that he had returned to the "original title", but in truth he only used the title, which was changed - exclusively for the American market.

How strongly the anti-Semitism that is often assumed to be true is a matter of dispute. Christie supported the death penalty . Especially in her late work, a growing conservatism is combined with a rejection of social progress and a negative image of youth.

Awards for literary life's work

• 1955 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America
• 1972 Grand Master of the Swedish Crime Academy (Svenska Deckarakademin)
• 2000 "Best crime writer of the century" (awarded at the Anthony Boucher Memorial World Mystery Convention)
• 2005 Archie Goodwin Award from the American Nero Wolfe Society

Works and their adaptations

→ Main articles : List of the works of Agatha Christie  and List of adaptations of the works of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie wrote 66 novels, numerous short stories, two autobiographies, several collections of poetry and 23 plays. These were adapted in five radio plays, 22 cinema films, 76 television films, 19 cartoons and some computer games. Four documentaries were shot about her.

Others

Christie's grave, St. Mary's church, Cholsey, Oxfordshire

• A rose was named after Agatha Christie (Ramira Kormeita Agatha Christie Kordes (D) 1988). The salmon-colored climbing rose was bred by the well-known German rose breeders W. Kordes' sons .
• In 2000, Agatha Christie was posthumously awarded the US Anthony Award for best crime and mystery writer of the century as part of the Millennium Celebration and prevailed over the nominated Raymond Chandler , Dashiell Hammett , Dorothy L. Sayers and Rex Stout . Christie's Hercule Poirot series triumphed as the best series in front of the nominated Ed McBain (87th Police Station), Marcia Muller (Sharon McCone series), Dorothy L. Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey series) and Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe series).
• The best-selling crime novel in the world is And then there was none .
• In March 2011, the British Museum bought for a million euros a collection of ivory handicrafts that Christie's husband had recovered during an archaeological dig in ancient Nimrud in what is now Iraq. Christie had cleaned the exhibits by hand with the help of her face cream and so, according to experts, contributed significantly to saving them. The purchase is considered to be the most expensive in the history of the museum, and the collection has been permanently accessible to the public since March 2011.
• The episode The Unicorn and the Wasp (Engl. The Unicorn and the Wasp ) ( Season 4, Episode 7 of the new episodes ) of the British sci-fi series Doctor Who is about Agatha Christie and covered include her disappearance and her memory loss. She was portrayed by Fenella Woolgar.
• In the episode Shots at Javier (season 2, episode 9) of the series Grand Hotel (TV series) , Agatha Christie appears as a guest under her maiden name and receives initial ideas for a story in the presence of a conversation about the late hotel owner.

further reading

• Gerd Egloff: detective novel and English bourgeoisie: construction scheme and image of society in Agatha Christie. (Literature in Society, Volume 23). Bertelsmann Universitätsverlag, Düsseldorf 1974, ISBN 3-571-05045-2 .
• Janet Morgan: Agatha Christie. The life of a writer - as exciting as one of her novels. ( Agatha Christie. A Biography ). Heyne, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-453-02619-5 .
• Anne Hart: Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. His life and his adventures. Scherz, Bern 1991. (Paperback: 1994, ISBN 3-502-51472-0 )
• Anne Hart: Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. Your life and your adventures. Scherz, Bern 1991. (Paperback: 1994, ISBN 3-502-51447-X )
• Monika Gripenberg: Agatha Christie. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1994, ISBN 3-499-50493-6 .
• II Revzin: On the semiotic analysis of the detective novel using the example of Agatha Christie's novels. In: Jochen Vogt (Ed.): The crime novel. Poetics - Theory - History. (UTB 8147). Fink, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-8252-8147-7 .
• Laura Thompson: Agatha Christie: The Fascinating Life of the Great Detective Writer. Scherz, Bern 2010, ISBN 978-3-502-15156-2 .
• Charlotte Trümpler (Ed.): Agatha Christie and the Orient - Criminology and Archeology . Exhibition catalog Ruhrlandmuseum Essen. Scherz, Bern 1999, ISBN 3-502-15750-2 .
• Dawn B. Sova: The Great Agatha Christie Book. Her life and her novels from A to Z. Scherz, Bern 2006, ISBN 3-502-15051-6 .
• Elke Schmitter: Agatha Christie: Murder and comfort. In: passions. 99 women authors of world literature. Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-570-01048-8 , pp. 114-120.
• Andrew Norman: Agatha Christie: the finished portrait. Tempus, Stroud 2006, ISBN 0-7524-3990-1 .
• Judith Kretzschmar, Sebastian Stoppe, Susanne Vollberg (ed.): Hercule Poirot meets Miss Marple. Agatha Christie intermedial . Büchner, Darmstadt 2016, ISBN 978-3-941310-48-3 .
• Dame Agatha Christie in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
• Barbara Sichtermann : Agatha Christie. Biography. Osburg Verlag, Hamburg 2020, ISBN 978-3-95510-215-9 .

documentary

• André Schäfer, Anna Steuber: Agatha Christie - The Queen of Crime. 2017, 52 min. ( Video available online on arte.tv until October 22, 2018).

Web links

Commons : Agatha Christie  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Agatha Christie in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Agatha Christie  in the German Digital Library
• Agatha Christie in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• The Secret of Agatha Christie in the Internet Movie Database (English) Feature film about the mysterious disappearance of Agatha Christie
• Atlantik Verlag website on the occasion of Agatha Christie's 125th birthday
• Agatha Christie. In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with references and citations).
• Podcast Hoaxilla : Episode 191 Mysterious Agatha Christie
• Christiane Kopka: September 15, 1890 - birthday of Agatha Christie WDR ZeitZeichen (podcast).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See for example Alison Flood: And then there was one: the campaign to find the world's favorite Agatha Christie book . In: The Guardian, April 27, 2015, online .
2. ↑ Agatha Christie: An Autobiography. HarperCollins Publishers, 2011, ISBN 978-0-00-731466-9 .
3. ↑ ^{a b} Danny Kringiel: Mystery of crime writer: How Agatha Christie disappeared without a trace. In: Spiegel Online . January 12, 2016, accessed January 13, 2017 . 
4. ↑ agathachristie.com: About Christie
5. ↑ See the Index Translationum, online , accessed July 24, 2017.
6. ↑ The "Queen of Crime". ( Memento from July 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) on: arte.tv
7. ^ ^{A b c} John Curran: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks - 50 Years of Mysteries in the Making. HarperCollins Publishers, 2010, ISBN 978-0-00-731057-9 .
8. ^ John Curran: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks. Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making. HarperCollins, London 2009, ISBN 978-0-06-198836-3 .
9. ↑ ^{a b c d} Zoë Beck : 125 years of Agatha Christie. Escapism in times of mass killing . In: Culturmag , October 5, 2015.
10. ↑ https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/65-years-of-the-mousetrap
11. ^ Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning, Springer-Verlag 2006, chapter Agatha Christie by Sascha Feuchert.
12. ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery - The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists , Thomas Dunne Books, New York 2011, p. 9.
13. ↑ Sven Strasen, Peter Wenzel: The detective story in the 19th and early 20th centuries. , in: Arno Löffler, Eberhard Späth (Hrsg.): History of the English short story. Francke Verlag, Tübingen and Basel 2005, from p. 99. / Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns: "Agatha Christie: Modern and Modernist". In: Ronald G. Walker, June M. Frazer (Eds.): The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory. Western Illinois University Press, Macomb 1990, from p. 122.
14. ↑ https://www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/article166023971/Agatha-Christie-beste-Plotterin-der-Weltliteratur.html
15. ↑ https://www1.wdr.de/radio/wdr5/sendung/neugier-genuegt/schecks-buecher-agatha-christie-104.html
16. ↑ https://austria-forum.org/af/Wissenssammlungen/Essays/Literatur/Agatha_Christie
17. ^ Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning, Springer-Verlag 2006, chapter Agatha Christie by Sascha Feuchert .
18. ↑ Ulrich Suerbaum: Crime. An analysis of the genus. , Stuttgart, Reclam-Verlag, 1984, from p. 22.
19. ^ Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning, Springer-Verlag 2006, chapter Agatha Christie by Sascha Feuchert .
20. ↑ Jane Arnold: Detecting Social History: Jews in the Works of Agatha Christie. on: jstor.org
21. ↑ Cristina Odone: In terms of literary racism, Agatha Christie is truly the Queen of Crime. ( Memento of March 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) at: blogs.telegraph.co.uk
22. ↑ http://home.insightbb.com/~jsmarcum/agatha40.htm
23. ↑ https://www.wienerzeitung.at/dossiers/shakespeare/421278-Der-verschwiegene-Antisemitismus.html?em_no_split=1
24. ↑ And then there was none (2003), DNB 966491203 .
25. ↑ https://www.wienerzeitung.at/dossiers/shakespeare/421278-Der-verschwiegene-Antisemitismus.html?em_no_split=1
26. ↑ https://austria-forum.org/af/Wissenssammlungen/Essays/Literatur/Agatha_Christie
27. ↑ Agatha Christie 'rose Description.
28. ^ British Museum buys Assyrian treasures cleaned by Agatha Christie. In: The Guardian.