Agatha Mary Clarissa, Lady Mallowan, (1890 - 197 6), commonly known as Agatha Christie, was an English crime writer of novels, short stories and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but is best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Her works, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative in the development of the genre. Christie has been called — by the Guinness Book of World Records, among others — the best-selling writer of books of all time and the best-selling writer of any kind, along with William Shakespeare. Agatha Christie was born as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, Devon, to an American father and an English mother. She never claimed United States citizenship. Her father was Frederick Miller, a rich American stockbroker, and her mother was Clarissa Margaret Boehmer, the daughter of a British army captain. Christie had a sister, Margaret Miller, called Madge, eleven years her senior, and a brother, Louis Miller, called Monty, ten years older than Christie. Her father died when she was eleven years old. Her mother taught her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16, she went to Mrs Dryden's finishing school in Paris to study singing and piano. Her first marriage, an unhappy one, was in 1914 to Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter; Rosalind Hicks. They divorced in 1928, two years after Agatha discovered her husband was having an affair. It was during this marriage that she published her first novel in 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. During World War I she worked at a hospital and then a pharmacy, a job that influenced her work; many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison. On 8 December 1926, while living in Sunningdale in Berkshire, she disappeared for ten days, causing great interest in the press. Her car was found in a chalk pit in Newland's Corner, Surrey. She was eventually found at the Harrogate Hydro hotel under the name of the woman with whom her husband had recently admitted to having an affair. She had suffered a nervous breakdown and a state caused by the death of her mother and her husband's infidelity. She could not recount any information as to her disappearance due to amnesia. Opinions are still divided as to whether this was a publicity stunt. Public sentiment at the time was negative, with many feeling that an stunt had cost the taxpayers a substantial amount of money. In 1930, Christie married the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan was 14 years younger than Christie, and a Roman Catholic wile she was of the Anglican faith. Their marriage was happy in the early years, and endured despite Mallowan's many affairs in later 1ife notably with Barbara Parker, whom he married in 1977, the year after Christie's death. Christie's travels with Mallowan contributed backgrounds of her several of her novels set in the Middle East. Other novels (such as And Then There Were None) were set in and around Torquay, Devon, where she was born. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976, at age 85, from natural causes, at Winterbrook House in the north of Cholsey parish, adjoining Wallingford in Oxfordshire. She is buried in the nearby St. Mary's Churchyard in Cholsey. Agatha Christie's first novel the Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920 and introduced the character detective Hercule Poirot, who appeared in 33 of Christie's novels and 54 short stories. Her other well known character, Miss Marple, was introduced in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and was based on Christie's grandmother. During World War II, Christie wrote two novels intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, respectively. They were Curtain and Sleeping Murder. Both books sealed in a bank vault for over thirty years, and were released for publication by Christie only at the end of her life, when she realized that she could not write any more novels. Like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Christie was to become increasingly tired of her detective Poirot. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, Christie confided to her diary that she was finding Poirot "insufferable", and by the 1960s she felt that he was an "an ego-centric creep". However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resist the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and what the public liked was Poirot. In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. I read only one book of Agatha Christie, that was And there were none or the original title is “Ten little niggers”. I fell in love with this book because of it breathtaking plot and mystery. She was a great psychologist. Ten little niggers was one of the most carefully planned of Christie's mysteries; she herself considered the plot "near-impossible". It was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated her. She wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and she was pleased with what she had made of it as she said in her Autobiography. This is the story about the ten people, each with something to hide and something to fear who were invited to a lonely mansion on Nigger Island by a host who, surprisingly, fails to appear. On the island they are cut off from everything but each other and the inescapable shadows of their own past lives. One by one, the guests share the darkest secrets of their wicked pasts. And one by one, they start to die. This book was even unusual for the writer herself. There were none detective in it. The location in which the action takes place is narrowed. The heroes themselves had to become a detectives even to save their life and evade the death. To make the plot deeper she used lots of literary terms in it. She used the setting as a mirror – the weather in the book reflect the psychological state of characters. The strengthening of the storm for example reflects the intensification of tension between heroes and makes special atmosphere of the story. But till they don’t know that the deaths cased by murder the sound of growing storm seemed to them being plesant: ‘the wind had freshened, small white crests were appearing on the sea. ”. There are also some flashbacks in the book. The author used such way of referring the previous events to help the reader to understand better the characters of heroes and their attitude towards what they have done. Author organized the plot in a short period of time to make the novel more tensitive. Also Agatha Christie used the technique of showing. She steps aside and allows the character to reveal themselves through they actions and words. For example Vera “you must keep cool! This isn’t like you. You’re always had excellent nerves!”.