Tony Dass
Prof Shaw
Egl 2219
May 4th, 2016
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on September 15, 1890 in the town of Torquay in Devon, England, the youngest of three brothers from a wealthy family. Daughter of an American father and granddaughter of a British Army Captain, she received her early education at home at the hands of their parents and the 16 years old, she studied at a school in Paris, where she was involved in singing, dancing and playing the piano. At a young age she was an avid reader of Arthur Conan Doyle, being fanatical about the character; Sherlock Holmes. She also liked reading the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Katherine Green and GK Chesterton. During World War II she took up nursing and worked as a nurse in a hospital and then a Red Cross clinic, knowing different types of poisons to develop drugs, information which she then used in her novels. During World War II she served in a pharmacy at University College London, where she gained more knowledge about poisons.
In 1914 she married Colonel Archibald Christie, aviator Royal Flying Corps and with whom she had a daughter, and in 1920 published her first novel under thrillers entitled “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”, using the pseudonym Agatha Christie. The work was published by the publishing house Bodley Head Press and was where first appeared the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who became popular quickly. In 1926, after a turbulent marriage, she divorced Archibald and years later sometime in 1930 she remarried an archeologist; Max Mallowan (who was 14 years younger than her). She accompanied him on various exotic locations; these trips provided her with suitable scenes which she added to many of her works. In 1928 she introduced to another of her most famous characters, Miss Marple, in her story club on which was hosted on Tuesday nights. Thanks to her undeniable talent, she was named in 1961 member of the Royal Society of Literature and got an Honorary Degree in Literature from the University of Exeter. In 1971, her health began to deteriorate considerably, but yet she continued to work. In January 1976 she suffered a severe flu, which sadly took her life , January 12, 1976 at age 85, at her residence Winterbrook House Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
During her 56 years of literary career, Christie published almost eighty novels and plays, mainly of arguments which involved one of her main characters, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. It is one of the most representative exponents of the detective genre, why was attributed her the nickname "Queen of Crime", who then sold two billion copies of her works and was translated into 103 languages. Successes granted to enter the Guinness Book of World Records as "one of the best – selling authors", being surpassed only by the Bible and the works of English playwright William Shakespeare.
Most of her novels and stories have been made into a film, some on more than one occasion, as Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. Poirot and Miss Marple, have also appeared in numerous films, radio programs and theatrical performances and from 1982 several cycles were filmed for TV. Her greatest theatrical success was the play The Mousetrap (published in 1952), which in 1982 was thirty years of being represented at the St. Martins Theatre, West End, reaching 12,483 stagings. By then, the work had been seen (in London alone) for over five million people; also it was presented in a remarkable number of British cities and in 41 countries.
Her writing style was so popular that it took as a basis to develop countless games, where you propose to discover the culprit of a crime through clues involving several suspects. They serve as puzzles that allow the end to reveal the responsible for the fact. After the death of her daughter, in 2004, a notebook where the author pointed her ideas for novels and schedules of them, these notes were published years later by John Curran, in a book entitled "The secret notebooks of Agatha Christie". Among his revelations she admits that at first she thought of starring Miss. Marple for the novel "Death on the Nile", but the work finally starred Poirot.
Besides being detective writer, Agatha Christie wrote six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott , some plays and a book of poems. It was with these stories that began as a writer, although very little is known about them because when publishing their novels about these detectives were dulled. For 15 years he published under this pseudonym without anyone knowing it was her. Novels like “The Giant Bread” and “Unfinished Portrait” were some of her works. In her biography he admits that under that pseudonym wrote the book that managed to satisfy completely, was based on the portrait of a woman and was titled "Away from you this spring" (1944).
It has an incredible storytelling genius to create different crimes in each work, with different characters and conflicts. And emphasizes "playing fair with the reader" to make sure their stories provide all the information to solve the puzzle, leaving no stone unturned. The frame structure is based on the puzzle by discovering and its development is based on psychological observation. One of the main features of detective prose Christie is that their stories are developed in what is called the “Whodunit”, where the plot unfolds in a complex puzzle whose main characteristic is to provide interest in the reader through clues and hypotheses, to try himself deduce the identity of the perpetrator, revealing the solution in the last pages of the book. Usually the character who performs research in the novel is usually an amateur or professional, often eccentric and erudite detective. The story grabs you from the first moment and literary style is fast, simple, clean and affordable. This makes it accessible to any reader and contributes to people of very different intellectual and social status are able to enjoy good times accompanied by some of her novels. In some of her stories, the mystery plot is displaced by the will to talk about the problems of her time, as with Passenger to Frankfurt (1970).
The personality of the characters is described with great humanity. Despite being designed in an environment of 1930, it is easy to compare current real characters, as their behaviors and attitudes are credible. Full of feelings and common phobias. A team of British neurologists College London, conducted studies of the works of the author concluding that Christie used certain phrases and prose style that manage to act in the brain, creating high levels of serotonin and endorphins that induce pleasure and satisfaction . Kapferer, one of the leaders of the research, said “Christie does not give her readers too much detail, her narrative lays down what can be described as a general mist of ideas in which the reader is shrouded until the plot has unfolded. It creates what we call ‘minimum cognitive distraction’.”. The "Agatha Project", as the investigation was called, also discovered that the author merely the most of their English vocabulary. "It means that readers aren't distracted and so they concentrate more on the clues and the plots," said Pernilla Danielsson, University of Birmingham. To create a Miss Marple was based on personalities of different women; she used people like her grandmother, friends of hers and aunts.
As Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, an opportunity she was tired of her character Poirot. In the 1930s, she confided in her diary, which was "insufferable" to her creation and by the 1960s, felt it was an "egocentric influence." However, she did not abandon her, as it was considered "an artist whose job was to produce what the public liked". Poirot is the only fictional character who had an obituary in the newspaper The New York Times, after her last appearance in the novel “Backdrop”, 1975. She never joined the two characters Poirot and Marple in the same novel.