THE NOVELIST GASTON LEROUX AND HER OLDER SISTER, MADGEĬhristie and her sister Madge had a discussion about various detective novels they liked-“We were connoisseurs of the detective story,” she wrote in her autobiography-and the conversation turned to Leroux’s 1908 closed-door whodunit The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which is widely considered one of the best in the genre and which both of the sisters loved. As both Poirot and Miss Marple are aware, it constitutes the prime motive for crime.” 4. “Agatha had a fear of poverty, deriving from her memory of the sudden downward swoop of the Miller fortunes,” Laura Thompson wrote in her 2007 biography Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. Though still comparatively well off, her youth was marked by constant worry about the family’s financial situation, especially when her father died when she was 11. When Christie was a young child, some family trusts fell through and her father, Frederick Miller, managed to lose or squander much of his fortune.
The genteel spinster sleuth appeared in 12 of Christie's novels, and the author described her as "the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my step-grandmother's Ealing cronies-old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl." She also attributed Miss Marple's ability to root out the guilty to her Grannie's general suspicion of others: "There was no unkindness in Miss Marple, she just did not trust people." 3. HER STEP-GRANDMOTHERĬhristie's step-grandmother Margaret West Miller, whom she called " Auntie-Grannie," was the model for Miss Jane Marple, one of her most well-liked characters. From "The Kittens" (with names like Clover and Blackie) to "The Girls"-other schoolchildren she pretended were her classmates (including a shy girl named Annie Gray and a frenemy named Isabella Sullivan)-Christie's wide assortment of imagined characters from childhood helped her shape the ones in her novels.
HER IMAGINARY FRIENDSĬhristie wasn't sent to boarding school like her two older siblings were, so she filled her days by inventing imaginary friends to keep her company. In honor of her 125th birthday today, below are 15 of the countless influences the late Queen of Crime culled for her popular narratives. Dame Agatha Christie is not only the most widely read novelist in the world-her 66 novels and 14 short story collections have sold more than 2 billion copies-but she's credited with creating the modern murder mystery.
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