There can be no doubting the worldwide appeal of Dame Agatha Christie’s writing.
The statistics speak for themselves. The Guinness Book of World Records names her as the World’s Best-Selling Author. Her crime novels have sold between an estimated two to four billion copies. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, her books have been translated into more than 100 languages.
Her play The Mousetrap has become the longest running theatre show, of any kind, in the world. There has been at least one film adaptation of her works every decade since the 1920s and Chorion, the entertainments and leisure company that now controls Christie’s copyrights, estimates that there have been about 190 film and TV adaptations of Christie’s work worldwide!
Not bad for a woman who only started writing because of a dare from her sister! Both sisters were fans of detective fiction, especially Arthur Conan Doyle and Anna Katharine Green. Madge, Agatha’s older sister, who was a bit of an aspiring writer herself, told her sibling that detective stories were incredibly hard to write. A bet followed that Agatha couldn’t write a whodunit that Madge couldn’t solve. The result was The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the first of her thirty-three novels that the Belgian detective, Poirot, would appear in.
A prodigious writer, throughout much of her life, she produced two novels a year, self-deprecatingly describing herself to the New York Daily News as “a perfect sausage machine”. But what of that very first novel? Does The Mysterious Affair at Styles still entertain one hundred years later?