5 things you didn’t know about Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie is without doubt the Queen of Crime. Recently selected as the CWA’s Best Ever Author, she also penned their Best Ever Novel category winner – Christie is the creator of 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections.

Our love for the great Christie knows no bounds and we wanted to find out more about one of our favourite authors. We thought we would unearth some interesting facts you might not know about Poirot’s creator to dazzle your friends with at dinner parties!

Five Agatha Christie Facts

 
1. Christie didn’t just pen crime. She wrote six romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, which she kept hidden successfully for twenty years. The name was derived from her middle name and Westmacott from distant relatives.

2. In a plot twist worthy of her own novels, Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926. It was a turbulent time for the young writer, her mother had just died and her husband was having an affair. So she simply got into her car and disappeared. The car was found abandoned and Police feared the worst – dredging local lakes and tapping the phone of her husband. Christie surfaced 11 days later at The Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate and to this day never said where she’d been. She had however checked into the hotel using her husbands mistress’s last name!

3. Hercule Poirot, Christie’s most famous detective, is the only fictional character to have had an obituary printed in the New York Times!

4. Agatha Christie loved to surf and was one of the first Britains to try the sport out when she visited Hawaii in 1922.

5. Tea was one of Christie’s favourite meals as it came with lashings of cream! The writer was particularly partial to clotted cream and fresh figs, her butler at Greenway, Christie’s country estate, never let her chose the desserts served as she’d invariably chose cream.

 
Agatha Christie is a name synonymous with masterful plotting and now we know more about the woman behind the books we can’t help but love her even more!