Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the queen of crime writing. She is one of the best known mystery writers in the world.
She is a writer of the (1) Golden Age of British Detective Stories. There are aspects of her own life which influenced her work.Like her lonely childhood and vivid imagination, the society in which she lived and also the other detective books, mainly those by (2) Arthur Conan Doyle and Gaston Le Roux. Moreover the places she visited as a child and also as an adult form the setting of many of her works. During World War I, she worked as a nurse. This experience helped her in learning about prescriptions and poisons, which figures strongly in her books.
Her books are very popular with her audience because of her clever inclusion of the element of mystery.She created her mysteries by applying many of her own techniques of character development, plot development, her language and the Agatha Christie Code. A source from BBC claims that scientists have analyzed her works and they believe that the reason behind her enduring popularity is her use of common phrases which induce pleasure and satisfaction in the minds of the readers.She created five detectives in all. The two most famous among them are Hercule Poirot , a retired Belgium detective and Miss Marple, a charming and old English lady. They are two different characters and personalities but both have in common a mix of tenacity, intuition and intelligence.
Agatha Christie was a shy child and her mother did not send her to school. She had an extremely creative and vivid imagination. Therefore while growing up she created a congregation of imaginative friends and creature to keep herself amused.Her games were based on make-belief, and from an early childhood she always chooses her own companions. With her vivid imagination she created successfully different fictional characters including the detectives Hercule Poirot Miss Jane Marple and also the complex plots of her crime stories.Agatha Christie was born in the era of Victorian England, where it was usual to have servants.
Many of her books are set in country houses, where servants play a part in her plots. They sometimes reveal important information related to the crime. Her detectives often go to them for information. Class System of the golden period is very much visible in Agatha Christie’s novels.
Her characters with few exceptions are always situated in the working class or in the middle class. She highlights the fact that the servants belong to the lower class by making them speak bad English. They often make mistakes like putting a ‘don’t’ in place of ‘doesn’t’. Her books also reflect contemporary events that happened at the time she wrote her books. Following the invasion of Belgium by Germany, there was an influx of Belgium refugees in the place where she lived.
Her first detective Poirot is a reflection of such an event. Another notable event is the German measles epidemic which occurred at the time of writing The Mirror Cracked. It played an important part in the book’s plot. The world she lives in as a child is very different from the world she lives at the end of her life. Yet the changes are not so significant in her novels.
She also tends to set her plots in such a way that one cannot tell in which part of the century it exactly happened.There are few signs of modern technology. In her detective novels, her main character practically never speaks of politics. In the book ‘Nemesis’, Miss Marple criticizes the newspaper “The Times”. She says that it is not being practical in finding information as it used to be due to excessive . Although few changes appear in her books, they show that society is changing but not for the best on the contrary.
(3)During First World War, she worked as a nurse in the local hospital. After two years she went back to work in the hospital dispensary, where she spend next two years working. She studied for the Apothecaries Hall Examination and in the process learnt all about drugs, poisons and their
