J o h n e s c o t t agatha Christie

Miss Jane Marple, played by the actress Margaret Rutherford
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CHAPTER 8
Dame Agatha
F
or the next twenty-five years, Agatha went with 
M ax on all his archaeological journeys. She loved 
travelling, and those were the happiest years of her life. 
It was a good time for writing, too.
‘It’s nice and quiet,’ Agatha always said. ‘There’s no 
telephone!’
And visiting these interesting places gave her ideas 
for some of her best books - Death on the N ile, 
Appointment with Death, Murder in M esopotam ia, They 
Came to Baghdad. She was now one of the most popular 
detective-story writers in the world.
One of the many people who enjoyed her books 
was Queen Mary, the mother of the King of England. 
One day, in 1946, Agatha had a letter from the British 
Broadcasting Corporation in London.
‘They want me to write a play for Queen M ary ’s 80th 
birthday!’ she told M ax. ‘A play for the radio.’
‘Then you must do it,’ said M ax.
Agatha’s play for radio was called Three Blind Mice. 
Later, she wrote the play again, for a London theatre. 
This time it was much longer, and she gave it a new 
name: The M ousetrap.
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Agatha Christie, Woman o f Mystery
It is a very famous play. It opened in 1952, and has 
been in one or other of the London theatres ever since 
then. In 1997, 45 years later, people were still going to 
see the play.
Why? It’s a very good murder mystery, of course, but 
there is another story about The M ousetrap, too. Every 
night, at the end of the play, one of the actors talks to 
the people in the theatre, and says, ‘Please don’t tell your
Programme for The Mousetrap
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Dame Agatha
friends who did the murder in this play. They must come 
to the theatre and see the play themselves!’
And everybody keeps the secret of the murderer’s 
name - and so more and more people go to see the play.
I
n 1971, Queen Elizabeth made Agatha a Dame of the 
British Empire — a very high honour for a woman in Britain. 
But why was Agatha Christie so famous? Perhaps it 
is because she was a wonderful story-teller. She planned 
her murder mysteries very carefully, putting a clue here, 
a clue there. And they are clever clues, so it is not easy to 
guess the name of the murderer. Who did it? We want to 
know, and by the end of the book, everything falls tidily 
into place - and we have the answer. And of course the 
stories are not really about murder and death - they are 
puzzles, with comfortable endings, because it is pleasing 
to read that the detective always catches the criminal. 
For an hour or two, we can escape from real life, which 
is often neither tidy nor comfortable.
Agatha Christie died on the 12th of January, 1976. 
During her life, she wrote sixty-seven detective novels, 
ten books of short stories, thirteen plays, six novels 
that were not about crime (using the name ‘Mary 
Westmacott’), and two books about her life. Many films 
were made from her books; the most famous one is 
Murder on the Orient Express, made in 1974.
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Agatha Christie, Woman o f Mystery
Today, millions of her books, in more than forty 
different languages, are still sold in every country of the 
world, from China to Nicaragua. Agatha Christie was, 
perhaps, the greatest detective-story writer of all time -
a woman of mystery, both in books and in life.