How to get away with murder: A look at the magic of Agatha Christie

* She learned to read at age four, and devoured the works of Louisa May Alcott, Edith Nesbit and Lewis Carroll, among others. She had an early love of dogs too. Her first dog was a Yorkshire Terrier puppy she received as a fifth birthday present.

* Her first published work was a poem about the trams newly introduced to the London suburb of Ealing. She wrote it in 1901, at the age of 11, during a visit to her grandmothers, both of whom lived in that city. It was published in a local magazine.

* Agatha briefly attended a girls’ school in Torquay, but was then moved to Paris, where she studied music too, chiefly playing the piano and singing. Her initial dream was to be a musician, but crippling stage-fright made this impossible.

* In 1908, aged 18, she wrote her first short story, The House of Beauty. She called it “the first thing I wrote that showed any kind of promise”. She then visited Cairo with her mother for a three-month debutante season, returned and wrote her first novel, a romance titled Snow Upon the Desert, under the pen name Monosyllaba. It was rejected by six publishers, but author and family friend Eden Phillpotts encouraged her to keep writing.

* Soon after her return from Egypt, she agreed to marry her friend Reginald Lucy. Two years into their two-year engagement, at a party in 1912, she met a dashing young aviator named Archibald Christie. She ended her engagement with Lucy and married Christie two years later, on Christmas Eve, 1914.

* World War 1 had broken out by now. He left to serve in the war. She served as a nurse with the Red Cross in Torquay, attending to wounded soldiers returning from the front lines. By 1917, she had trained in pharmacy, passed the Apothecaries Hall exam, and become a certified apothecary’s assistant (or dispenser).

* It was at her elder sister Margaret’s urging that Agatha Christie finally wrote her first murder mystery, the first Hercule Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She sent it to several publishers. The seventh to receive it, John Lane of the publishing house Bodley Head, accepted it with the proviso that she change the setting of the denouement. Christie had written the final reveal as a courtroom scene. Lane asked her to set it in the country house where the murder occurred, with all suspects assembled. Christie would follow this formula in most of the 66 novels she would write over the next 50 years.

* The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) was released to generally positive reviews. The one that pleased her most appeared in the trade magazine The Pharmaceutical Journal and Pharmacist. “Such cases as we pharmacists find within the covers of a novel are, as a rule, apt to offend our professional instincts,” it read, but “this novel has the rare merit of being correctly written–so well done, in fact, that we are tempted to believe either that the author had a pharmaceutical training.”

* By this time, Christie was a mother. Her husband had returned from the war and their first, and her only, child Rosalind, was born in 1919.

* Her second novel came three years later. The Secret Adversary (1922) was a light-hearted affair involving spies, a shadowy master criminal, espionage, and a couple of engaging heroes: Tommy and Tuppence, who would return in later books.

* During travels with her husband at this time, she discovered she enjoyed surfing, and is considered a pioneering woman surfer. “Nothing like it. Nothing like that rushing through the water at what seems to you a speed of about two hundred miles an hour… It is one of the most perfect physical pleasures that I have known,” she wrote in her autobiography (published posthumously in 1977).

* 1926 saw the publication of one of her most famous, and controversial, novels: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It had an unreliable narrator and a shocking twist (he did it!) that would shake her readers. Among the many successful adaptations: a radio play by Orson Welles in 1939.

* Despite all her success, 1926 marked the beginning of a dark period for Christie. In April, her beloved mother died, and she was faced with clearing out the family home alone, while struggling to meet her writing commitments. Separated by distance and strained by grief, Archibald and Agatha’s relationship broke down. He fell in love with fellow golfer and family friend, Nancy Neele, whom he would later marry.

* By December, Christie was in crisis. She left her daughter and the house to the care of the staff and disappeared. Her car was found abandoned miles away, the next morning. A nationwide search ensued. She was finally found 11 days later, at a hotel in the city of Harrogate, over 300 km away. She had registered under the name Theresa Neele.

* She later claimed to have no memory of the 11 days. Doctors at the time put it down to a fugue state brought on by emotional trauma, grief and exhaustion, though the episode has remained a subject of debate and fascination. The next two years saw Christie struggle with grief, writing lacklustre novels cobbled together from short stories, such as The Big Four (1927) and The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928).

* In 1928, she cancelled a journey to the West Indies, exchanging it for a ride on the Orient Express.

* Her next novel, The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), was a return to form, heavily influenced by a contemporary whose work she loved: PG Wodehouse. (Decades later, when she was in her 70s and he in his 80s, she would dedicate her 1967 novel Hallowe’en Party to him.)

* In 1930 came her first Miss Marple book: The Murder at the Vicarage. The female detective had already made an appearance in 1927’s The Tuesday Night Club, and is believed to have been based on Caroline Hubbard from …Roger Ackroyd.

* That same year, she released Giant’s Bread, her first novel under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. It was about the life and loves of a tortured musical genius.

* This was also the year she met her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. At 39, she had found love again. She and Mallowan, 14 years her junior, married a few months after they met, on September 11, 1930.

* The ’30s saw Christie at her most productive. She wrote Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), Death on the Nile (1937; inspired by a trip with Max and Rosalind) and Appointment with Death (1938), as well as a range of short stories, including several of the Parker Pyne tales, featuring a civil servant turned happiness consultant, all heavily influenced by her travels through the Middle East with her husband.

* In 1939, on the eve of the war, she published what would be her bestselling work, and remains the bestselling crime novel in the world, And Then There Were None (about 10 strangers being picked off one by one on a distant island). Its bleakness reflected the mood of the British public at the time.

* Her next novel, N or M? (1941), was her explicit contribution to the war effort, with Tommy and Tuppence on the trail of German spies in England. As a result of one of her characters being named Major Bletchley, MI5 briefly investigated Christie, concerned that she may have an informant within the codebreaking centre Bletchley Park.

* In 1944, Greenway, her holiday home in Devon, was requisitioned by the US Coast Guard, which added a series of lavatories. She fought to have them removed.

* In 1946, she published her first non-fiction work, Come, Tell Me How You Live, an autobiographical account of her travels before World War 2.

* In 1947, the BBC approached her to write a radio play for the 80th birthday of Queen Mary, who was a huge Christie fan. The result was Three Blind Mice, which she then expanded and fleshed out as The Mousetrap. Before its 1952 premiere (which starred Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim), she gave the rights of the play as a gift to her nine-year-old grandson, Mathew Prichard. It has since become the world’s longest-running play, still being staged at West End 73 years on.

* The volume of her output meant that Christie was taxed heavily, so she slowed down in the tax-heavy post war years. She also formed Agatha Christie Ltd in 1955, becoming an employee. Mathew Prichard’s son, James Prichard, now runs the company, which manages the rights to all her books.

* While Christie is often associated with the cosy country-house mystery, her books, especially the Miss Marple novels, clearly reflect the passage of time. Old homes are replaced by council estates, modernisation and even the Swinging London of the 1960s, examined in the late Poirot mystery, Third Girl (1966).

* In 1971, Christie joined several notable others in writing to Pope Paul VI, asking for a Papal Edict to preserve the traditional Latin mass alongside newer versions. Paul is said to have looked at the list of signatories and exclaimed “Ah, Agatha Christie”. He granted the indult (or decree). It has been called the Agatha Christie indult ever since.

* That year, she was also made a Dame of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, for her contributions to literature. But Christie remained intensely private, and uncomfortable with the idea of celebrity. She even fought publishers to keep her photograph off book jackets.

* Her final public appearance was in 1974, for the premiere of the film Murder on the Orient Express starring Albert Finney. Though she generally disliked adaptations of her work, she approved of this one, noting that Finney’s Poirot was the closest to her vision, though she playfully complained that his moustaches weren’t quite “splendid” enough.

* In 1975, Christie authorised the publication of Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. The book was a huge success. The New York Times carried a front-page obituary for the Belgian detective, the only fictional character to ever be honoured in this manner.

* Agatha Christie died peacefully, aged 85, at Winterbrook, her home in Oxfordshire. She is buried in the nearby churchyard of St Mary’s, Cholsey.

* Sleeping Murder, the final Miss Marple mystery was published nine months later, in October 1976.

* According to Guinness World Records, Christie remains the best-selling fiction writer of all time. Her novels have sold more than two billion copies worldwide, and been translated into over 100 languages.

* She made another interesting, if tangential, contribution to literature. After visiting Christie in 1934, publisher Allen Lane (nephew of the original John Lane of Bodley Head) was waiting for a train at Exeter St Davids station and found that there was nothing there worth reading. It struck him that paperback editions of classics and renowned titles might be cheap enough to stock at a railway stall, and Penguin Books was born.

(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and, occasionally, technology)