By the end of the 1930s, Christie wrote in her diary that she was finding Poirot "insufferable", and by the 1960s she felt he was "an egocentric creep". Shortly after her eleventh birthday however, Agatha’s world was turned upside down by the sudden death of her father. Family friend and author Eden Philpotts offered shrewd and constructive advice: “The artist is only the glass through which we see nature, and the clearer and more absolutely pure that glass, so much the more perfect picture we can see through it. One of Christie's plays, The Mousetrap, opened in West End theatre in 1952, and ran continuously until 16 March 2020, when the stage performances had to be temporarily discontinued during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was the youngest of three children born to Frederick Alvah Miller, "a gentleman of substance", [3] and his wife Clarissa Margaret "Clara" Miller, née Boehmer.

Film and television productions were also beginning to make their mark, including the 1945 classic telling of And Then There Were None from René Clair. She had always wanted to travel on the Orient Express and her autobiography lists in exquisite detail the sights and sounds of the journey to Syria. One night in early December, overwhelmed and with close friend and secretary Carlo away for the night, Agatha left Rosalind and the house to the care of the maids without saying where she was going. After keeping the submission for several months, John Lane at The Bodley Head offered to accept it, provided that Christie change how the solution was revealed. In a recording discovered and released in 2008, Christie revealed the reason for this: "Hercule Poirot, a complete egoist, would not like being taught his business or having suggestions made to him by an elderly spinster lady.After he was sent to the Western Front in the First World War, she worked with the Voluntary Aid Detachment and in the chemist dispensary, giving her a working background knowledge of medicines and poisons.

Christie mocked this insight in her foreword to Cards on the Table: "Spot the person least likely to have committed the crime and in nine times out of ten your task is finished.Her sister had been sent to a boarding school, but their mother insisted that Christie receive her education at home. The young debutante was introduced to many eligible men (she went to around fifty dances) but later wrote that she was more drawn to “bronzed middle-aged colonels”, most of whom were already married. While in Cape Town the Christies learned to surf, and Agatha became the first British woman to do so standing up!

I thought it would go along more like an Enola Holmes story but it reminded me more of a comic strip you would read in the papers! Both books were sealed in a bank vault, and she made over the copyrights by deed of gift to her daughter and her husband to provide each with a kind of insurance policy. Subsequent productions have included The Witness for the Prosecution [104] but plans to televise Ordeal by Innocence at Christmas 2017 were delayed because of controversy surrounding one of the cast members. Spider's Web, an original work written for actress Margaret Lockwood at her request, premiered in the West End in 1954 and was also a hit. While they visited some ancient Egyptian monuments such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, she did not exhibit the great interest in archaeology and Egyptology that developed in her later years.The wooden counter in the foyer of St Martin's Theatre showing 22,461 performances of The Mousetrap (pictured in November 2006). Meanwhile, Christie's social activities expanded, with country house parties, riding, hunting, dances, and roller skating.