One of the interesting facts about Agatha Christie is that her mother is against her daughter learning to read. Christie's mother reportedly objected to her daughter learning to read until the age of 8 (Christie was self-taught) and insisted that the author be homeschooled before she went on to become a best-selling author. Agatha didn't receive formal education from Mrs. Christie until she was 15 years old when her parents sent her to a finishing school in Paris.

Christie claims that Clara thinks she shouldn't begin learning to read until she is eight years old. However, due to her natural interest, Clara began reading books at the age of four. Their mother demanded that Christie receive her education at home while her sister was sent to a boarding school. She was therefore taught to read, write, and do basic mathematics, which she liked, by her parents and older sister. She was also taught music, and she mastered the mandolin and piano.

Christie has always been a voracious reader. Reading children's books by Mrs. Molesworth and Edith Nesbit is one of her earliest memories. She began reading surreal poetry by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll as she grew older. She read Anthony Hope, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas while she was a teen. At the age of 10, she penned "The Cow Slip," her first poetry, in April 1901.

Christie's sister Madge issued a challenge to her siblings to tackle a novel-length project following adolescence spent reading and creating short stories. In response to the challenge, Christie created The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a suspenseful novel about a sick soldier who becomes involved in a poisoning event at a friend's compound.

In addition to reading early Sherlock Holmes tales by Arthur Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins, Christie has long been a devotee of detective fiction. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her debut detective book, was written by her in 1916. Hercule Poirot, a former Belgian police officer with a "lovely mustache" and "similar fruit" "head eggs," was depicted. After the German invasion of Belgium, Poirot fled to England.

Belgian refugees who settled in Torquay and the Belgian soldiers she assisted in treating as a volunteer nurse during World War I served as Christie's inspiration for the character. Hodder & Stoughton and Methuen turned down her initial manuscript. John Lane at The Bodley Head offered to accept the report after holding onto it for a while, but only if Christie altered how the solution was revealed. She did so and executed a contract, which she later thought was exploitation, committing her following five works to The Bodley Head. Before being published in 1920, the Hercule Poirot novel was rejected by six publishers

One of the interesting facts about Agatha Christie is that the character Hercule Poirot she wrote is real. Hercule Poirot was introduced in Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was published in 1920. Christie, a Belgian, took inspiration from a Belgian man for his book dapper hero early 1900s saw off the bus. With his strange facial hair and peculiar attitude, he was thought to have an off-putting appearance. Does he have a neat mustache and manly fashion? He served as the model for a character that appeared in more than 40 best-selling mystery novels and fit in well in Torquay, England.

Like Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes, Christie has grown sick of Poirot with time. In her diary, Christie noted that she thought Poirot was "irreparable" in the late 1930s and that he was "a selfish man" in the 1960s. By pointing out that "in later life, she strove to defend him against distortion in a way strong as if he were her flesh and blood," Thompson, Christie's biographer contends that Christie's frequent hostility to her work is overdone. She resisted the need to murder her detective while he was still well-known, in contrast to Conan Doyle.

Christie almost turned into a tragic character from one of her own stories after gaining a large following for her work. She left her London house in 1926 and vanished. When the police started their inquiry, they learned that her husband Archie, a notorious con artist, had previously claimed to be in love with someone else.

The disappearance rapidly gained media attention as the media tried to satiate its readers' "sense of hunger, calamity, and scandal." William Joynson-Hicks, the home secretary, put pressure on the police, and one newspaper offered a £100 reward (equivalent to around £6,000 in 2021). The region was combed by more than a thousand police officers, 15,000 volunteers, and numerous planes.

Despite a thorough search, it took another 10 days to locate her. She was registered as Mrs. Tressa Neele (her husband's mistress' last name) from "Capetown SA" at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, 184 miles (296 kilometers) north of her home in Sunningdale, on December 14, 1926 (South Africa). The following day, Christie traveled to Abney Hall in Cheadle to visit her sister. There, she was confined in solitary confinement "in a guarded lobby, the gate barred, the phone switched off, and the caller leaving one by one."

Christie was located at a spa in a nearby town ten days after going missing. Her spouse revealed that Christie had amnesia at the time. Enrolling in the spa under her husband's mistress' identity, according to some, was her method of publicly humiliating her husband for his affair, while others thought it was a publicity hoax.

One of the fun facts about Agatha Christie is that she loves to surf. The Christies family traveled the globe in 1922 to promote the British Empire Exhibition under the direction of Major Ernest Belcher. In ten months, they visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Canada after leaving their daughter with Agatha's mother and sister.

Agatha Christie's early years are rarely captured in photographs, but there is evidence that she was a very stylish teenager at the time. In 1922, Christie's joined the world tour for the British Empire Exhibition, led by Major Ernest Belcher. In 10 months, they traveled to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Canada. They learned to surf in South Africa, and their surfing skills improved as a result of their long trip. Experts claim that the famous crime writer is only the second British person to ever stand on a surfboard. Since everyone wanted to know, Prince Edward was the first.

When they returned to England, Christie continued to work hard at writing. After living in a series of flats in London, the couple bought a house in Sunningdale, Berkshire, which they renamed Styles after the mansion in Christie's first detective novel.

Film and television have both adapted Christie's novels. The first was The Passing of Mr. Quinn, a 1928 British motion picture. Austin Trevor was Christie's boss in the 1931 picture Alibi, which also included Poirot in a supporting role. In several 1960s movies, Margaret Rutherford played Marple. Christie praised her acting, but she thought the first movie was "very terrible" and wasn't much better than the others.

She had various opinions on the Sidney Lumet film Murder on the Orient Express (1974), which starred major names and had high production values. Her appearance at the London premiere was one of her final public appearances. In 2016, a brand-new motion picture adaptation was released, with Kenneth Branagh directing and also starring, and sporting "the most magnificent mustache spectators have ever seen."

With David Suchet playing the title character, the television adaptation of Agatha Christie's Poirot aired for 70 episodes across 13 series from 1989 to 2013. In the years 1990 to 1992, it was nominated for nine BAFTA Awards and took home four of them. All 12 of Marple's novels were made popular by the television series Miss Marple (1984–1992) starring Joan Hickson as "BBC's peerless Miss Marple." The French television series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie (2009–2012, 2013–2020), adapted 36 stories by Christie.

One of the interesting facts about Agatha Christie is that her books are bestsellers. Christie's was rarely off the bestseller list when she was at her finest. In 1948, she became the first author of crime fiction to have Penguin publish 100,000 copies of each of her ten books on the same day. As of 2018, Christie was ranked as the all-time best-selling fiction author by Guinness World Records. Her books have sold more than two billion copies in 44 languages as of the year 2020. English-language editions account for 50% of sales, while translations account for 50%.

She is the most translated individual author as of 2020, according to Index Translationum. One of the most often borrowed writers in UK libraries is Christie. She also writes the most popular audiobooks in the UK. The number of audiobooks by Christie that were sold in 2002 was 117,696, as opposed to 97,755 by JK Rowling, 78,770 by Roald Dahl, and 75,841 by JRR Tolkien.

With sales of about $100 million, the Christie estate proclaimed And Then There Were None "the best-selling crime novel of all time" in 2015. It quickly rose to the top of the bestseller list grand. By 2020, more than two million English-language copies of her books had been sold.

Thomas Beresford and his wife, who appeared in four novels and an anthology of short tales released between 1922 and 1974, were amateur detectives created by Christie in addition to Poirot and Marple. Her other minions, the Beresfords, who were introduced in The Secret Adversary when they were only in their twenties, were permitted to grow older alongside their maker. She gives their stories a "dash and energy" that isn't admired by reviewers, treating them with more compassion. Postern of Fate, their last adventure, is Christie's final book.

The "easily most unconventional" of Christie's fictional detectives is Harley Quin. Quin, a semi-supernatural character, has always collaborated with an elderly man known as Satterthwaite, who was inspired by Christie's love of characters from the Harlequinade series. 14 short stories featured the duo, 12 of which were gathered in Mr. Quin's Mystery in 1930. These tales are "a touching, wonderful discovery of a fairy tale, a natural result of Agatha's great imagination," according to Mallowan. Satterthwaite also made an appearance in the Poirot-starring short story "Dead Man's Mirror" in the novel Three Act Tragedy.

Parker Pyne, a retired civil worker who assists the unfortunate in an unorthodox way, is one of her less well-known characters. Parker Pyne Investigates (1934), a collection of 12 short stories that introduced him, is best known for "The Disgruntled Soldier Case," which featured Ariadne Oliver, "an amusing and caustic self-portrait by Agatha Christie." Seven novels featuring Oliver in the decades that followed had her in most of them as Poirot's main supporter.