Christie still popular 100 years on
LONDON: It was partly thanks to a bet with her sister that Agatha Christie wrote her first detective novel, and 100 years after it was published she is as popular as ever.
Christie was 30 when in February 1920 The Mysterious Affair at Styles was serialised in a British newspaper. The book was published in the United States in October and the following year in Britain.
Now, according to Guinness World Records, Christie is the world’s bestselling fiction writer and her crime novels have sold 2 billion copies.
‘‘She did that as a woman at the time when women did not really do that kind of thing. And I think that is extraordinary and worthy of . . . jumping up and down about,’’ her greatgrandson James Prichard said in a Zoom interview.
Christie also wrote 19 plays, of which the most famous, The Mousetrap, opened in 1952. It broke for the first time in March due to the pandemic.
Christie died in 1976. — Reuters