ANSWERS

1) A. A classical musician. IN HeR late teens, the creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple trained as a singer and pianist, but she did not pursue music as a career as she was too shy to perform.

2) B. and C. B. THe Mousetrap has held the record for the longest-running show in British history since 1958 and in the world since the midSeventies. It has been running since 1952, despite Christie thinking it would last only eight months.

C. In 2009, a 12.67in-thick volume of Christie’s Miss Marple tales (12 novels and 20 short stories) was published.

A. The most prolific amateur sleuth is Jessica fletcher, who featured in 265 episodes and four films of Murder, She Wrote.

D. The first detective on British Tv was Inspector Holt in the BBC’s 1938 Telecrime. 3) False. THAT was how American poet Ogden Nash described her. But she did contribute one word to the Oxford english Dictionary — ‘sit’, an abbreviation for sitting room (from her 1937 novel Dumb Witness). 4) D. And Then There Were None. ReSPONDING to a letter from a Japanese translator, Christie wrote a list of ten favourites in 1972. And Then There Were None came top. She said she enjoyed its ‘difficult technique’. The bestselling crime novel of all time sold more than 100 million copies. 5) B. The Penguin paperback. IN 1934, Allen Lane was travelling from exeter to London after visiting Agatha Christie. He was on a platform with nothing to read and came up with his sixpenny paperback to make literature affordable. 6) True. THe earliest Tv adaptation was BBC’s The Wasp’s Nest in 1937. It first brought Hercule Poirot to our screens. It started as a short story in the Mail in November 1928.