Unit 3 YOUR PREFERENCES - PAGES 4 READERS

p. 174, ex. 4. Read the text.

A BIOGRAPHY OF AGATHA CHRISTIE

Agatha Christie was born in Devon, England, on the 15th of September, 1890, the youngest of three children in a wealthy family. As a child, she never attended school because her mother wanted her to be taught at home by a governess and tutors. She was a very shy child who learned very early to create games to keep herself occupied. She studied piano and music in Paris and later turned to writing.

In 1914, at the age of 24, she married Archie Christie, a World War I fighter pilot. During the First World War, Agatha worked as a nurse. It was while she was working in a hospital that Agatha Christie came up with the idea of writing a detective novel. In the hospital she learned a lot about drugs and poisons and she used this information in her novels. Her fi rst novel was published in 1920 and the main character was a Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Christie wrote about 30 novels featuring Poirot.

Among the most popular were Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.

In 1926 Archie asked for a divorce and Agatha, feeling lost and upset, suddenly disappeared. For two weeks nobody knew where she was. All of England became involved in the case of the missing writer. Eventually, she was found in a small hotel, explaining to the police that she had lost her memory. Even today nobody knows exactly what happened to her during those two weeks. Her second marriage was to Max Mallowan, a young archaeologist whom she met on a trip to Baghdad. They went home to England on the Orient Express and got married in 1930. Christie and her husband travelled to the Middle East many times. These journeys created the background for several of her novels, for example Death on the Nile.

Another one of Christie’s well-known characters was introduced in The Murder at the Vicarage. It was Miss Jane Marple, an old lady who solved mysteries with her sharp mind and intuition.

During her life, Christie wrote over 70 novels and a number of short stories, plays and screenplays. Some of her novels have been made into successful fi lms. Her work has been translated into more than a hundred languages and she is the most popular mystery writer of all times. Agatha Christie died on the 12th January, 1976, at the age of 85.