Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time

Agatha Christie is, by Guinness World Records’ reckoning, the best-selling fiction author in history. Her crime novels have sold an estimated two billion copies — roughly half in English and half in translation.

She is also the most translated individual author ever recorded. UNESCO’s Index Translationum logs 7,236 translations of her works, spread across more than 44 languages, putting Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple into the hands of readers worldwide.

Her publishers note her books are thought to be outsold only by the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

The output behind those numbers was relentless: 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, plus plays — including The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the world, which opened in London in 1952 and is still running. Nearly a century after her debut, Christie remains a one-author publishing industry.