Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist, leaves a record legacy
On this day · 12 January 1976
The creator of Poirot and Miss Marple died holding a record no author has matched: roughly two billion copies sold.
When Agatha Christie died peacefully on January 12, 1976, at age 85, the lights of London’s West End theatres were dimmed in tribute, an honor she earned partly because her play The Mousetrap was already the longest-running show in history.
Christie was no ordinary mystery writer. Across a half-century career she produced 78 crime novels, plus plays and, under the pen name Mary Westmacott, romances. Her detectives, the fastidious Hercule Poirot and the deceptively mild Miss Marple, became household names from the page to film and television.
Guinness World Records names her the best-selling fiction writer of all time.
Her books have sold an estimated 2 billion copies in 44 languages, a tally typically said to be outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Decades after her death, fresh adaptations keep her plots in circulation, proving that a well-built whodunit ages remarkably well.
Sources & references
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