Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie was born on September 15th, 1890. She didn't go to school because
her mother wanted to teach her at home.
She studied the piano and singing in Paris. She got married in 1914 to a pilot and they had one daughter. During the First World War, when she was working as a nurse, she began to write detective novels. In the hospital, she learned a lot about drugs, and she used these in her novels.
She wrote her first novel in 1920. The hero was a detective, Hercules Poirot. The book soon became a best-seller and made her famous.
In 1928, Agatha Christie was lost. The police found her two weeks later. She didn't know anything. This was front-page news in all the newspapers in Britain, and even today nobody knows what happened to her during those two weeks.
In 1929, Agatha Christie went on holiday to the Middle East. She came home to England in 1930.
After that, she traveled with her husband to the Middle East many times, and a lot of her later stories took place there, for example, Murder on the Nile. She also wrote the detective Miss Murple and began to write plays. One of them, The Mousetrap, opened at a theatre in the West End of London in 1952, and is still on today.
During her life she wrote nearly eighty detective stories. She also wrote other novels under the pen name of Mary Westmacott. She died in January 1976 at the age of eighty-six. Agatha Christie's detective novels are famous for their surprise endings.
Exercises
Choose the correct answer to each question:
1. Christie began to write detective novels ______.
A. in 1914 B. during World War I C. at home D. since she married
2. The detective in Christie' s first novel is ______________.
A. Hercules Poirot B. Her Mother C. Marple D. An Archaeologist
3. Why was Christie lost for two weeks in 1928?
A. Because she was ill. B. Because she got married.
C. Because she wanted to write novels herself. D. Nobody knows.
4. What was her husband's job?
A. A pilot. B. A writer. C. A Publisher. D. A detective.
5. Why did her detective novels interest so many readers? Because ___________.
A. they have a sad ending B. they have an unusual ending
C. there is always a murder in her novels D. Christie was very famous