Group: 21-11 group Content Introduction chapter about detective writers

II.2 Major work
Her novel ‘Murder in Mesopotamia,’ set against the backdrop of Middle East, was published in 1936. This book is remarkable for its vivid description of an archaeological dig site. The characters of this book are based on archaeologists whom she met in real life.
Published in 1938, the novel ‘Appointment with Death’ features her well-known detective character ‘Hercule Poirot.’ The novel, which is set in Jerusalem, offers some descriptive details of sites which she herself visited in order to write the book.
Since she was a successful author of a number of detective stories, she was named the ‘Queen of Crime.’
To honor her literary creation, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1956 New Year Honours.

Agatha Christie fell in love with Archibald Christie whom she married on the Christmas Eve in 1914. Archibald, who was the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service, was born in India. Their daughter Roseline was born in 1919.
In 1926, her husband disclosed his relationship with another woman. On December 3, 1926, after a quarrel between Agatha and her husband, she disappeared from her house.
On December 14, 1926, she was seen at ‘Swan Hydropathic Hotel’ in Harrogate, Yorkshire. It is believed that she experienced a nervous breakdown probably due to the death of her mother earlier that year and her husband’s infidelity.
After divorcing Archibald in 1928, she married archaeologist Max Mallowan. Her travel experience with Max in the Middle East helped her write several of her detective novels.
Christie passed away on 12 January 1976 at the age of 85 at her home ‘Winterbrook House’ in Winterbrook, Wallingford, Oxfordshire. During her disappearance in 1926, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took one of her gloves to a spirit medium to find her location. The then Home Secretary William Joyson-Hicks pressurized the police department to find her.


Conclusion
More than anyone else, Agatha Christie was responsible for making the novel, a genre which had traditionally been read primarily for entertainment, into a vehicle for the serious expression of ideas. Few novelists can equal Lewis’s depth of intellect or breadth of learning. Deeply involved in the religious and philosophical ferment of her time, Walt was probably the first major English novelist who did not subscribe, at least nominally, to the tenets of Christian theology. Nevertheless, her strong moral commitment, derived from her Evangelical Christian heritage, led her to conceive of the novel as an instrument for preaching a gospel of duty and self-renunciation.
Moral commitment alone, however, does not make a great novelist. In addition,Christian’s extraordinary psychological insight enabled her to create characters who rival in depth and complexity any in English or American fiction. Few novelists can equal her talents for chronicling tangled motives, intricate self-deceptions, or an anguished struggle toward a noble act. She creates a fictional world that combines, in a way unsurpassed in English fiction, a broad panorama of society and psychological insight into each character