It’s said that none of the British writers of our age enjoyed such popularity all over the world as Agatha Christie did. Her works were translated into many languages, and scores of films were made using them as the script.
The name of Agatha Christie is a synonym for high-class detective story, as well as Pele is a symbol of football, and Marilyn Monroe is an embodiment of femininity. According to Agatha Christie herself, she began to write just to imitate her sister whose stories had already been published in magazines. And suddenly Agatha Christie became famous as if by miracle.
Having lost her father at an early age, the prospective writer didn’t receive even fairly good education. During the First World War she was a nurse, then she studied pharmacology. Twenty years later she worked in a military hospital at the beginning of the Second World War. The favourite personages of the “queen of detective story” are the detective Hercules Poirot and the sedate Miss Marple who carry out investigations in noisy London and delusive quiet countryside.
The composition of her stories is very simple: a comparatively closed space with a limited number of characters, who are often plane or train passengers, tourists, hotel guests or residents of a cosy old village. Everyone is suspected!
Murders in the books of Agatha Christie are committed in most unsuitable places: in the vicar’s garden or in an old abbey; corpses are found in someone’s libraries being murdered with the help of tropical fishes, a poker, candelabra, a dagger or poison.
Once Agatha Christie wrote: “Some ten years will pass after my death, and nobody will even remember me…”. The writer was mistaken. Agatha Christie’s novels are very popular now. People of all continents read and reread “The Oriental Express”, “Ten Little Negroes”, “The Bertram Hotel”, “The Corpse in the library” and other of her novels time and again, enjoy films made by her works, and one can hardly find a country where people do not know her name.
Questions:
1. Why did Agatha Christie begin to write?
2. The prospective writer didn’t receive education, did she?
3. What are the favourite personages of Agatha Christie?
4. Is the composition of Agatha Christie stories simple?
5. Name the best of her published works.
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