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**Agatha Christie**

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Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 15, 1890 in Torquay, Devon, England and died January 12, 1976 at the age of 85. Her parents were Clarissa Margaret Boehmer and Frederick Alvah Miller. She was the youngest having two older siblings, Margaret Frary Miller (Madge), who was eleven older and Louis Montant Miller (Monty) who was ten years older than her. She wrote more than 80 novels. She was the only crime writer, to date, who created two equally famous and much loved characters: Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. Her influences were Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Katherine Green, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and G.K. Chesterton. Her first book was the result of a challenge from her sister, Madge. She wrote six novels (romantic) under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Her pseudonym was a secret for almost twenty years! Her favorite color was green. She had a rose named after her. She is the only crime novelist to achieve equal and international fame as a dramatist. She married Archibald Christie December 24, 1914 and gave birth to Rosalind Christie in 1919. Agatha and Archie were divorced about fourteen years later after it was revealed that Arhcie had been having an affari with another woman. In late 1926, after a quarrel, Agatha Christie disappeared for elven days and tunred up at the Swan Hydopathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire under the name Mrs. Teresa Neele (Neele was the last name of the woman Archie had been having the affair with). No one was exactly sure how she had ended up there, but it was presumed that she had had a mental breakdown though she claimed amnesia. Two years later, she married archeologist, Max Mallowan, whom she had often accompanied to archeological excavations, where she had gotten many ideas for some of her stories. Despite Mallowan's infedlity, their marriage lasted until Christie's death in 1975. Agatha Christie continued to write until 1975 when she began to become very weak and had signed over the rights to her most successful play, "The Mouse Trap", to her grandson, Mathew Prichard. On the day she died, the West End theaters dimmed their lights for one hour.