Agatha Christie
She was taught at home, began writing on a bet with her sister, and knew the poisons that kill her characters not from books: in both wars she worked in a hospital dispensary. The first novel with Hercule Poirot appeared in 1920, and “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” (1926), with its inverted solution, made her famous. That same year her mother died and her husband asked for a divorce, and she vanished for eleven days — she was found in a hotel under an assumed name and never gave an explanation. Her second marriage, to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, took her to digs in Iraq and Syria, out of which came “Death on the Nile” and “Murder in Mesopotamia”. Sixty-six novels, the play “The Mousetrap”, running in London since 1952, and two billion books sold.
She was born in Torquay on 15 September 1890 at 04:00 Greenwich time; the hour comes from the family record.