Agatha Christie

Christie was educated at home, largely by her mother, and came to writing through a dare from her sister. During the First World War she volunteered in a hospital dispensary in Torquay, weighing and mixing medicines, and acquired the working knowledge of poisons that runs through the rest of her career. Her first novel, written in 1916, was turned down repeatedly and appeared in 1920.

Her method was a contract with the reader: every clue in plain sight, the solution technically available, the misdirection achieved by knowing exactly where attention goes. She wrote sixty-six detective novels, and became the best-selling novelist in history in any language.

In December 1926, after her mother's death and her husband's request for a divorce, she disappeared for eleven days. Her car was found abandoned; a national search followed; she was discovered at a Harrogate hotel, registered under the surname of her husband's lover. She never gave an explanation, and never mentioned the episode in her autobiography. Everything written about it since is inference. In 1930 she married the archaeologist Max Mallowan and spent decades writing at excavation sites in Syria and Iraq, which furnished several of the books.