Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, in the United Kingdom, the daughter of a wealthy American stockbroker. Her father died when she was eleven years old. Her mother taught her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16, she went to Mrs. Dryden's finishing school in Paris to study singing and piano. In 1914, at age 24, she married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. While he went away to war, she worked as a nurse and wrote her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), which wasn't published until four years later. When her husband came back from the war, they had a daughter. In 1928 she divorced her husband, who had been having an affair. In 1930, she married Sir Max Mallowan, an archaeologist and a Catholic. She travelled with her husband's job, and set several of her novels set in the Middle East. Most of her other novels were set in a fictionalized Devon, where she was born.
Agatha Christie is credited with developing the "cozy style" of mystery, which became popular in, and ultimately defined, the Golden Age of fiction …
