Innovative, curious, multifaceted, and extremely adventurous, Agatha Christie fearlessly embraced every interest that crossed her path, shaping life to her liking rather than conforming to the standards of her time. She is said to have been one of the first women to fly in an airplane, and possibly the first British woman to ride a surfboard; she drove with incredible skill at a time when most men didn't own a car, and she undertook journeys with nothing but her typewriter to places so far away that few women would have dared to go. In this engaging biography, the reader will embark on a deep dive into the life of an author whose trajectory was written in the ink of 20th-century world events. They will also discover delightful anecdotes, the origins of her most famous works, and the intricacies of her strange disappearance in 1926, an event about which the author and her family never spoke publicly.

Known to her most devoted fans as the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie is a name that needs no introduction; we all know her in one way or another. In fact, she is the most widely read, translated, and published author of all time, surpassed only by Shakespeare and the Bible. The figures for her success are stratospheric, with more than four billion copies sold since records began, and editions translated into more than one hundred languages. Her extensive literary catalog includes eighty novels, numerous short stories, six romance novels, four radio plays, three books of poems and stories for children, and twenty-three plays—the most famous, The Mousetrap, holds the record for the longest-running play in London, with more than twenty-five thousand performances and seven million spectators since its premiere in 1952. She wrote her first novel in response to a challenge from her sister and, without the slightest ambition, achieved fame in less than a decade with a work that broke all the rules of the detective novel: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Later, her career took off as a major voice in the crime genre, of which she would become one of the greatest exponents with classics such as And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, and Crooked House. With her timeless and entertaining prose, Agatha Christie remains, almost half a century after her death, a global icon for lovers of the detective genre.