On this date in 1890, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, the woman who would become Agatha Christie and the best selling novelist in history after the Bible and Shakespeare. She went on to write 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, creating enduring figures such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
Her own life carried a strange echo of her fiction: in 1926 she vanished for eleven days, sparking a nationwide manhunt, before being found registered under an assumed name at a Yorkshire hotel, an episode that remains unexplained to this day.
