Her second novel, “ The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” completed in 1919, was published several months later by The Bodley Head, an independent English publishing house. She shopped it around to many publishers, only to receive rejection after rejection.
She would note physical appearances of strangers whom she saw and met in public and then would use their likeness and subtle mannerisms to develop relatable characters for her mysteries.Īgatha completed her first novel, “ Snow Upon the Desert” in 1911 or 1912. To overcome this obstacle, she would develop many characters from scratch. Miss Marple often worked beside Poirot on tough crime cases.Īgatha regularly looked for “creative inspiration” by studying the people around her however, her chosen genre, the murder mystery, stunted her writing process because it was difficult at times to put reality into fictional environments for example, she sometimes had trouble using attributes of acquaintences to do things she couldn’t imagine them doing, like murder, and this often caused writer’s block.
Miss Marple, an elderly woman who used her amateur sleuthing skills to solve crimes, appeared in 12 of Agatha’s mystery crime novels and 22 short stories. Poirot, a Belgian private investigator, appeared in thirty-three novels, one play, and over 50 short stories from 1920 to 1975. Her most memorable and popular characters, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, are great examples of her skill to develop “high society” characters with mainstream appeal.Īgatha’s novel, “ The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (published in 1920) introduced the character Hercule Poirot. She created memorable and dignified characters which any class of readers could relate to.
What made her stories stand out were, of course, the characters. What made Agatha Christie’s stories stand out? In a writing career lasting more than 55 years, she wrote 72 novels (66 mystery novels and 6 romance novels) and 15 short story collections-a body of work that remains unparalleled in any genre, except perhaps by Stephen King. The works of Dame Agatha Christie are still a part of popular culture.