My Favourite English Writer
It's said that none of the
British writers of our age enjoyed such popularity all over the world as Agatha
Christie did. Her works were translated into many languages, and scores of
films were made using them as the script.
The name of Agatha Christie is
a synonym for high-class detective story, as well as Pele is a symbol of
football, and Marilyn Monroe is an embodiment of femininity. According to
Agatha Christie herself, she began to write just to imitate her sister whose stories
had already been published in magazines.
And suddenly Agatha Christie
became famous as if by miracle. Having lost her father at an early age, the
prospective writer didn't receive even fairly good education. During the First
World War she was a nurse, then she studied pharmacology. Twenty years later
she worked in a military hospital at the beginning of the Second World War.
The favourite personages of
the "queen of detective story" are the detective Hercules Poirot and
the sedate Miss Marple who carry out investigations in noisy London and
delusive quiet countryside. The composition of her stories is very simple: a
comparatively closed space with a limited number of characters, who are often
plane or train passengers, tourists, hotel guests or residents of a cosy old
village.
Everyone is suspected! Murders
in the books of Agatha Christie are committed in most unsuitable places: in the
vicar's garden or in an old abbey; corpses are found in someone's libraries
being murdered with the help of tropical fishes, a poker, candelabra, a dagger
or poison. Once Agatha Christie wrote: "Some ten years will pass after my
death, and nobody will even remember me...". The writer was mistaken.
Agatha Christie's novels are
very popular now. People of all continents read and reread "The Oriental
Express", "Ten Little Negroes", "The Bertram Hotel",
"The Corpse in the library" and other of her novels time and again,
enjoy films made by her works, and one can hardly find a country where people
do not know her name.
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