I would prefer a British or an American accent.
Thanks in advance.
Agatha Christie was born in England in a privileged family on September 15th 1890. She spent her childhood in Torquay, Cornwall. She spent her time going to concerts or theatres or dance halls. She first married with Colonel Christie who was in the army and they had a daughter Rosalind. While her husband was fighting during the First World War, she worked in a hospital. There she learnt all the information about poisons, toxic drugs and medicines which she used later in her books. Many of her clues are normal objects like a calendar, a coffee cup, flowers, or a beer bottle…
In 1920 she published her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was an immediate success. The hero, Hercule Poirot is a funny little man, very elegant, from Belgium. He is a retired policeman and is also extremely clever. Contrary to Sherlock Holmes, Poirot doesn’t walk around with a magnifying glass, looking for fingerprints, footprints or cigarette butts. He just sits in an armchair, setting his “little grey cells” to work. Poirot usually likes to gather the guilty party in a lounge where he reveals the name of the murderer. One of the most famous books is And Then They were None (in French : les Dix Petits Nègres) . This book sold 100 million copies and is also the “best selling crime novel of all time”.
Later on, Agatha Christie invented another character called Miss Marple : she isn’t a professional detective, but a sweet old lady who lives in a small village in the country : she is observant and sometimes very nosy.
After her divorce in 1928, Agatha Christie remarried in 1930 and with her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archeologist, she travelled a lot, particularly to Egypt, Syria and Iraq. That’s why several of her books are located abroad and have exotic titles like Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express.
She wrote sixty-six crime novels, one hundred and fifty short stories, nineteen plays. One of her plays, the Mouse Trap, was first performed in November 1952 and is still on in London, a world record after 27,500 performances in September 2018. Her novels have sold two billion copies, most of her books have been adapted for television, radio, and video games. More than thirty films have been based on her books. A film was made about her life, a few years later after she died in 1976.
Thanks very much for this recording Mistymint.