How to get away with murder

How does she do it over and over, grip new generations of readers with her thrillers? The clues were there all along. On her 50th death anniversary, see how truth, toxins and an unerring eye for detail built the legacy of Agatha Christie

- K Narayanan

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in scenic Torquay, Devon, on what is called the English Riviera, on September 15, 1890. She was the youngest of three born to Frederick Miller and Clarissa Boehmer, a wealthy upper-middle-class couple. The baby was baptised at All Saints Church, which her family helped build. It still holds the marble baptismal font, and the Miller family pew.

Agatha learned to read at age four, and devoured the works of Louisa May Alcott, Edith Nesbit and Lewis Carroll.

Her first published work was a poem about the trams newly introduced to the London suburb of Ealing. She wrote it in 1901, at the age of 11, during a visit to her grandmothers, both of whom lived in that city. It was published in a local magazine.

Agatha briefly attended a girls' school in Torquay, but was then moved to Paris, where she studied music as well, chiefly playing the piano and singing. Her initial dream was to be a musician, but crippling stage-fright made this impossible.

In 1908, aged 18, she wrote her first short story, The House of Beauty. She called it "the first thing I wrote that showed any kind of promise". She then visited Cairo with her mother for a three-month debutante season, returned and wrote her first novel, a romance titled Snow Upon the Desert. It was rejected by six publishers, but author and family friend Eden Phillpotts encouraged her to keep writing.

Soon after her return from Egypt, she agreed to marry her friend Reginald Lucy. Two years into their two-year engagement, at a party in 1912, she met a dashing young aviator named Archibald Christie. She ended her engagement with Lucy and married Christie two years later, on Christmas Eve, 1914.

World War 1 had broken out by then. He left to serve in the war. She served as a nurse with the Red Cross in Torquay. By 1917, she had trained in pharmacy, passed the Apothecaries Hall exam, and become a certified apothecary's assistant (or dispenser).