Dame Agatha Christie, WC2 - Cranbourn Street

Born 15th September 1890
Died 12th January 1976

Inscriptions on the two panels:

Agatha Christie, neé Miller, was born on 15 September 1890 in Torquay, Devon. Educated at home, she acquired as a child her lifelong passion for reading and writing. Knowledge of poisons, gained as a pharmaceutical dispenser in the 1914 - 18 war, proved invaluable for her crime writing. She maried Archie Christie in 1914; their daughter Rosalind was born in 1919. A devotee of travel, she gave many books foreign settings, especially in the Middle East, where she assisted her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, on his expeditions in Syria and Iraq. Her daughter, her son-in-law Anthony Hicks, her grandson Mathew Prichard, born in 1943, and all who knew it shared her great love for Greenway, her house on the River Dart, which her family later gave to the National Trust. Agatha Christie was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1971. She died on 12 January 1976.
Agatha Christie's books have sold over two billion copies in 100 lanquages, moe than any other modern writer. Her work has been widely adapted for the cinema, radio and television. Th Mousetrap, the world's longest-running show, opened in 1952 at the Ambassadors Theatre and has played at the St Martin's Theatre since 1973. In 1954 she became the first woman to have three plays running in London at the same time. Hercule Poirot, the all-knowing Belgian detective, made his bow in 1920 in Agatha Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Miss Jane Marple, her all-seeing village spinster, followed a few years later. The Mousetrap, her many other plays, and more than eighty novels and books of short stories brought Agatha Christie world-wide fame in her lifetime. Through her unique understanding of human nature, her dramatic skills and mastery of the art of story-telling she as become one of the most successful and best loved writers of all time.