Agatha Christie

 Agatha Christie was a contemporary of Dorothy Sayers and like her a detective fiction writer.  She was born to a well to do middle class family in 1890.  She studied at home and was a voracious reader.  Her father died when she was a child and the family were  left not so well off, but Agatha did come out and do the social season, and fell in love with Archie Christie, just before the outbreak of the War.  He joined the army and they got married.  During the war, she did voluntary work learning to be a dispenser in a hospital, so she acquired a knowledge of medicines and poisons. 

This knowledge was useful to her, when she started to write, which she had always wanted to do.  Her husband came out of the army at the end of the war and went into business, and Agatha started to write her novels.  She created Hercule Poirot, a Belgian refugee who became her first detective.   During the war, a lot of Belgians had come to Britain to escape the German invasion. 

Her novels sold well and she was a busy worker.  Unlike Sayers who only wrote 11 detective novels, Christie produced many novels in this genre and created more than 1 detective, like Miss Marple, a middle aged spinster.  Sayers wanted to write more serious novels and also went into writing plays, mainly on religious themes. However Christie stuck to the one genre, for the most part and her works tend to be pure mystery rather than serious novels. 

In the 1920s, Agatha's marriage to Archie Christie became unhappy.  He had a mistress and wanted a divorce.  Agatha disappeared for 11 days, causing a newspaper furore, her car was found abandoned and she had vanished.  She was found staying at a hotel under the name of her husband's mistress.  She seems to have had a breakdown, but some people thought it was a publicity stunt.  Afterwards, she and Archie divorced and Agatha continued with her writing career.  She later remarried to an archaeologist, and took a great interest in his work. 

She was such a prolific writer and her works still sell and have been made into TV and films, with many different actors playing Poirot and Miss Marple.  Sayers, by contrast, was not keen on her works being filmed, and even now, there have only been a handful of TV adaptations.