Agatha Christie‘s personal life is as fascinating as her books. Born 130 years ago on September 15th, Agatha is known as the Crime Queen and is considered to be the most successful writer of all time. Translated into over a 100 languages, she’s sold over four billion worldwide. It was a career of 56 years, over 80 books, more than 19 plays, and six romances written as Mary Westmacott. It was from her imagination that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple came to life. However, it was Agatha who was the protagonist of a never-solved mystery in the United Kingdom. Her own disappearance.

Home-schooled, Agatha lost her father at 11 anos and traveled around the world with her mother. She dreamt of becoming an opera singer, but she gave up the stage to get married.

Her first union, air pilot Archibald Christie, fathered her only daughter, but it wasn’t a happy one. When he came clean about an affair and wanted the divorce, Agatha Christie simply disappeared. Literally. Her car was found abandoned on the road, with her purse and a few pieces that helped to prove it was hers. All searches for the body were vain; the country stopped. Two weeks later, a fan identified her in a hotel north of England. She was under a different name, funny enough, the same Family name as her husband’s girlfriend. She answered when called by her real name, but then claimed she had amnesia and had no memory of how she got there. She never spoke about it. There are three theories.

The first, she wanted to take revenge on Archibald, making him a suspect in her possible death. The second admits the amnesia version, which would have been caused when she hit her head when the car crashed. The third and most skeptical admits it could be a marketing strategy to improve sales of her latest book. In any case, it was legendary.

Agatha’s style invented the many plot twists that are so surprising to solve the real crime. She would use some of her personal experiences, such as being caught in a train that could not move with other passengers, ruins in Egypt, or even knowledge of medicines and poisons, to imagine murders.

She would write her ideas in a notebook, always at hand. She would only type the book after she had written a few chapters by hand.

It didn’t take long for the movies to fall for Agatha Christie. Some of them became Oscar winners (Ingrid Bergman in  Murder on the Orient Express). The new version of Death on the Nile brings  Kenneth Branagh again as Hercule Poirot.

See the trailer for Death on the Nile