Agatha Christie

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, who went down in literary history as Agatha Christie, was born on 15 September 1890 in England, in the town of Torquay in Devonshire, situated almost on the very shore of the English Channel.

Her parents, Clara and Frederick Miller, were well-off representatives of the upper British middle class, the very class that appears before readers on the pages of most of her novels.

Agatha was the third and youngest child in the Miller family. Her sister Madge (Margaret Frary, 1879–1950) and brother Monty (Louis Montant, 1880–1929) were eleven and ten years older than she was. In childhood they had almost no contact. “I have poor memories of my brother and sister,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I think because they were at school. My brother at Harrow and my sister in Brighton.”

Agatha always remembered her father with unfailing tenderness. “Looking back, I realize that our home was indeed a place of prosperity, and its main reason was the extraordinary kindness of my father,” she wrote.

Her father played word games, charades, and arithmetic puzzles with her, told her all kinds of stories, composed acrostics with her, and instilled in little Agatha an interest in logic puzzles, which later became the basis of her detective plots.

Agatha inherited her rich imagination and gift for storytelling from her mother, who told her a different story every day, none of them repeated. Moreover, she made them up on the spot.

Agatha was not sent to a boarding school, as her sister was, and she did not even have a proper governess to teach her the basics. Instead, she had Marie, a young French seamstress hired by Clara so that her daughter could quickly learn French. Thanks to her, the girl really did begin chatting in French within a few weeks.

Under the influence of the latest educational theories, Clara Miller tried to prevent Agatha from learning to read before the age of eight. But this came to nothing, because Agatha adored being read fairy tales aloud and then taking the book to look at it carefully. During walks she would ask the nanny what words were written on signs and posters, look at them, and memorize them