Agatha Christie, DBE

Agatha Christie is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world’s longest-running play – The Mousetrap. Opening in London's West End in 1952 it has been running continuously ever since (approx 28,000 performances). The play began life as a short radio play called Three Blind Mice and was first broadcast on May 30th 1947.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Drawing on her observations of the world and people surrounding her she became the literary world’s Queen of Crime, and although she earned a place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling novelist in the world with sales of over four billion books, writing didn’t come easily to Christie.

There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

When you begin to write, you are usually in the throes of admiration for some writer, and, whether you will or no, you cannot help copying their style.  Often it is not a style that suits you, and so you write badly.  But as time goes on you are less influenced by admiration. You will admire certain writers, you may even wish you could write like them, but you know quite well that you can’t.

There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.

Nothing turns out quite in the way that you thought it would when you are sketching out notes for the first chapter, or walking about muttering to yourself and seeing a story unroll.

Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.

There is a right length for everything. I think myself that the right length for a detective story is fifty- thousand words. I know this is considered by some publishers as too short. Possibly readers feel themselves cheated if they pay their money and only get fifty-thousand words- so sixty- thousand or seventy-thousand are more acceptable.  If your book runs to more than that I think you usually find that it would have been better if it had been shorter.

There always has to be a lapse of time after the accomplishment of a piece of creative work before you can in any way evaluate it.

I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

Christie was awarded a CBE in 1956 and in 1971 she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE)

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