Agatha Christie's Real Name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller

Quick answer: Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, Devon, England. Christie was the surname of her first husband. She created the detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and wrote the record-running play The Mousetrap. She died on January 12, 1976, in Wallingford, Oxfordshire (Britannica; Library of Congress).

Real name and early life

The Library of Congress name authority files her as "Christie, Agatha, 1890-1976." It keeps the variants "Christie, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller" and "Christie, Agatha Miller." One LOC note records her usage names as "Agatha Christie; Agatha Christie Mallowan; Mary Westmacott; full name: Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller Christie." Britannica lists "Agatha Miller" among her names and gives her formal style as Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie.

Britannica says she was educated at home by her mother. She began writing detective fiction while working as a nurse during World War I.

Career highlights

Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. He went on to appear in about 25 novels and many short stories, and Christie killed him off in Curtain (1975), again set at Styles. Miss Jane Marple first appeared in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930). Christie's breakthrough was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), followed by some 75 novels that routinely made best-seller lists. Britannica says her books have sold more than 100 million copies in about 100 languages, earning her the title "Queen of Crime."

The Mousetrap (1952) set a world record for the longest continuous run at one theater: 8,862 performances at London's Ambassadors Theatre. It then moved to St. Martin's Theatre in 1974 and played without a break until the COVID-19 pandemic shut theaters in 2020, by which point it had passed 28,200 performances. Witness for the Prosecution (1953) became a 1957 film. Other screen adaptations include And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express (1974 and 2017), and Death on the Nile (1978 and 2022).

In 1926 her mother died and her husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, asked for a divorce. Christie then disappeared for several highly publicized days and was found registered at a hotel under the name of the woman her husband wanted to marry. She never fully explained the episode. In 1930 she married archaeologist Max Mallowan and joined his expeditions in Iraq and Syria. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971.

Name notes for searchers

Miller was her maiden name and Christie her first married name, which she kept as her pen name even after marrying Mallowan. Some records call her Agatha Christie Mallowan. Her nondetective romance novels, such as Absent in the Spring (1944), appeared under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.