Agatha Christie a long-running character in Christie's works, appearing in 33 novels and 54 short stories. Miss Jane Marple, introduced in the short-story collection "The Thirteen Problems" in 1927, was based on Christie's grandmother and her "Ealing cronies". Both Jane and Gran "always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right." Marple appeared in 12 novels and 20 stories. During the Second World War, Christie wrote two novels, "Curtain" and "Sleeping Murder", intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Both books were sealed in a bank
Agatha Christie around 1959 she had transferred her 278-acre home, Greenway Estate, to her daughter Rosalind. In 1968, when Christie was almost 80 years old, she sold a 51% stake in Agatha Christie Limited (and therefore the works it owned) to Booker Books (better known as Booker Author's Division), a subsidiary of the food and transport conglomerate Booker-McConnell (now Booker Group), the founder of the Booker Prize for literature, which later increased its stake to 64%. Agatha Christie Limited remains the owner of the worldwide rights for over 80 of Christie's novels and short stories, 19 plays, and nearly 40 TV films.