Jules Verne in Eighty Days" (1873). Verne is generally considered a major literary author in France and most of Europe, where he has had a wide influence on the literary avant-garde and on surrealism. His reputation is markedly different in Anglophone regions, where he has often been labeled a writer of genre fiction or children's books, largely because of the highly abridged and altered translations in which his novels are often reprinted. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking between Agatha Christie and William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "Father of Science Fiction", a
Agatha Christie page of the paper on 6 August 1975. Following the great success of "Curtain", Christie gave permission for the release of "Sleeping Murder" sometime in 1976 but died in January 1976 before the book could be released. This may explain some of the inconsistencies compared to the rest of the Marple series—for example, Colonel Arthur Bantry, husband of Miss Marple's friend Dolly, is still alive and well in "Sleeping Murder" although he is noted as having died in books published earlier. It may be that Christie simply did not have time to revise the manuscript before she died. In 2013,