Agatha Christie bibliography Agatha Christie bibliography Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was an English crime novelist, short-story writer and playwright. Although she wrote six romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, her reputation rests on the 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections that she wrote under her own name, which have sold over two billion copies—an amount only surpassed by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. Her works contain several regular characters with whom the public became familiar, including Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Parker Pyne and Harley Quin. Christie wrote more Poirot stories than any of the others,
Agatha Christie However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and the public liked Poirot. She did marry off Poirot's companion Captain Hastings in an attempt to trim her cast commitments. In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. However, the Belgian detective's titles outnumber the Marple titles more than two to one. This is largely because Christie wrote numerous Poirot novels early in her career, while "The Murder at the Vicarage" remained the sole Marple novel