12 January 1976: Agatha Christie dies

Agatha Christie celebrated her 80th birthday with the publication of her 80th book, Passenger to Frankfurt. Rather fitting, actually. [1]

On 12 January 1976, Agatha Christie died peacefully at Winterbrook House, her home in Wallingford, Oxfordshire. She was 85.

By then she was not simply a successful crime writer, but a literary phenomenon. Her books had travelled around the world, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple had become household names, and The Mousetrap, first staged in 1952, was already enjoying its extraordinary London run. Christie had been awarded a CBE and later made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Her final years brought a gradual retreat from public life. Her last public appearance was at the November 1974 premiere of Murder on the Orient Express, where she met Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Anne. Christie enjoyed the film, although she complained that Albert Finney’s Poirot did not have the magnificent moustache she had described in the books. In 1975, Curtain, Poirot’s final case — written many years earlier and kept safely in reserve — was finally published. Poirot’s death was considered sufficiently important for The New York Times to give him an obituary, an extraordinary honour for a fictional detective.

When Christie herself died the following January, the lights of London’s West End theatres were dimmed in tribute. She was buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s at Cholsey, near the Wallingford home where she and her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, had lived since the 1930s.

And the books continued. Sleeping Murder, Miss Marple’s final case, appeared later in 1976, followed by Christie’s Autobiography in 1977.

Christie left sixty-six detective novels, fourteen collections of short stories, plays, romances written as Mary Westmacott — and an apparently inexhaustible supply of murders. Half a century after her death, readers are still happily trying to solve them before Poirot or Miss Marple does.