Agatha Christie | Origin of Street Names

Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (1890 – 1976) was a renowned British writer, best known for her detective novels, which have sold over two billion copies worldwide, with the majority of them being adapted into films and TV series.

She was born and raised in the English town of Torquay, where she acquired education in a highly unconventional manner. Her mother taught her reading, writing, arithmetic, and certain artistic skills, even though her older brother and sister attended school and university in the usual way.

At the age of 16, she received her first formal education in Paris, studying singing and piano. However, much to the delight of future generations, she found herself completely in a different form of art - literature.

A rather shy young girl showed no signs that she would grow into the world's most popular novelist, with her works, alongside the Bible and Shakespeare's classics, becoming the best-selling literature of all time.

During World War I, she worked as a nurse, and after the war, she found her professional engagement in a hospital pharmacy, leading a rather ordinary life for a long time.

Encouraged to write poems and stories from a young age, she wrote her first major novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," at the age of 30. From then on, one after another, her best detective and crime novels came out annually, like clockwork, captivating the world and readers everywhere.

The popular "queen of crime," as she was respectfully called, created some truly authentic and recognizable characters in her novels, which later, with the adaptation of the novels for the big screen, brought great fame to a few actors. The most famous among them is undoubtedly David Suchet, an actor who is still inseparably associated with the character of the astute detective Hercule Poirot, one of the recurring characters in most of Agatha Christie's novels.

It is little known that our capital city, Belgrade, also received a kind of promotion in the novels of this British writer, in the iconic "Murder on the Orient Express" from 1934, as the former capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was an important point on the trans-European route of this popular luxury train.

Mysterious murders and their thrilling resolution became synonymous with Agatha Christie, who, in over 80 novels, always found a way to portray characters and events in her works in a different and highly original manner. Her books still captivate readers from cover to cover, holding their attention with equal excitement to this day.

In addition to the worldwide fame achieved through record-breaking sales of her novels, Agatha Christie also gained recognition as the author of the play "The Mousetrap," which has been performed over 25,000 times - the most in the history of world theater.

Even during her lifetime, Agatha Christie honored her homeland, as she was a recipient of the Order of the British Empire and held the title of Dame. She lived to a ripe old age and passed away at the age of 86.

The name of the world's most popular writer is carried by hundreds of schools and streets in Britain, and symbolically, one street in the Belgrade neighborhood of Kotež.