Informative Speech

Who do you think is the best-selling novelist in the world? People normally answer with J.K Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien. Detective fiction may not sound like the mainstream, but data proves that most people are drawn to Agatha Christie’s stories. According to her official website, she is in fact the best-selling novelist, “outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.” She is not only able to manage the diverse characters and complex plots, but logic, clues, and the use of foreshadowing are also tightly tied together. Christie has a lot of life experiences that we see as “unexpected.” She, like her novels, was a woman of mystery, and her life was full of drama. 

Christie is well-known in the world of literature, but was she like this from the beginning? One shocking thing about her is that her mother refused to give her any education until she was eight years old. Yet, she taught herself how to read at the age of five. These childhood experiences, collectively, shaped her extraordinary imagination. Meanwhile, when she was asked where her inspiration comes from, she responded that as she casually carried out her daily activities, “suddenly a splendid idea came into her head” (“About Agatha Christie”). 

Christie’s career begins at eleven with her publishing a poem in a London newspaper. Since then, she published several poems, many of them in The Poetry Review, which is London’s representative literary journal. During the First World War, she volunteered as a nurse at the Torbay Hospital. Later she passed the Society of Apothecaries exam and became a pharmacist. Being a pharmacist familiarized her with poisons — the element that she frequently used in her novels. During this time, she wrote her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles with detective Hercule Poirot as the main character. Christie accomplished Poirot's character, Poirot accomplished Christie's career. 

Hercule Poirot is a private detective and a devout Catholic. He has a close friend named Hastings, similar to Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. However, unlike Holmes, who is tall and slim, Poirot is somewhat chubby and with a bushy mustache. In solving cases, Holmes uses the deductive method — from physical evidence to the truth — while Poirot analyzes in his head. As Dawn Sova said, “Poirot uses ‘the little gray cells,’ and does his most effective detecting work while sitting in an easy chair.” 

In 1926, shortly after the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Christie disappeared without any sign. After a massive eleven-day search, she was found in a hotel under an alias. Gillian Gill wrote in her book, “the victim, her doctors claimed subsequently, of amnesia.” Afterward, Christie never responded to what happened in those eleven days, nor did she tell the truth in her autobiography, but what can be guessed is that she left and hide due to the two tragic events that happened in a row: Christie’s mother left her and her husband Archie Christie confessed to her that he was in love with someone else. She lost two of her closest ones in a short period of time. 

Eventually, Christie’s passion for life was rekindled when she met Max, a young archaeologist in Baghdad. Max fell in love with Agatha, who was fourteen years older than him, and proposed to her. After her marriage, she reached her peak with her most famous work Murder on the Orient Express, and later, Death on the Nile. 

One cannot discuss detective fiction without mentioning Agatha Christie, the Queen of Mystery. Did you know? When detective Poirot died solving his last case in Curtain, The New York Times mourned the character by putting an obituary on the front cover. According to Dawn Sova, he is “the only fictional character ever to be honored with an obituary,” which proves Christie’s huge accomplishments as a writer.