“I had been dared to write a detective story; I had written a detective story; it had been accepted, and was going to appear in print. There, as far as I was concerned, the matter ended. Certainly at that moment I did not envisage writing any more books.”
-An Autobiography by Agatha Christie
It all started with a dare.
Agatha worked in a hospital and eventually was promoted to assistant in the dispensary. It was there that she conceived the idea of writing a detective story – something she had been dared by her older sister Madge to do a year or two earlier. Since she was surrounded by poisons, what better method for murder than a poisoning case? And the plot?
“The whole point of a good detective story was that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would then find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it” (The New Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie).
And so became the premise of Agatha Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and the birth of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.
The book was written in 1915, but took five years to reach publication. Although Agatha made meager royalties because of the contract she had signed as a “raw and innocent author,” luckily for us, she was encouraged enough to continue penning mysteries.
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