'There's been a lot of nonsense written about it over the years, but the truth is we don't really know what happened,' says Dr John Curran, author of the recently published Agatha Christie's Complete Secret Notebooks. Ninety years after Christie's disappearance, the reasons for her actions remain obscure. After all, she had checked in at the hotel in the Yorkshire spa town using the surname Neele. Although she maintained that she had been suffering from amnesia, there were those who believed that it had been a publicity stunt or that she had staged the whole thing to get revenge on her philandering spouse. When it was revealed that Agatha was very much alive and had spent the time at a hotel in Harrogate, there was an outcry. The police suspected foul play, the prime suspect being Christie's husband Archie, a former airman who wanted to divorce 36-year-old Agatha and marry his mistress, Nancy Neele. Thousands joined in the search, and the story even made the front page of the New York Times. Over the next 10 days, the police undertook a huge operation to find her. One December night in 1926, Christie slipped out of her house in Berkshire, drove her car to a beauty spot in Surrey and vanished. And later this year sees the release of an all-star, big-screen version of Murder on the Orient Express (with Kenneth Branagh, its director, as Poirot), and it's been reported that there are two biopics in the works, one with Alicia Vikander and another with Emma Stone, said to focus on an unsolved mystery with the crime writer at its heart.
After the success of And Then There Were None and The Witness for the Prosecution, the BBC has commissioned seven new productions of the author's novels. In fact, over 40 years after her death, the Queen of Crime continues to sell 3-4m copies each year around the world, and new adaptations of her works are scheduled to appear on both the small and the silver screen. Stephen King (300m) and Dan Brown (200m) are also small fry compared to the extraordinary career of Agatha Christie, whose novels, featuring characters like Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, are estimated to have sold up to 4bn copies. Neither is it the late Barbara Cartland, the prolific writer of romantic fiction who is estimated to have sold between 500m and 1bn copies.
Who do you think is the bestselling novelist of all time? It's not JK Rowling, whose sales are thought to be at the 450-500m mark.
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