Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was born into an upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon. 

A precocious reader from the age of four, she began writing fiction as a young woman, while enjoying a vibrant social life of dances and amateur theatrical performances. 

During the Great War, she served with the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross, first as a nurse and later in a dispensary, gaining the knowledge of poisons that would prove so useful in her fiction. 

, was written in 1916 and published in 1920. It introduced Hercule Poirot, inspired in part by Belgian refugees then living in Torquay. The novel launched Christie’s career, and she went on to become the ‘Queen of Crime’ and one of the defining authors of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. She helped define the detective story as an intellectual puzzle: a game for the reader rather than a melodrama, in which the truth lies hidden almost in plain sight beneath a tangled web of social relationships.