Christie's six-decade-long career reaped many awards and public honors. She received the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award in 1955, and she is still listed on the Mystery Writers of America Top 100 list. Her books are the third-most-read works in the world (after the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare), selling a record-setting 2 billion copies worldwide, and have been translated into more than 59 languages.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on September 15, 1890, in the fashionable Devon, England, seaside holiday resort of Torquay. Her father, Fred Miller, was a handsome and wealthy American who married his step-cousin, Clarissa Boehmer, an upper-middleclass Englishwoman, in 1878.

After years of education, travel, and many suitors, Agatha married Lieutenant Archie Christie in 1914. Two years later, she wrote her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which was published in 1920. The work introduced one of her most enduring and popular characters: Detective Hercule Poirot.

In 1926 Christie's mother, her greatest influence, died, and her husband left her for another woman. In 1928 she met and fell in love with Max Mallowan, an archaeologist 14 years her junior, on her first trip aboard the Orient. They married later that same year.

Christie's writing has constantly been adapted by filmmakers and television and theatrical producers since the 1930s. The Mousetrap is the longest-running play in the history of theater, and still runs today in London's West End. Film versions of Witness for the Prosecution and And Then There Were None have become classics.

But it was the 1974 feature film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express, directed by Sidney Lumet, that garnered unprecedented success. The film set a box-office record for British films and boasted an all-star cast that included Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, and Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. It was nominated for six Academy Awards and earned a Best Supporting Actress award for Ingrid Bergman. Agatha Christie died two years after her Hollywood success, on January 12, 1976. She was 85 years old.

Murder on the Orient Express was influenced by two historical events: a disaster involving the actual Orient Express train, and the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the infant son of aviator-hero Charles Lindbergh and his millionaire heiress wife, Anne. Inspired by these contemporary events, Christie wove an intriguing tale about an American millionaire who is found murdered in his berth on the luxury train en route from Istanbul to Paris.