Performed 28 & 29 November 2003 at Forest Community Centre, Walthamstow

Agatha Miller was born in Torquay, England on 15 September 1890. She married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps in 1914. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind, before their divorce in 1928. In a writing career that spanned more than half a century.

Agatha Christie wrote 79 novels and short story collections. She wrote over a dozen plays including the longest continuously running play in theatrical history The Mousetrap, which opened in London on 25 November 1952.

Miss Jane Maple first appeared in print with The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930 and did not make her dramatic debut until some decades after that. When she did finally appear it was television, not film, that introduced the elderly sleuth of St. Mary Mead to mass audiences. Goodyear Playhouse presented an hour-long adaptation on American television of A Murder Is Announced on 30 December 1956, with Gracie Fields, as the rather unlikely Miss Marple although there were stranger incarnations to come. In her first cinematic outing, Christie's genteel village spinster was nearly unrecognizable in an uproarious comic portrayal by the zaftig play, written in 1950, was first presented at the Theatre Royal, Brighton; and subsequently at the Vaudeville Theatre London, on 21 September 1977, with Dulcie Gray as Miss Marple.

Known as the Queen of Crime, she is the world's best-known mystery writer. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the England language and another billion in over 45 foreign languages. She is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She has been widely dramatized in feature films and television. And Then There Were None (1945), Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Murder on the Nile (1978) are a few of the successful films based on her works.

Before her death on 12 January 1976 she had achieved her country's highest honor when she received the Order of Dame Commander of the British Empire.