Agatha christie (1891-1976)

English detective novelist and playwright whose books have sold more than 100,000,000 copies.

Educated at home by her mother, she began writing detective fiction while working as a nurse during World War I. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced Hercule Poirot, her eccentric and egotistic Belgian detective, who reappeared in about 25 novels and many shorter stories before returning to Styles, where in Curtain (1975) he died. The elderly spinster Miss Jane Marple, her other principal detective figure, first appeared in Murder at the Vicarage (1930). Christie's first major recognition came with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which was followed by some 75 novels that usually made best-seller lists and were serialized in popular magazines in England and the United States. Her plays include The Mousetrap (1952), which set a world record for the longest continuous run at one theatre (8,862 performances – more than 21 years – at the Ambassadors Theatre, London) and then moved to another theatre; and Witness for the Prosecution (1953), which, like many of her works, was adapted into a very successful film (1958). Other notable film adaptations include Murder on the Orient Express (1934; 1974) and Death on the Nile (1937; 1978).

Agatha Christie domesticated murder perhaps no other author had done before or since and transformed it into nothing more perilous than an intrigue game of chess or a satisfactory crossword puzzle. All her life she abhorred violence and blood and constantly confessed that she had no knowledge of the usual implements used for murder. "I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse."

Her first marriage, to Colonel Archibald Christie, ended in divorce in 1928. After her marriage in 1930 to the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, she spent several months each year on expeditions in Iraq and Syria with him. She also wrote romantic, nondetective novels, such as Absent in the Spring (1944), under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Her Autobiography (1977) appeared posthumously. She was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1971.

Archibald joseph cronin (1896-1981)

Scottish novelist and physician whose works combining realism with social criticism won a large Anglo-American readership.

Cronin was educated at the University of Glasgow and served as a surgeon in the Royal Navy during World War I. He practiced in South Wales (1921-24) and then, as medical inspector of mines, investigated occupational diseases in the coal industry. He opened medical practice in London in 1926 but quitted because of ill health, using his leisure to write his first novel, Hatter's Castle (1931; filmed 1941), the story of a Scottish hatmaker obsessed with the idea of the possibility of his noble birth. This book was an immediate success in Britain.

Cronin's fourth novel, The Stars Look Down (1935; filmed 1939), which chronicles various social injustices in a North England mining community from 1903 to 1933, gained him an international reader­ship. It was followed by The Citadel (1937; filmed 1938), which showed how private physicians' greed can distort good medical practice. The Keys of the Kingdom (1942; filmed 1944), about a Roman Catholic missionary in China, was one of his most popular books. Cronin's subsequent novels include The Green Years (1944; filmed 1946), Shannon's Way (1948), The Judas Tree (1961), and A Song of Sixpence (1964). One of his more interesting late works is A Thing of Beauty (1956), a study of a gifted young painter who must break free of middle-class conventions to realize his potential.

Cronin's strengths were his narrative skill and his powers of acute observation and graphic description. Though labeled a successful middlebrow novelist, he managed to create in The Stars Look Down a classic work of 20th-century British fiction.