Author. She gained international fame as an English mystery writer, credited with 66 best-selling novels and 14 collections of short stories. She was the youngest daughter of Frederick Alvah and Clarissa Miller, she was mainly educated at home by her mother, and attended a girl's private school for a couple of years before going to Paris as a teenager to study singing and piano. Her grandfather Nathaniel Miller, was a self-made man, earning in his lifetime a fortune, which he left to her father. Her father's occupation, according to her birth certificate, was a "gentleman" or socialite. Her writing career began with the publication of "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" in 1920, in which she introduced Hercule Poirot, a fictional Belgian detective. The Hercule Poirot character was extremely successful and appeared in a long-running made-for-television series as well as several films including her 1937 "Death on the Nile" in a 2022 film. She first gained recognition after the publication of Detective Poirot's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" in 1926, which followed with "Murder on the Orient Express" in 1934, and the last, "The Curtain", in 1975 for a total of 25 novels and short stories. In 15 of her novels, she introduced in 1930 Miss Marple, an elderly amateur sleuth character, who lived in a quiet English village. Besides her mysteries, she wrote over a dozen plays, including the long-running 1975 play, "The Mousetrap," and six romantic novels under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Her books, which have sold over a billion copies in the English language and over a billion in foreign languages, have only been outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare according to her website. She married Colonel Archibald Christie in 1914, had a daughter in 1919 before the couple divorced in 1928. After a very publicized divorce, she continued to author under her married name of Christie. In 1930, she married noted English archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, whom she often accompanied to excavation sites in Syria and Iraq. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1971. Her "Autobiography" was posthumously published in 1977.