Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was born Agatha Miller in Torquay, Devon. During the First World War she served as a volunteer nurse and then in the dispensary of the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, where she gained the knowledge of drugs and poisons that she used throughout her fiction. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introduced the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot; she later created Miss Marple and wrote some sixty-six detective novels, many short stories and the play The Mousetrap (1952), which has run in London since that year. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971 and is among the best-selling novelists in history.
“Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side.”
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front in 1916, meets his old friend John Cavendish and is invited to Styles Court, the Cavendish family's country house in Essex. The house belongs for her lifetime to John's stepmother, the generous and domineering Emily Inglethorp, who has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man about twenty years younger whom the family suspect of wanting her money.
The Murder on the Links is Agatha Christie's second Hercule Poirot novel, narrated like the first by Captain Arthur Hastings. Returning from Paris on the Calais boat-train, Hastings meets a pert young actress with black curls who calls herself Cinderella.
,_bij_aankomst_op_Schiphol_me,_Bestanddeelnr_916-8898_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
