Agatha Christie sold two billion books and created two of fiction’s most enduring detectives. Her real life held bigger mysteries — an eleven-day disappearance that baffled Scotland Yard, wartime poison expertise, and archaeological adventures across the Middle East.

This episode traces Christie from her sheltered Torquay childhood through two world wars, a painful divorce, and the quiet discipline behind sixty-six novels. Her genius was the architecture of deception, and her own life proved she understood misdirection better than anyone.

• Her pharmacy work in both World Wars made her fictional poisonings medically accurate
• Her 1926 disappearance triggered a manhunt with 15,000 volunteers and remains unexplained
• She published six romance novels under the pen name Mary Westmacott
• The Mousetrap has run continuously in London since 1952