The detective story was more or less invented by Edgar Allen Poe, but he more or less lost interest with the genre and moved on, with the next leading practitioner being Arthur Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes tales. It was about thirty-three years before Agatha Christie entered the detective mystery field, and she wound up becoming one of the most well-known English authors of the twentieth century. Her success was so extraordinary she became the bestselling novelist of all time, with only the Bible and Shakespeare exceeding her sales.
Her accomplishments often came in unusual fashion, as she would be walking down a street and a plot idea would come to her. All this had begun when she had a poem published in a local London newspaper when she was only four years old. Remarkable, yes, but the extremely early beginning led to her tremendous success. She finally created a play, The Mousetrap, that began in 1952 and had more than 27,000 performances before being finally halted in mid-March, 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. For now, let’s listen to one of her creations for the infamous Belgian detective/investigator Hercule Poirot. You can rest assured we’ll find out “whodunnit.”
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