The Best Selling Novelist of All Time

Agatha Christie courtesy http://www.twincities.com/2016/11/16/minneapolis-theater-round-agatha-christie-murder-on-the-nile.

My husband Rob and daughter Jacqueline used to play a video mystery game called Murder on the Orient Express based on the famous novel written by Agatha Christie.  More recently, they played Death on the Nile.  Currently they are playing Evil Under the Sun.  These games peaked Jacqueline's interest and she started searching our bookshelves for Rob's old Agatha Christie Novels.  Last night she begged to stay up later so she could read Murder on the Orient Express.  How could I say no?  I mentioned to her that Daddy and I watched the movie of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a few years ago.  The movie was filmed in 1972 but I didn't realize that the book was first published in 1934.  "It's almost as old as Grandpa!" I said to Jacqueline.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_First_Edition_Cover_1934.jpg

It turns out that Rob has ten of the Agatha Christie mysteries, but the famous author wrote at least 66 detective novels.  In fact, she is the most widely published novelist in history, only outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare.  For a complete list of Christie's novels, visit http://www.agathachristie.com/stories.

https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Body_in_the_Library_Miss_Marple.html?id=Xr0XqQoyc0AC&source=kp_cover&redir_esc=y

Agatha Christie's main character Hercule Poirot could have been inspired by someone she met while attending school in France where she learned how to speak fluent French.  One source, however, says that Christie's character was inspired by a Belgian gendarme she met in Britain after he fled the Germans during the First World War.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10825492/Poirot-unmasked-the-Belgian-refugee-who-inspired-Agatha-Christie-character.html

https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Crackd-Side-Mystery-Mysteries/dp/0062073672

Agatha Christie served as a nurse during the First World War.  Her knowledge of poisons, which she learned at the time, could have been used in any one of the 83 poisonings in her books.  For instance, cyanide features in The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side, And Then There Were None, A Pocket Full of Rye and Sparkling Cyanide.  Kathryn Harkup writes about this in her book A is for Arsenic:  The Poisons of Agatha Christie https://bookshop.theguardian.com/catalog/product/view/id/323440/. 

 

https://covers.openlibrary.org/w/id/3451-M.jpg

 

Agatha Christie travelled widely through Europe and Africa.  She participated in archeological digs in the Middle East with her second husband Max Mallowan which inspired many book titles.  While on digs, Mallowan discovered artifacts as old as 3000 years.  Christie, always conscious of the fact that she was 15 years older than her husband, used her face cream to clean the artifacts.  As archeologist Charlotte Trumpler explained:  "Christie was of course fascinated by puzzles, by the little archeological fragments, and she had a gift for piecing them together patiently." http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/03/12/uk.christie.writer.archaeology/ Her novel, Murder in Mesopotamia, with an archeologist as the culprit, was the result of these digs.  

Christie helped husband Mallowan uncover the lost city of Nimrud in the late 1940's and early 1950's courtesy http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4095210/Photographer-Mesopotamia-Incredible-pictures-taken-Agatha-Christie-reveal-helped-uncover-Iraq-s-lost-city-Nimrud-archaeologist-husband-writing-detective-novels.html.

William Lyon Phelps The Pleasure of Books

"If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including things that other people are certain are impossible." (William Lyon Phelps)

Yale University's William Lyon Phelps taught the first course about the modern novel.  He penned many books including the Advance of the English Novel.  Professor Phelps was also blessed with the gift of oratory.  In April of 1933, a month before the famous Berlin Book Burnings, he delivered this address, titled "The Pleasure of Books".  

Here is an excerpt from his speech:

"Books are for use, not for show; you should own no book that you are not afraid to mark up, or are afraid to place on the table, wide open and face down.  A good reason for marking favourite passages in books is that this practice enables you to remember more easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly, and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once blazed a trail.

Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; the instinct of private property, which is fundamental in human beings, can here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils.  One should have one's own bookshelves...The knowledge that they are all there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing.  You do not have to read them all.  Most of my indoor life is spent in a room containing six thousand books.  And I have a stock answer to the invariable question that comes from strangers:  'Have you read all of these books?'  'Some of them twice.'  This reply is both true and unexpected.

Books are of the people, for the people, by the people.  Literature is the immortal part of history; it is the best and most enduring part of personality.  In a private library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy.  And therre is no doubt in these books you see these men at their best.  They laid themselves out; they did their ultimate best to entertain you, to make a favourable impression.  You are necessary to them as an audience is to an actor, only instead of seeing them masked, you look into their innermost heart of heart." (http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/phelps.htm)

http://www.phelpsfamilyhistory.com/bios/william_lyon_phelps.asp

Love Poetry

"Love isn't something you find.  It's something that finds you." (Loretta Young)

From Shakespeare to Bono, love has been written about since Biblical times.  Here are eight poems about love:

1.  Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare http://www.poemofquotes.com/williamshakespeare/sonnet-116.php.

2.  A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns http://www.poetrysoup.com/famous/poem/122/a_red_red_rose.

3.  Maud by Alfred Lord Tennyson http://www.poemofquotes.com/alfredtennyson/maud.php.

4.  I am Not Yours by Sara Teasdale http://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/i-am-not-yours-by-sara-teasdale.

5.  How do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/how-do-i-love-thee-sonnet-43.

6.  They Flee from Me by Thomas Wyatt http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174858.

7.  I loved You First by Christina Rosetti http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180859.

8.  Brown Penny by William Butler Yeats http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/william_butler_yeats/poems/10173.

http://www.brainyquote.com/photos/l/lorettayoung195830.jpg