Welcome to the official  web site CAIUS ZIP - The Time Traveler  

	" Give me a decent bottle of poison and I’ll construct the perfect Crime."           "                                                                                                                         Paris 1906                                               Ashfield                         Agatha e Archibald Christie                                                                                                                                                            Agatha and Max Mallowan	AGATHA CHRISTIE    (1890-1976)   >> Once, a student wrote to her, requesting biographical information for a school project. She answered that what matters is what is written and not the life of who wrote it, to read the book and take his own conclusions. <<                           In the fiction book, "Caius Zip in: Einstein, Picasso,  Chaplin and Agatha", you get the chance to read about this great comedian in 1905 when he was only 16 years old, as he helps Caius and Agatha solve a crime. You can also witness the birth of the Theory of Relativity and of Cubism. Different, aren’t they?             See a PASSAGE OF THE BOOK CAIUS ZIP IN: EINSTEIN, PICASSO, AGATHA and CHAPLIN        Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, Devon, England, on the 15th of September 1890.   Her father was Frederick Alvah Miller, a rich American stockbroker and her mother was Clara Bohemer, a British aristocrat called Clara. Agatha had a sister, Margaret Frary Miller (1879-1950), called Madge, eleven years her senior, and a brother, Louis Montant Miller (1880-1929), called Monty, ten years older  than Agatha.   She was brought up in the period of the reign of Queen Victoria. At that time, Torquay had become an area for noble residents of large estates. This explains why most of her books were set in country houses. A characteristic of that period was that only boys went to school. The girls received their education at home under the care of a tutor. Agatha’s mother was not one to follow conventions and sent Madge, her eldest, to school.   At the age of four and already ahead of her time, the small future queen of crime, or lady of mystery, could already read storybooks by herself. A very curious girl, she had the habit of asking her nanny the meaning of any word she saw, like for example, on a shop window. She would memorise the words and was capable of reading phrases without knowing the letters. From these phrases, she passed onto books, becoming a voracious reader from a very early age. Agatha studied piano in her childhood and did not attend school. Her strongest influence in her studies, apart from her parents, were her nanny, her oldest sister, her brother  and her grandparents. Her father helped her in her first steps in the subject that later became her favourite, mathematics.   She loved to eat apples, especially when she was having a bath, creating her stories. She  mostly played with her puppy dog Toby and with her invisible friends. She collected toy monkeys, bought in the yearly Fair and swam in the open sea, especially on stormy days. She rode on horseback, played tennis, although not very well, and attended dance lessons. In the winter, out of the concert season in the Princess Pier, she would roller-skate with her friends.     Agatha lost her father at the age of twelve. It was a difficult period. The months that followed his death were marked by financial problems and her mother’s health problems.         She attended singing lessons in Paris, in 1906, during her adolescence. On these occasions in which she travelled for long periods of time, her family would rent her beloved house Ashfield to obtain the large sums of money required for the trip. Once, she performed in a concert and dreamed of being an opera singer but her talent for music did not comprise a harmony with her timid personality.         When they returned to England, her mother’s health worsened and the family doctor recommended she stay in a drier place than the seaside town of Torquay. They rented their house once more and Agatha and her mother spent three months in Cairo. During this season, in a place intensely frequented by British families, Agatha underwent a swift change in her personality due to the many dances she attended.        She started writing under the influence of her mother, who once stimulated her into creating a story when Agatha was bed-stricken with a terrible cold. She even doubted her capacity at one time but her mother urged her on and she eventually managed to write the story. She continued writing with the encouragement of Eden Phillpotts, a playwright, friend of the family and neighbour. When she was famous, she said she had had a lot of fun writing melancholic stories in which most of the characters died.    During the First World War, Agatha was a volunteer at a hospital in Torquay, where she acquired familiarity with poisons that would be very valuable in the future.   She met colonel Archibald Christie of the Royal Flying Corps whom, after years of a long distance courtship, she eventually married after the war, becoming known as Agatha Christie.    Her first and only child, Rosalind, was born five years later.     The British author used to read many detective stories, like those written by Connan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Edgar Alan Poe and Gaston Leroux. Through these stories, she would improvise mysteries with her sister, Madge.  She wrote her first detective novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles”, as a result of a challenge set by her sister that said she was incapable of writing a detective story. It seems that her sister was calling her bluff but Agatha took the challenge seriously. The book was published in 1920, after having been turned down by half a dozen editors     In 1926, after an average of one book a year, she wrote her masterpiece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by the editor Collins and marked the beginning of an author-editor relationship that lasted 50 years and produced 70 books. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first book to be dramatized, under the name of Alibi, and to be a success in the London West End. .        Agatha’s life suffered a serious overturn with the death of her mother in 1936. She left for the country with her daughter and her husband stayed in London. During this time, her husband abandoned her for another woman, leaving her utterly devastated. It has been recorded that she disappeared for a time and was eventually found in a hotel in which she had registered under the name of her husband’s lover, Tessa Neele, claiming to be suffering from a short spell of amnesia. She kept her husbands surname, as it was already a trademark on her books. She wrote twelve plays, a collection of stories and more than sixty detective novels. Her most successful stage play was “The Mousetrap” (an adaptation of her story “Three Blind Mice”), in London. It is still running to this day and became the longest-running play in the English language.   She also wrote 19 plays and six romance novels under the name, Mary Westmacott.     Many years later, she remarried. He was a professor of archaeology called, Max Mallowan, who was more than ten years younger than her. She accompanied him on his archaeological expeditions and wrote travel narratives using her married name, Agatha Christie Mallowan. Some of her detective novels also derive from these expeditions like, “Death on the Nile”, “Murder in Mesopotamia”, “Appointment with Death” and “Death Comes as the End”.        In her detective novels, the crimes are solved through the use of behavioural psychology.   For this, she created the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, inspired from a neighbour, a character of short stature, with black hair and a very well-groomed moustache. His companion is captain Hastings.  To solve the crimes, he calls upon his acute sense of reasoning and talks of "little grey cells in the brain ".   Another of the detectives created by Agatha is Miss Jane Marple, a caricature of the British elderly woman, who lives in the country in St. Mary Mead. By mere coincidence, she is always close to places where crimes occur and, through psychological parallel with the people of St Mary Mead, she finds the murderer, always one step ahead of the police. Agatha Christie’s books present clues with the mathematical rigour that make the suspense all the more elaborate.   They are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that must be pieced together by joining the different clues that appear throughout the book. And it is not always easy to distinguish a clue from coincidence. The author once revealed that she begins her books from the murder. She then studies the way in which it occurred and the motives. Only then does she scatter the false and genuine clues. The unexpected is always present in her detective novels, like killing all the characters, making all the suspects participants in the murder and making the murderer be none other than the narrator of the story.      Agatha died in her home, in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, on the 12th of January 1976. After a private ceremony, she was buried in St. Mary’s Churchyard, in Cholsey, Oxon.       Since 1920, more than a billion copies have been made of her books. They have been translated into many languages. After the bible, Agatha is the second most translated author.