Agatha Christie is remembered today as the queen of crime fiction, the author of one hundred eighty-four works of detective fiction and thirteen plays. Born on Sept. 15, 1890 to an aristocratic American father and his English wife, the pretty socialite became a Volunteer Aid Detachment nurse. By 1956, the author became a Commander of the British Empire and, in 1971 she was named a Dame of the British Empire.
