"ALL ABOARD! THE AGATHA CHRISTIE CENTENNIAL IS ROLLING

Lead: Mathew Prichard, Agatha christie´s grandson, is remembering an evening he spent with his grandmother in the late 1950´s.
" We were at a dinner-dance together" Mr. Prichard recalls, "at a table with 10 orr 12 people, and at one point everyone got up, to dance or to table hop. My grandmother and I were talking with someone across the room when she suddenly  pointed back at our vacant table. "There you are", she said. " That´s how I invented the plot for  Sparkling Cyanide". We´ve left the table. Everybody´s got two wine glasses. When we come back, there´s no way to know if the same glasses will be in front of the ame people. it would be so easy for somebody at our table, or to another table, to exchange glasses and put poison in one. " That was the kind of acute observation her plots arose from."

Plots and puzzles:
Mr. Prichard is on the telephone from the wales talking about his famous grandmother because today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the mystery writer whose skillful plots and clever literary puzzles have delighted millions upon millions of readers around the world for most of this century. Agatha Christie (her parents named her Agatha Clarissa  Miller; the Christie unnoticed, and neither will her birthday.

In this country, the Putnam Berkley Publishing group is issuing commemorative papaerback editions of many of her novels; in England, Collins publishers has issued limited hard-cover editions of some her books and put new covers on the papaerback. Madame Tussaud´s in London has spifed up its Agatha Christie wax display, with some of her clothes and her eyeglasses provided by Mr. Prichard; there is now Agatha Christie rose, a new hybrid named after her at the Chelsea Flower Show, and there are also official Agatha Christie centennial plates, boutonnieres, paperweights and coffee mugs.

In the United States this month, the Free Press is publishing " Agatha Christie, the woman and her mysteries," a biography by Gillian C. Gill. In December, Harpercollins, wich last year bought paperback rights to 33 Christie titles beginning in October 1991 for $9,6 million, is coming out with "Agatha Christie", a tribute that includes accounts by friends and colleagues and articles by Christie´s daughter and by Mr. Prichard.

And today at 10 A.M., the venice Simplon Orient-Expresss is scheduled to pull out of Victoria Station in London and head for Torquay, Devon, Christie´s birthplace, and the Mystery on the English Riviera Festival, a gala that includes a fireworks display and an Agatha Christie banquet. On the train is to be Daved Suchet, who has portrayed Christie´s best-knownn male detective, the Belgian investigator Hercule Poirtot, on public television in recent years. He is to be met at the Torquay station by Joan Hickson, who has done the same for Christies´s most famous female sleuth, Miss Jane Marple.

A Theatrical Record:
This much ado about Christie is not without cause. Consider the statics ( as provided by Mr. Prichard ). she wrote 78 crime novels (including "The murder of roger Ackroyd," "Murder on the Orient Express" and " And Then There were None"), 19 plays, 6 romantic novels under the name Mary Westmacott and 4 nonfiction works, including her autobiography. Her play " The Mousetrap" has been running in London for 38 years, making it the longest running show in the history of the English-speaking stage.

There have been more than a score of movies based on her books, including "Witness for the Prosecution", "Murder on the Orient Express", Rene Clair´s 1945 adaptation of " And then they were none" and "Death on the Nile". Peter Ustinov and Margaret Rutherford are among those who have large- screen life to Poirot and Miss Marple. There have also been more than a score of television shows. In addition to Poirot and Miss Marples, her otfer sleuhs included Harley Quin and Mr. Satter-thwaite, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Parker Pyne, sir Edward Palliser and Inspector Evans of Scotland Yard.

Christie´s popularity is enduring: when she died in 1976, her books had sold 400 million copies worlwide; today the figure is more than a billion copies in English and another billion in more than 40 other languages. Her British publisher says that only Shakespeare and the Bible have sold more copies. Mr. Pichard, who is chairman of agatha Christie Ltd., which controls the rights to almost all of her works, says that royalty earnings this year are expected to be about  $5 million.

"They Seem Timeless"
"Our agent has been predicting for the last 15 years that the royalties must fall off sometime" Mr. Prichard says. "But so far he´s been wrong".
what accounts for the popularity? "The books don´t date", Mr. Prichard says. "I once challenged someone to read a book by my grandmother from the 1930´s, and then read ones from the 40´s, 50´s and 60´s, and tell me which decad each had been written in. Most people would fail tha test. It doesn ´t matter when they were written. They seem timeless, just as appropiate in the 1990´s as in the 1930´s."

Chrsitie´s first mystery novel: "The mysterious Affair at Styles," which introduced Poirot, was published in 1920. She wrote in her autobiography that she first thought of the idea of writing while her husband was serving in World War I and she was working at a Red Cross hospital in England. Her sister Madge had challenged her years before to write one, and "on duty alone in the afternoon with hardly anything to do but sit about," she began considering what kind of detective story to write. "Since I was surrounded by poisons," she wrote " perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method I selected." Her novel was rejected by a number of publushers before it was accepted by Bodley Head.

It was six years later, thought, on May 27, 1926, when "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" was published, that she began to receive recognition, because of that novel´s ingenious and unexpected ending. The solution surprised readers and led to a debate about whether she has been fair with them (most felt she had).

The missing 10 days.
But it was a real-life event in December of that year, with an even more unusual twist, that made her a household name. Suddenly, and without explanation, christie disappeared for 10 days.
She abandoned her car and vanished without a trace. Newspapers in Britain and the rest of the world gave great play to the story. What happened has never been fully revealed - for the rest of her life, she refused to discuss her disappearance - but most accounts report that, upset  had an attack of amnesia. She was found, after an intensive search over land, sea and air by thousands of police officers and soldiers, registered at a hotel in Yorkshire under the name of the woman who eventually became her husband´s second wife. Becauseof the publibity, sales of her books skyrocketed and newspapers serialized her stories.

Despite Christie´s popularity, critics were at times less than enthuasistic about the quality of her work. The mystery novelist Julian Simons said that she "wrote badly", "thought he admired her ingenuity. Her books, he wrote, " sya something about manners but nothing about life."

And the poet and novelist Robert Graves declared that "her English is schoolgirlish, her situations for the most part artificial, her detail faulty." christie herself once even said that she was a "sausage machine" and that she wrote exclusively for money.

Red Herrings by the School.
those who admired her work largely said her forte was her extremely adroit ploing and her sharp, believable charectirazations: that for her, the puzzle and the detective were the things that counted. In a typical christie tale, a murder, often bloodless, will be comitted in a setting populated primarily by the leisure class, in a stately mansion. perhaps, or on the Orient Express. One of her trademark detectives will come along, puzzle through a plethora of red herrings and come up with the proper solution.

"The very best Christies are like a magician´s tricks." Mr. Symons wrote in 1975, "not only in the breathtaking sleights of phrase that deceive us but also in the way that, looking back afterward, we find the tricks to have been handled so that our deceit is partly self- induced."

Whatever caveats the critics may have had, however, almost all have agreed that she deserved er popularity. Her colleague in crime, Margery Allingham, said in 1950 that Christie has entertained "more people for more hours at a time than almost any other writer of her generatiom.

By Merevyn Rothstein ( New York Times, September 1990)



                                          
               
               

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