Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie, besides being a hugely prolific writer, even dabbling with romances, is also synonymous with the whodunit. She is ranked as the best selling novelist of all time only beat out by God and Shakespeare, with her characters of Poirot and Miss Marple being the most famous amateur sleuths of all time, though Poirot would object to the "amateur" title. Christie's play, The Mousetrap, is the longest running play in history, seeing as it hasn't closed since it's opening in 1952. The play is unique because to appease Christie's hatred of spoilers, theater goers are asked not to reveal the ending before they depart.
While her books have nice tidy endings, Christie's life contains a great mystery, in that on December 3rd, 1926, Christie disappeared for nine days. While she showed up at a hotel registered under another name, the public outcry and the fact that the reason for her disappearance was never explained has added an extra air of mystery to the Queen of Crime. Was it the failure of her marriage, or as Doctor Who suggests, a giant alien bee, we will never know.
Besides her writing, she had a lifelong love of archaeology. She spent many seasons in the Middle East on the sites managed by her second husband Max Mallowan. Her love of archaeology also played into several of her novels, Death on the Nile probably being the most famous. But with a writer like Christie, "most famous" is really a matter of personal opinion, as all her books are read and re-read and are still being adapted and loved till this day. She is the Gold Standard of Golden Age Mysteries.
