The Scoop and Behind The Screen

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.... According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly four billion copies, and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the most widely published books. According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most translated individual author, with only the collective corporate works of Walt Disney Productions surpassing her. Her books have been translated into at least 103 languages. Agatha Christie published two autobiographies: a posthumous one covering childhood to old age; and another chronicling several seasons of archaeological excavation in Syria and Iraq with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan.
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E. C. Bentley was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. One of the best known is this : Born in London, and educated at St Paul's School and Merton College, Oxford,... Edmund's father John Edmund Bentley, was professionally a civil servant but was also a rugby union international having played in the first ever international match for England against Scotland in 1871. Bentley worked as a journalist on several newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph. His first published collection of poetry, titled Biography for Beginners , popularized the clerihew form; it was followed by two other collections, in 1929 and 1939. His detective novel, Trent's Last Case , was much praised, numbering Dorothy L. Sayers among its admirers, and with its labyrinthine and mystifying plotting can be seen as the first truly modern mystery. It was adapted as a film in 1920, 1929, and 1952. The success of the work inspired him, after 23 years, to write a sequel, Trent's Own Case .
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Dorothy Leigh Sayers was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between World War I and World War II that... feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. However, Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work. She is also known for her plays and essays. Sayers, an only child, was born on 13 June 1893 at the Head Master's House, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, where her father, the Rev. Henry Sayers, M.A., was chaplain of Christ Church and headmaster of the Choir School. She grew up in the tiny village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdonshire, after her father was given the living there as rector.
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Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was an English priest, theologian and writer, including crime novels and regular broadcasts for BBC Radio. Knox had attended Eton College, and he won several scholarships at Balliol College, Oxford. Knox was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1912 and was appointed chaplain... of Trinity College, Oxford, but he left in 1917 to convert to Catholicism. In 1918 he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. Ronald Knox wrote many books of essays and novels. Directed by the Catholic clergy, he re-translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into English, using Hebrew and Greek sources, beginning in 1936. Ronald Knox was born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, England into an Anglican family. His father was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, who became the Bishop of Manchester. The young Knox was educated at Eton College, where he took the first scholarship in 1900 and Balliol College, Oxford, where again he won the first classics scholarship in 1905.
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Anthony Berkeley Cox was an English crime writer. He wrote under several pen-names, including Francis Iles, Anthony Berkeley and A. Monmouth Platts. Berkeley was born in Watford, England, and educated at Sherborne School and University College London. After serving in the Army in World War I, he... worked as a journalist for many years, contributing to such magazines as Punch and The Humorist. In 1938 he took up book reviewing for John O'London's Weekly and the Daily Telegraph, writing under his pen name Francis Iles. He also wrote for the Sunday Times in the 1940s and for the Manchester Guardian, later The Guardian, from the mid 1950s until 1970.
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Clemence Dane was the pseudonym of Winifred Ashton , an English novelist and playwright. After completing her education, she went to Switzerland to work as a French tutor, but returned home after a year. She studied art in London and Germany. After the First World War, she taught at a girls’... school, and began writing. She took the pseudonym "Clemence Dane" from the church, St Clement Danes on the Strand, London. Her first novel Regiment of Women was written in 1917, a study of life in a girls' school. In 1919 she wrote Legend, the story of a group of acquaintances who debate the meaning of a dead friend's life and work. Dane's 1921 play, A Bill of Divorcement, tells the story of a daughter who cares for her deranged father. In 1932 the smash hit play was adapted for film starring Katharine Hepburn and John Barrymore. Dane began writing screenplays as well as novels. She co-wrote the screenplay for Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo.
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Freeman Wills Crofts was an Irish mystery author, one of the 'Big Four' of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Crofts was born at 26 Waterloo Road, Dublin, Ireland. His father had the same name as he, Freeman Wills Crofts, and was a surgeon-lieutenant in the Army Medical Service, but he died of... fever in Honduras before the young Freeman Wills Crofts was born. His mother, née Celia Frances Wise, re-married the Venerable Jonathan Harding, Vicar of Gilford, County Down, and Archdeacon of Dromore, and Crofts was brought up in the Gilford vicarage. He attended Methodist College and Campbell College in Belfast. In 1912 he married Mary Bellas Canning, daughter of the manager of a local bank in Coleraine. In 1896, at the age of seventeen, Crofts was apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Berkeley Deane Wise, who was chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. In 1899 Crofts was appointed Junior Assistant on the construction of the Londonderry and Strabane Extension of the Donegal Railway. In 1900 he became District Engineer at Coleraine for the L.M.S.
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Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole, CBE was an English novelist. A prolific writer, he published thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, two plays and three volumes of memoirs. His skill at scene-setting, his vivid plots, his high profile as a lecturer and his driving ambition brought him a large... readership in the United Kingdom and North America. A best-selling author in the 1920s and 1930s, his works have been neglected since his death. Walpole was born in Auckland, New Zealand, the eldest of three children of the Rev George Henry Somerset Walpole , Canon of St Mary's Cathedral, Auckland and his wife, Mildred Helen née Barham . Walpole was educated at a series of boarding schools in England, principally at Truro School for two years, the King's School, Canterbury for two years and as a day boy for four years at Durham School, when his father was principal of Bede College at the university. Walpole's popular character Jeremy lived in the cathedral town of Polchester in Glebeshire, an amalgam of Truro and Durham, which featured in many of his later books.
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