More mystery

As a teenager, I was an avid reader of the mysteries of Agatha Christie (1890-1976). I read as many of her 70+ novels and short story collections as I could get my hands on. Guess what? There are two more Hercule Poirot stories! "The Capture of Cerberus" and "The Mystery of the Dog's Ball" were deciphered (apparently her handwriting was terrible) by John Curran after he found them in a mass of family papers at one of her former homes. They have been published in a book due out next month, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making, but one of them is being serialized in the Daily Mail.

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Christie was born Agatha Miller in Torquay, Devon, England. She married aviator Archibald Christie in 1914 and had a daughter in 1918, but her life was a mystery itself for 11 days in 1926, after Archie - who was having an affair with another woman - asked her for a divorce. Already upset by the death of her mother, the missing writer was found suffering from amnesia in a hotel room. Her 2nd marriage to prominent British archaeologist Max Malloran in 1930 was a success. He was later knighted and she was honored as Dame of the British Empire. She died of natural causes in Cholsey, Oxfordshire, and is buried in the local churchyard. She published her first novel in 1920 and her books - outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare - have sold 4 billion copies and have been translated into 100 languages.