

However, a contract clause signed back in 1956 means that no one can make an English-language version of the story until six months after the show closes. Moreover, her 1952 play, The Mousetrap, is the longest-running production in theatre history and is still going strong after over 27,000 performances. With global sales around two billion, she has been translated into over 100 languages. Only William Shakespeare has sold more books than Agatha Christie. Cinema Paradiso investigates how her work has been adapted for the screen.

Today, Agatha Christie is known as 'the Queen of Crime' and is the world's biggest-selling novelist. Several companies had rejected the whodunit featuring a Belgian detective with an outsize moustache, which had been written on Dartmoor in 1916 while its author was working as an unpaid nurse in a Torquay hospital during the Great War. One hundred years ago, a London mother-to-be was trying to find a publisher for her first book.
