Agatha Christie received a lot of accolades during her long writing career.

She had fans all over the world. Her books sold thousands upon thousands of copies and mostly received good reviews and in

1971 she was made a dame by the Queen for her services to literature.

But one of her most prized compliments was actually in response to her very first novel, the mysterious affair with Stiles, which was published in 1921.

This novel has the rare merit of being correctly written, a reviewer in the Pharmaceutical Journal declared.

Since this was a who-done-it with a close- in the pharmaceutical journal declared.

Since this was a who-done it with a clever unusual poisoning plot, Christie was very proud that it had been praised

and her use of science endorsed

by the prestigious academic journal published by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

Unlike other crime novelists who littered their pages with so-called untraceable poisons and mysterious compounds. It seemed to suggest

that here was a novelist who really knew her stuff when it came to chemicals that can

kill people. And indeed she did. Before Agatha Christie was a

detective novelist, she was a hospital dispenser. And her experience in that role would go on to exert a great influence over her fiction for decades to come. Welcome to She Dunnet! I'm Caroline Crampton. Agathristy wasn't exactly groomed for a high-flying career in science. Indeed, few women in Britain were when she was a teenager

in the first decade of the 20th century. University degrees for women was still a hotly contested topic within higher education

and women doctors had only really very recently won the right to qualify and practice medicine freely.

Although her older sister Madge was sent away to school, Agatha was educated at home with her parents in Devon.

According to Christie biographer Janet Morgan, her mother Clara had some rather esoteric ideas about homeschooling,

including the notion that children shouldn't be taught to read until they were eight years old,

because delay was better for the eyes

as well as the brain.

It seemed like her daughter learned anyway, becoming a voracious reader from a young age, and learning arithmetic every morning from her father after breakfast.

At the age of 13, she had a brief period of attending a school in her hometown of Torqui two days a week, and then at 15, she was sent to Paris for a year to be finished.

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