Christie died peacefully on 12 January 1976 at age 85 from natural causes at her home at Winterbrook House.^[75][76] When her death was announced, two West End theatres – the St. Martin's, where The Mousetrap was playing, and the Savoy, which was home to a revival of Murder at the Vicarage – dimmed their outside lights in her honour.^{[29]: 373}  She was buried in the nearby churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey, in a plot she had chosen with her husband 10 years before. The simple funeral service was attended by about 20 newspaper and TV reporters, some having travelled from as far away as South America. 30 wreaths adorned Christie's grave, including one from the cast of her long-running play The Mousetrap and one sent "on behalf of the multitude of grateful readers" by the Ulverscroft Large Print Book Publishers.^[77]

Mallowan, who remarried in 1977, died in 1978 and was buried next to Christie.^[78] Most of English detective novelist ans playwright

Agatha Christie always said that she had no ambition to be a writer although she made her debut in print at the age of eleven with a poem printed in a local London newspaper. Finding herself in bed with influenza, her mother suggested she write down the stories she was so fond of telling. And so a lifelong passion began. By her late teens she had had several poems published in The Poetry Review and had written a number of short stories. But it was her sister’s challenge to write a detective story that would later spark what would become her illustrious career.

Agatha Christie wrote about the world she knew and saw, drawing on the military gentlemen, lords and ladies, spinsters, widows and doctors of her family’s circle of friends and acquaintances. She was a natural observer and her descriptions of village politics, local rivalries and family jealousies are often painfully accurate. Mathew Prichard describes her as a “person who listened more than she talked, who saw more than she was seen.”

The most everyday events and casual observations could trigger the idea for a new plot. Her second book The Secret Adversary stemmed from a conversation overheard in a tea shop: “Two people were talking at a table nearby, discussing somebody called Jane Fish… That, I thought, would make a good beginning to a story — a name overheard at a tea shop — an unusual name, so that whoever heard it remembered it. A name like Jane Fish, or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better.”

"My own ten would certainly vary from time to time because every now and then I re-read an early book for some particular reason, to answer a question that has been asked me perhaps, and then I alter my opinion – sometimes thinking it is much better than I thought it was – or not so good as I had thought.

At the moment my own list would possibly be:

And Then There Were None – a difficult technique which was a challenge and so I enjoyed it, and I think dealt with it satisfactorily.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - a general favourite.

A Murder is Announced – I thought all the characters interesting to write about and felt I knew them quite well by the time the book was finished.

Murder on the Orient Express – again because it was a new idea for a plot.

The Thirteen Problems – a good series of stories.

Towards Zero – I found it interesting to work on the idea of people from different places coming towards a murder, instead of starting with the murder and working from that.

Endless Night – my own favourite at present.

Crooked House – I found a study of a certain family interesting to explore.

Ordeal By Innocence - an idea I had had for some time before starting to work upon it.

The Moving Finger – which I have re-read lately and enjoyed reading it again, very much."