Over 100 years of Mystery.

January 2020 marked 100 years since Agatha Christie’s famous detective novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in the United Kingdom. It was her first novel and was born from a dare by her sister Madge to write a story. Agatha began writing the novel whilst working in a dispensary at Torquay's Red Cross Hospital during the First World War, and it became the first of around 66 mystery novels. It also introduced the iconic character Hercule Poirot, who would go on to feature in many of her other stories.

In 2020, we celebrated a century of Christie novels with a £2 coin, which featured a missing puzzle-piece design and the iconic phrase, ‘little grey cells’, which was first used by the character Poirot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.