Answer the following questions. Read the following article about one of the world-famous women, Dame Agatha Christie (1890--1976)

Read the following article about one of the world-famous women, Dame Agatha Christie (1890--1976). Perephrase or explain the meaning of the underlined words and sentences, insert the missing word.

Dame Agatha: Queen of the Maze

Dame Agatha Christie made more profit out of murder than any woman since Lucrezia Borgia. One estimate of her total earnings from more than a half-century of writing is $20. million. The Christie output was torrential: 83 books, including a half-dozen romances written under the name Mary Westmacott; 17 plays, nine volumes of short stories, and Com,. Tell Me How You Live, in which she described her field explorations with her second husband, British Archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. The number of printed copies of her books is conservatively put at 300 million. Her own characters were much less exotic: doctors, lawyers, army officers, clergymen. Her stalking grounds were usually genteel English houses, and she rarely strayed. I could never manage miners talking in pubs;" she once said, "because I don't know what miners talk about in pubs."

In a Christie murder mystery, neatness not only counts, it is everything. As the genre's undisputed queen of the maze, she laid her tantalizing plots so precisely and dropped her false leads so cunningly that few - if any - readers could guess the identity of the villain. Poison was a preferred method of dispatching a victim - frequently " in quiet family surroundings. " She continued to publish one or two novels a year, often plotting them in a hot bath while eating apples.

Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, she was the daughter of a rich American and an English mother. Although gifted with a good singing voice, she abandoned a stage career because of her shyness. In 1914 she married a British airman, Colonel Archibald Christie, and plunged into the war effort. Between volunteer nursing and practicing pharmacy, she wrote her first detective story The Mysterious Affair at Styles which introduced the 5-ft. 4-in. dandy and retired Belgian police officer Hercule Poirot. His egoism, eccentricities and the fact that for a time he had a Watsonian colleague called Hastings suggest that Christie was strongly influenced by Sherlock Holmes.

Christie was a well-established writer when her controversial The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in 1926. Publication of the novel coincided with another first ………………… in the author's otherwise scandal-free life. For two weeks in December 1926, Agatha Christie, 36, was officially a missing person. A frenzied nationwide search led to a Yorkshire hotel, where she was found registered as Tessa Neele, the name of the woman Colonel Christie married after his divorce from Agatha two years later. Doctors said the disappearance was caused by amnesia.

In 1930, on a trip to the Middle East, she found Max Mallowan, 14 years her junior, who was excavating on the site of ancient Ur. "An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have," she noted before their 25th anniversary. "The older she gets, the more interested he is in her." '

The last few years of Dame Agatha's life saw an upsurge in Christiemania. Murder on the Orient Express, the film based on her novel Murder in the Calais Coach, was a huge box office success that spurred even further the sales of her books. Curtain, the novel in which Hercule Poirot predeceases his author, is still No. 1 on US bestseller lists, with over a quarter of a million copies in print.

But if was the elderly, frail spinster Jane Marple who remained her favorite detective. Gifted with as many " little grey cells " as Poirot, Miss Marple also possesses an unpretentious village wisdom and homey psychological insight that make her Agatha Christie's alter ego. Although Poirot is gone, Marple survives for at least a while longer. An unpublished manuscript in which she too passes on is locked in the Christie vault, along with the ultimate whodunit Dame Agatha's autobiography. By refusing to publish it during her lifetime, Dame Agatha has assured herself one last suspenseful hurrah.

· Have your learned anything new about Dame Agatha?

· Have you read any of her brilliant detective stories or plays? If yes, which one is your favourite and why? Did you read them in Russian or in English?

· What is your attitude to detective stories in general? What kind of books you prefer to read for pleasure?

· Do you think there are ‘female’ and ‘male’ styles of writing? Give your reasons, illustrate your point of view with examples.

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