When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world’s most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide, in more than one hundred countries, she had achieved the impossible–more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller.

So prolific was Agatha Christie’s output–sixty-six crime novels, twenty plays, six romance novels under a pseudonym and more than one hundred and fifty short stories–it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those fifty-five years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimes?

Following the death of Agatha’s daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable legacy was revealed.

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