'I like Agatha Christie's writing. I read her books to build up my fluency in English,' the China Club and Shanghai Tang founder once said at a forum on learning English.

'Sometimes I couldn't wait to find out the solutions to her mysteries. I simply read the last chapter first.'

It is difficult to resist Christie's charm. Her detective stories have been translated into more than 45 languages. They still top the lists of most borrowed books in libraries worldwide.

Christie published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920. For decades she delighted the literary world with her stories of the eccentric Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot.

Hardly more than five feet four inches tall, Poirot was no David Beckham nor Andy Lau Tak-wah. He instead had an egg-shaped head and military-like moustache.

Yet the sleuth carried himself with great dignity and was loved by many crime story devotees. Poirot was the only fictional character whose death was honoured with an obituary on the front page of The New York Times. He 'died' in the book Curtain, published in 1975.

Christie became the focus of her own mystery in 1926. On December 4 she went missing from her home in Berkshire, southern England, only to be found 11 days later at a posh hotel in the northern county of Yorkshire using a false name.

Both the author and her then husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, claimed that she suffered amnesia in those days.

Rumours have it that the disappearance was part of a drama over her bitter marriage. The couple married in 1914 when Christie was 24 years old. They divorced in 1928. But what did actually happen in those 11 days? Was Christie's memory loss genuine?

It prompted Londoner Jared Cade to write an investigative book, titled Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, published in 1999.

Although unsuccessful in her own love life, Christie knew how to cast a spell over her audience. Besides novels, she also wrote many successful plays. One famous production, The Mousetrap, has been running in London since its debut in 1952.

Now in its fifth decade, the play was described by a well-known international publication as an 'absurdly long-running murder mystery from the mistress of suspense'.