Agatha Christie was born as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay , Devon , to an American father and an English mother. She never held or claimed United States citizenship. Her father was Frederick Miller, a rich American stockbroker, and her mother was Clara Bohemer, a British aristocrat. Christie had a sister, Margaret Frary Miller (1879-1950), called Madge, eleven years her senior, and a brother, Louis Montant Miller (1880-1929), called Monty, ten years older than Christie. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother resorted to teaching her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16 she went to a school in Paris to study singing and piano.

BECKE, GEORGE LEWIS (LOUIS) (1855-1913), author, was born on 18 June 1855 at Port Macquarie, New South Wales, son of Frederick Becke, clerk of petty sessions, and his wife Caroline Matilda, née Beilby, both English-born. Becke received little formal education before 1867 when the family moved to Sydney and he attended Fort Street Model School. Two years later, with his brother Vernon, he took passage to San Francisco and was away for nineteen months. At 16 he stowed away to Samoa, taking a job in Apia as a book-keeper. He was 18 when he met the notorious Captain 'Bully' Hayes who was to become a central character in his later writings. Early in 1874 Hayes signed Becke on as supercargo on the Leonora which, some ten weeks later, sank off Kusaie, stranding the survivors there. When a British warship arrived in pursuit of Hayes six months later, Becke was arrested for piracy and taken to Brisbane. Acquitted, he joined the Palmer River gold rush, worked at Ravenswood station (1877), and as a bank clerk in Townsville (1878-79).