agathas lifelong true friends - who were they?

TonyD

I want to find out who her true friends were, how they met who she went on holidays with and family connections. This side of her is sadly missing it seems, maybe someone has information?

Pete

Good question. The dedications in her books provide some good clues. Agatha herself made this observation...

Agatha Christie. An Autobiography: 
Now that I was starting life again, I had to take stock of my friends. All that I had gone through made for a kind of acid test. Carlo and I compiled between us two orders: the Order of the Rats and the Order of
There were not many Rats, but there were some rather unexpected ones: people who you had thought were your true friends, but who turned out anxious to disassociate themselves from anybody who had attracted notoriety of the wrong sort. This discovery, of course, made me more sensitive and more inclined to withdraw from people. On the other hand, I found many most unexpected friends, completely loyal, who showed me more affection and kindness than they had ever done before.
I think I admire loyalty almost more than any other virtue. Loyalty and courage are two of the finest things there are. Any kind of courage, physical or moral, arouses my utmost admiration. It is one of the most important virtues to bring to life. If you can bear to live at all, you can bear to live with courage. It is a must. I found many worthy members of the Order of Faithful Dogs amongst my men friends.

Tommy_A_Jones

Did she base the recurring Characters in Miss Marple Books and Poirot Books on her Friends?

taliavishay-arbel

I believe she wrote once that Miss Marple was partly based on her Grandmother (or was it her Great-Aunt?) but wasn't a copy by any means. Other than that, there is no indication in her autobiography about recourring characters. Of course, several of the One-time Characters in Murder in Mesopotamia are based on real people (including her second husband Max Mallowan), as stated both in her and his autobiographies. There has been a longtime debate whether Mrs Ariadne Oliver is a self portrait, but I would call it a kind of self caricature - The shyness, the preference of the written word to the spoken one, the underlying shrewedness seem to be AC characteristics, but the scattiness (e.g. in Cards on the table, suspecting each suspect in turn and always being sure she is right), the insistance that all the police's problems would be solved by a woman head of police, are in the nature of a caricature. 

HerculeAndAchille

@taliavishay-arbel, didn't she base Miss Marple on her step-grandmother's cronies and not the woman herself?

taliavishay-arbel

@HerculeAndAchille, it seems we are both partially right. Here is what AC says about MM's origins in her autobiography:

"I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies...

Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her–though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right...

‘A downy fellow, that–I don’t trust him,’ Grannie would remark, and when later a polite young bank-clerk was found to have embezzled some money, she was not at all surprised, but merely nodded her head.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve known one or two like him."

HerculeAndAchille

How very peculiar (and reassuring)! Miss Marple seems like a universally grandmotherly, doesn't she - I suspect that's part of her appeal.