Agatha Christie 120th birthday anniversary celebrated by Google Doodle
Agatha Christie, the British mystery writer, has had the anniversary of her 120th birthday celebrated with an elaborate new Google Doodle.
The search engine's multicoloured logo has been replaced with an elaborate scene adapted from one of the crime author's many detective novels.
Each of the logo's letters has been replaced with a character taken from her novels. For example the letter "G" has been designed in the form of her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.
It has been created more than 30 years after her death, in January 1976, in Wallingford, Oxon.
The author, who also wrote under the pen name Mary Westmacott, was born in Torquay, Devon on September 15, 1890.
She wrote more than 90 books, mostly detective novels, which have sold an estimated four billion copies worldwide.
Christie is considered the best selling writer of books of all time and is only outsold by the Bible and William Shakespeare.
She also wrote several successful West End performances, including The Mousetrap, the world’s longest running play.
The design is the latest in long line of doodles that celebrate key events or anniversaries.
Last week Google fuelled online speculation by releasing a mysterious new interactive doodle for a second consecutive day. In that doodle users could "type" in the colours of the search engine's logo.
It followed a design the previous day that sparked similar mystery on the web. That design featured dozens of coloured balls amid suggestions the interactive logo was part of its 12th birthday celebrations.
Earlier this month, Google marked the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the "buckyball", a spherical dome of exotic molecules of carbon, with a special moving design. Users could move around an orange sphere using their mouse.
Another interactive Doodle was produced in May, celebrating the 30th birthday of Pac-Man.
That design, which went public on Friday, May 21, 2010, was the first doodle to be fully interactive. The Pac-Man character could be moved by using the arrow keys on the user's keyboard.
Google Doodles have become newsworthy in their own right after the firm started using the customised versions of its logo to mark what it considered significant occasions.
The first of them was used in August 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the firm's founders, designed one for the Burning Man Festival.
In October 1999, it produced a Halloween doodle: the first after the firm switched to a new logo.
The first "Christmas card" doodle was presented in 1999, on Christmas Day, featuring a snowman and flakes drifting onto the name.
Mother's and Father's Day doodles appeared in May and June 2000 respectively before the firm started noting more esoteric and, let's face it, interesting occasions.
On October 7, 2009, it did "Google" as a bar code to recognise the anniversary of its invention in 1948 by Bernard Silver, which some saw as a significant shift away from human language and towards machine language.
On Saturday, June 5, 2010, a hologram replaced the logo to honour Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holograms.
Most recently the firm marked the 71st anniversary of the Judy Garland film The Wizard of Oz with a doodle of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow walking down the Yellow Brick Road towards a landscape with "Google" on it. Perhaps it's a metaphor.
Mary Shelley, the British author of Frankenstein, had the 213th anniversary of her birth celebrated by a spooky Google Doodle late last month.
Which character do you think the other letters represent or what novel is the scene taken from? Post your comments below.