What was the nationality of the novelist whose eighteenth novel was published in 1976?
Iris Murdoch Dame Jean Iris Murdoch ( ; 15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, "Under the Net", was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Her books include "The Bell" (1958), "A Severed Head" (1961), "The Red and the Green" (1965), "The Nice and the Good" (1968), "The Black Prince" (1973), "Henry and Cato" (1976), "The Sea, the Sea" (1978, Booker Prize), "The Philosopher's Pupil" (1983), "The Good Apprentice" (1985), "The Book and the Brotherhood" (1987), "The Message to the Planet" (1989), and "The Green Knight" (1993). In 2008, "The Times" ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Agatha Christie bibliography Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was an English crime novelist, short story writer and playwright. Although she wrote six romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, her reputation rests on the 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections that she wrote under her own name, which have sold over two billion copies—an amount only surpassed by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. Her works contain several regular characters with whom the public became familiar, including Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Parker Pyne and Harley Quin. Christie wrote more Poirot stories than any of the others, even though she thought the character to be "rather insufferable". Following the publication of the 1975 novel "Curtain", Poirot's obituary appeared on the front page of "The New York Times". The literary historian Howard Haycraft considered that "few fictional sleuths can surpass the amazing little Belgian—with his waxed moustache and egg-shaped head, his inflated confidence in the infallibility of his 'little grey cells', his murderous attacks on the English language—either for individuality or ingenuity."