A complete egoist,” Agatha Christie said of Hercule Poirot, her brilliant, diminutive, impeccably dressed Belgian detective.

“Puffy and spinsterish,” she quipped of Miss Marple, her other famous sleuth. “The old spinster lady living in a village.”

Uttered in the reedy voice of Christie herself, these withering descriptions are contained on a cache of audiotapes, recently discovered in a dusty cardboard box in one of her former houses by her only grandson, Mathew Prichard.

The tapes - 27 reels running a total of more than 13 hours - are filled with Christie's painstaking dictation of her life story, rough material recorded in the early 1960s that eventually made up her autobiography, published posthumously in 1977. It stands as one of only a handful of recordings of Christie, the British mystery writer, who rarely agreed to be interviewed.

Christie's estate is expected to announce its discovery on Monday, the 118th anniversary of her birth, calling the tapes a rare find and a significant addition to the collection of memorabilia related to Christie.

In Britain the appetite for all things Agatha Christie is still fierce. Devoted fans still mark her birthday with a weeklong festival of theater performances, treasure hunts, teas and murder-mystery parties. And while her books have never been considered high literary art, more than 500,000 copies of them are sold in Britain each year. She has been outsold in volume only by Shakespeare and the Bible.

Taking into account such strong interest, Christie's estate is considering releasing part of the tapes or publishing a new, updated version of her autobiography.

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