Agatha Christie

An informed, engaging and accessible introduction to the Christie phenomenon, examining all her novels and short stories. This edition has been updated to include new material on all recent film, TV and literary adaptations.

Agatha Christie is the most popular novelist in the world. With total sales of 2 billion books (4 million a year in the 21st Century) she is outranked only by Shakespeare and the Bible.

Since her debut in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair At Styles, Agatha Christie has become the chief proponent of the English village murder mystery. Although she created two enormously popular characters - the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, and the inquisitive elderly spinster and amateur sleuth Miss Jane Marple of St Mary Mead - it is not generally acknowledged that she wrote in many different genres: comic mysteries (Why Didn't They Ask Evans?), atmospheric whodunnits (Murder On The Orient Express), espionage thrillers (N or M?), romances (under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott), plays (The Mousetrap) and poetry. She was never afraid to break the rules either, and provoked a storm of controversy with the unorthodox resolution of The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, now acclaimed as one of the classics of British crime fiction.

Christie wrote complex whodunnits in a clear, readable style, which is why her books are as popular now as they were when she first wrote them. Exemplary film and TV adaptations (Peter Ustinov and David Suchet as Poirot, Margaret Rutherford and Joan Hickson as Miss Marple), have also encouraged new readers to search out her work.