Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; private investigator; cozy
Principal Series: Hercule Poirot, 1920-1975; Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, 1922-1973; Superintendent Battle, 1925-1944; Jane Marple, 1930-1976; Ariadne Oliver, 1934-1961
Principal Series Characters:
Hercule Poirot, a private detective, after retiring from the Belgian police force in 1904, lives mostly in London. Short, with an egg-shaped head, eyes that turn a deeper shade of green at significant moments, and an elegant military mustache, he wears a striped three-piece suit and patent leather shoes. His foreign accent and uncertain command of English suggest a buffoon (as does his surname: “poireau” in colloquial French means simpleton or fool), but “the little grey cells” are always seeking and finding the truth.
Captain Arthur Hastings is Poirot’s faithful, though dull-witted, chronicler. Hastings, wounded in World War I, is investigating a case for Lloyd’s of London when he meets Poirot. Even after he marries Dulcie Duveen and moves to Argentina, Hastings reappears occasionally to assist in and record his friend’s adventures.
Lieutenant Thomas Beresford and Prudence Cowley Beresford, better known as Tommy and Tuppence, were childhood friends. Shortly after World War I, in which Tommy was twice wounded, they establish the International Detective Agency. Tommy has the common sense and Tuppence the intuition that make them successful in their cases, which usually involve international intrigue. The couple age realistically; by the time of their last adventure they are both more than seventy years old and living at the Laurels in Hollowquay.
Superintendent Battle, the father of five children, is a large, muscular man who never displays emotion. Though little given to imagination, he believes that no one is above suspicion.
Jane Marple, who first appears as a seventy-four-year-old never-married woman in 1930 and hardly ages thereafter, lives in the village of St. Mary Mead. Tall, thin, with fluffy white hair and china-blue eyes, she is given to gardening, which provides her with an excuse to be outside at convenient moments, and bird-watching, a hobby that requires the use of a pair of binoculars—which she sometimes trains on nonfeathered bipeds. Her intuition is flawless.
Ariadne Oliver, an Agatha Christie alter ego who produces a prolific quantity of successful detective novels, is something of a feminist. She is attractive though untidy and is always experimenting with her plentiful gray hair. Despite her vocation, her detecting abilities sometimes falter.
Contribution
Through some seventy mystery novels and thrillers as well as 149 short stories and more than a dozen plays, Agatha Christie helped create the form of classic detective fiction, in which a murder is committed and many are suspected. In the end, all but one of the suspects are eliminated, and the criminal dies or is arrested. Working within these conventions, Christie explored their limits through numerous variations to create her intellectual puzzles. Much of the charm of her work derives from its use of the novel-of-manners tradition, as she explores upper-middle-class life in the English village, a milieu that she made peculiarly her own.
Typical of the novel of manners, Christie’s works offer little character analysis, detailed description, or philosophy about life; as she herself noted, “Lots of my books are what I should describe as ‘light-hearted thrillers.’” Simply written, demanding no arcane knowledge, requiring only careful attention to facts, her works repeatedly challenge readers to deduce from the clues they have been given the identity of the culprit before she reveals the always surprising answer.
Biography
Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller just outside Torquay, England, on September 15, 1890, to Frederick Alvah Miller and Clarissa Margaret Beohmer Miller. Because her two older siblings were at school, Agatha spent much time alone, which she passed by inventing characters and adventures for them. She was also often in the company of her two grandmothers (who later served as models for Jane Marple). Though she received no formal education except in music, she read voraciously and showed an early interest in writing, publishing a poem in the local newspaper at the age of eleven.
At eighteen, bored while recovering from influenza, Christie (then Miller) took her mother’s suggestion to write a story. Her first attempt, “The House of Beauty,” was published in revised form as “The House of Dreams” in the Sovereign Magazine in January, 1926, and two other stories from this period later grew into novels. Turning to longer fiction, she sent a manuscript titled “Snow upon the Desert” to Eden Phillpotts, a popular novelist who was a family friend, and he referred her to his agent, Hughes Massie, who would become hers as well.
After her marriage to Archie Christie on Christmas Eve, 1914, she went to work, first as a nurse and then as a pharmacist. The latter post gave her a knowledge of poisons as well as free time to apply that information as she composed The Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Detective Story (1920). Rejected by several publishers, the manuscript went to John Lane at the Bodley Head in 1917, where it lay buried for two years. In 1919, the year Christie’s daughter, Rosalind, was born, Lane called Christie into his office and told her that he would publish the novel (with some changes), and he signed Christie to a five-book contract. The Mysterious Affair at Styles sold a respectable two thousand copies in its first year, but Christie had not yet begun to think of herself as a professional writer, even after The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) earned for her enough money to buy a car.
Indeed, Christie did not need to write professionally as long as her husband supported her. In 1926, though, the year of her first major success with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her life changed: Archie announced that he wanted a divorce. Coupled with the recent death of her mother, this news overwhelmed Christie, who, suffering from hysterical amnesia, vanished for ten days in December. The resulting publicity boosted sales, a fortunate result as she now depended on her fiction to live.
On an excursion to Iraq in 1929, Christie met Max Mallowan, an archaeologist fifteen years her junior; they were married in Edinburgh on September 11, 1930. For the next decade she would travel between the Middle East and England while producing seventeen novels and six short-story collections. The war years were equally productive, yielding seventeen works of fiction and an autobiography.
In 1947, to help celebrate the birthday of the Queen Mother, Christie created a half-hour radio play, Three Blind Mice, which in 1952 opened in London’s West End as The Mousetrap, a play that was to break all theatrical records. Her novels also fared well. A Murder Is Announced (1950) was her first book to sell more than fifty thousand copies in one year, and every book of hers thereafter sold at least as many. Honors, too, flowed in. These included the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (1955), the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play (1955, for Witness for the Prosecution, pr. 1953), commander of the British Empire (1956), an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter (1961), and dame of the British Empire (1971).
In 1970, at the age of eighty, Christie published her eightieth book. A fall the next year broke her hip, and she never fully recovered. On January 12, 1976, she died at her home in Wallingford, England, and she was buried at St. Mary’s Churchyard in nearby Cholsey.
Analysis
By 1980 Agatha Christie’s books had sold more than four hundred million copies in 102 countries and 103 languages. Only the Bible and William Shakespeare have sold more, and they have had a few centuries’ head start. If all the American editions of Peril at End House (1932) were placed end to end, they would reach from Chicago to the moon. The Mousetrap, which has earned millions of dollars, has exceeded all previous record runs by several decades, and Christie is the only playwright to have had three plays being performed simultaneously in London’s West End while another was being produced on Broadway. To what do her works owe the popularity that has earned for her the title “Queen of Crime”?
The solution to this mystery lies in Christie’s combination of originality and convention, a fusion evident already in her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The detective she introduces here, Hercule Poirot, resembles not only Sherlock Holmes but also Marie Belloc Lowndes’s Hercule Popeau, who had worked for the Sûreté in Paris, and Hercule Flambeau, the creation of G. K. Chesterton. Gaston Leroux’s hero of Le Mystère de la chambre jaune (1907; The Mystery of the Yellow Room, 1908), Joseph Rouletabille, as well as Rouletabille’s rival, Frederick Larson, also contributed to Poirot, as did Christie’s observations of Belgian refugees in Torquay. Similarly, Captain Arthur Hastings derives from Holmes’s chronicler, Dr. Watson: Both have been wounded in war, both are unable to dissemble and hence cannot always be trusted with the truth, both are highly susceptible to female beauty, both see what their more astute friends observe, yet neither can correctly interpret the evidence before him.
However conventional these characters are, though, they emerge as distinct figures. One cannot imagine Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s cerebral detective referring to himself as “Papa” Holmes the way Christie’s calls himself “Papa Poirot.” To Holmes’s intellect Christie has added a heart, one that has been captured by Countess Vera Rossakoff. Poirot refers to her much as Holmes speaks of Irene Adler, but one would not suspect Holmes of harboring any of the matrimonial or sexual interest toward Adler that Poirot seems to have for his “remarkable woman.”
The differences between Hastings and Watson are equally noticeable, Christie’s narrator being less perceptive and more comic. Watson is not “of an imbecility to make one afraid,” nor would Watson propose to a woman he hardly knows. Christie’s modifications made Poirot an enduring figure—Nicaragua put him on a postage stamp—but she quickly realized that Hastings lacked substance. He appears in only eight of the thirty-four Poirot novels, and as early as 1926 she sent him to Argentina, allowing another character to recount The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Like this detecting duo, the plot of The Mysterious Affair at Styles draws on the tradition of detective fiction but bears Christie’s individual stamp. There is the murder in the locked room, a device popularized by John Dickson Carr. The wrong man is arrested and tried for the crime. Abiding by the rules of mysteries, Christie sets before the reader all the clues that Poirot discovers, often going so far as to number them. Yet the work exhibits a subtlety and misdirection characteristic of Christie’s work. For example, she reproduces a letter that the victim supposedly wrote on the night she was murdered. The reader naturally tries to find some hidden meaning in the words, when in fact the clue lies in the spacing within the date. Early in the book one learns that Evelyn Howard has a low voice and mannish figure; still, when someone impersonates Arthur Inglethorp, the reader assumes that the impostor is a male.
The reader is not likely to make much of the fact that Evelyn Howard’s father was a doctor or pay attention when Mary Cavendish says that her mother died of accidental poisoning from a medicine she was taking, even though Mrs. Inglethorp has been using a tonic containing strychnine. When Evelyn Howard finds the brown paper used to wrap a parcel containing a false beard, one assumes that she has fulfilled Poirot’s expectations of her abilities. Since Poirot has taken her into his confidence, one hardly suspects that she is involved in the murder. Moreover, she seems too straightforward and blunt, too likable and reliable to be guilty.
Her cousin Arthur Inglethorp, on the other hand, seems too obviously the killer; even the dull-witted Hastings suspects him, and Hastings’s suspicion should be enough to exonerate anyone. Inglethorp has an obvious motive—money—and is supposedly having an affair with another woman. Before leaving Styles early in the novel, Evelyn Howard further implicates him by telling Hastings to be especially wary of Mr. Inglethorp. Given all these clues, no one familiar with the conventions of the genre would regard him as the criminal. Any lingering doubt, moreover, seems removed when Poirot remarks that considering Mrs. Inglethorp’s kindness to the Belgian refugees, he would not allow her husband, whom she clearly loved, to be arrested now. One presumes that Poirot means that he is now sure that Arthur Inglethorp is innocent, though in fact the detective simply means “now,” before the case against Inglethorp is complete.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles tricks the reader not only by making the most likely and least likely suspects both guilty of the crime but also by introducing many false leads. Dr. Bauerstein, a London toxicologist, unexpectedly appears at Styles on the night of the murder and is found very early the next morning walking, fully dressed, in front of the gates to the manor. Why does Lawrence Cavendish, Mrs. Inglethorp’s son by her previous marriage, persist in maintaining that death was accidental? Why does Mary Cavendish cry out, when she learns that her mother-in-law has been poisoned, “No, no—not that—not that!” Why does she claim to have heard sounds in Mrs. Inglethorp’s room when she could not possibly have heard them? What is one to make of the strychnine in John Cavendish’s drawer or of Lawrence Cavendish’s fingerprints on another bottle of the poison?
Typical, too, is the focus on the solution rather than the crime. Although Christie presents an account of Mrs. Inglethorp’s final convulsions, the details are not gruesome because the description is sanitized. In most of Christie’s subsequent works, the murders occur offstage; significantly, the word “murder” itself does not often appear in her titles, particularly not in the titles that she, as opposed to her American publishers, chose. The reader’s reaction to her crimes is, therefore, not “How terrible!” but “Who did it? How? Why?” Like Christie’s detectives, the reader embarks on an intellectual quest to solve an intricate puzzle, not an emotional journey of revenge or purgation.
Red Herrings and Plain Evidence
Christie often allows the reader to engage in self-deceit. In The Body in the Library (1942), the clues are again so plain that one dismisses them as red herrings. In The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), the obvious suspects confess quite early, much to Jane Marple’s surprise. The reader assumes that she believes that someone else is the actual culprit and so dismisses the admissions of guilt. Actually, Miss Marple is merely perplexed that two people who worked so hard to create an alibi should give themselves up voluntarily. One would not expect the police officer in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1939) to be the murderer any more than one would suspect Lettitia Blacklock, the apparent target of at least two murder attempts, of being the killer in A Murder Is Announced.
In each case, Christie presents the evidence; Dora Bunner, for example, often says “Lotty” instead of “Letty,” a clear indication that Lettitia Blacklock is someone else. Yet the reader will dismiss these slips as signs of Dora Bunner’s absentmindedness. Christie’s most notable adaptations of conventional plotting appear in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the sympathetic narrator—who, like Evelyn Howard, seems to be in league with Poirot—turns out to be the killer, in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), in which all the suspects are in fact guilty, and in Ten Little Niggers (1939; also known as And Then There Were None), where all the suspects are victims.
Ordeal by Innocence
At the same time that the crime itself is presented dispassionately, Christie recognizes its effect on the innocent. Cynthia Murdock and Lawrence Cavendish cannot be happy together as long as each secretly suspects the other of Mrs. Inglethorp’s murder. The Argyle family (Ordeal by Innocence, 1958) is not pleased to learn that John Argyle did not kill his mother, for if John is not guilty, another family member must be, and no one can be trusted until the actual culprit is identified.
Such considerations are about as philosophical as Christie gets, though. For her the story is all; philosophy and psychology never go beyond the obvious. Much of the appeal of Christie’s work lies in this very superficiality. Just as one needs no special knowledge of mysterious poisons or English bell-ringing rituals to solve her crimes, so to understand her criminals’ motives one need not look beyond greed, hate, or love.
N or M? the New Mystery
In N or M? The New Mystery, Tommy and Tuppence (now married and some twenty years older) are again unemployed. Their two children are both serving their country in World War II. The parents are bemoaning their fate when a messenger from their old friend Mr. Carter starts them on a spy adventure at the seacoast hotel of Sans Souci. They arrive with the assumed names Mr. Meadowes and Mrs. Blenkensop. Mrs. Blenkensop, they agree, will pursue Mr. Meadowes and every now and then corner him so they can exchange information. The dialogue is amusing and there is a good deal of suspense, but too many characters and a thin plot keep this from being one of Christie’s best.
At times, it seems that Christie withholds clues; the fact that all evidence is presented to the reader is the supreme test of good detective fiction. Mrs. Sprot, adopted mother of Betty, coolly shoots Betty’s real mother in the head while the woman is holding Betty over the edge of a cliff. The reader cannot be expected to know that the woman on the cliff is Betty’s real mother, nor can the reader be expected to decipher Tuppence’s mutterings about the story of Solomon. In the story of Solomon, two women claim the same baby, and Solomon decrees that the woman who is willing to give up her child rather than have it split in half is the real mother. Since both women in this scene appear willing to jeopardize the baby’s life, the reader is likely, justifiably, to form some wrong conclusions. This seems less fair than Christie usually is in delivering her clues.
Sleeping Murder
In her last novel, Sleeping Murder, written several years before its 1976 publication date, Christie achieves more depth in her portrayal of characters than before: Gwenda, her dead stepmother, Dr. Kennedy, and some of the minor characters such as Mr. Erskine are excellent examples. The motivation in the book is, at least, psychological, as opposed to murder for money or personal gain, which are the usual motives in Christie’s novels. In comparison with others of Christie’s works, this novel seems, in short, to display much more probing into the origins and motivations of her characters’ actions.
Sleeping Murder ends with the romantic young couple and the wise old Miss Marple conversing on the front porch of a hotel in, of all places, Torquay, Christie’s beloved birthplace. Christie had come full circle, celebrating her romantic and impulsive youth and her pleasant old age in one final reunion at home in Torquay, England.
Characterization
Characterization is similarly simple, again not to detract from the story. Mr. Wells, the attorney in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, is presented as “a pleasant man of middle-age, with keen eyes, and the typical lawyer’s mouth.” Lawrence Cavendish looks “about forty, very dark with a melancholy clean-shaven face.” Caroline Sheppard, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, hints that her brother is “weak as water,” but one does not otherwise get that impression of him.
Even Christie’s most fully realized characters remain in many ways ambiguous. Readers were surprised to learn, for example, that Jane Marple is tall; the fact emerges rather late in the novels about her. So, too, Poirot, though seemingly minutely described, is in some ways enigmatic. There is, for example, the mystery about his age: If he retired from the Belgian police force in 1904, he should be about eighty by the time of Mrs. Inglethorp’s death and 130 by the time of his own. His head is egg-shaped, but which way does the egg lie (or stand)? Exactly what are military mustaches? Christie cultivated this ambiguity, objecting to a dust jacket that showed so much as Poirot’s striped pants and shoes. She preferred to allow readers to supply the details from their own experience or imagination.
Universality
Even the English village that she made particularly her own milieu for murder is but roughly sketched. Christie can offer detailed floor plans or maps when this information is necessary, but Wychwood (Murder Is Easy, 1939) might easily be Jane Marple’s St. Mary Mead or Styles St. Mary:
Wychwood...consists mainly of its one principal street. There were shops, small Georgian houses, prim and aristocratic, with whitened steps and polished knockers, there were picturesque cottages with flower gardens. There was an inn, the Bells and Motley, standing a little back from the street. There was a village green and a duck pond, and presiding over them a dignified Georgian house.
This easy transferability of her settings applies even to her most exotic locales; Mesopotamia seems no more foreign than Chipping Cleghorn.
The lack of specific detail has given her works timelessness as well as universality. Speaking of Death Comes as the End (1944), set in the Egypt of the Eleventh Dynasty, Christie observed, “People are the same in whatever century they live, or where.” In keeping with the novel-of-manners tradition she does chronicle the life of the period: A Murder Is Announced shows how Britishers attempted to cope with post-World War II hardships through barter and the black market, with children who read The Daily Worker, with social changes that brought the breakup of the old manors and caused servants to disappear, and with new technology such as central heating. A decade later, St. Mary Mead has a new housing development, and Gossington Hall gets new bathrooms (The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, 1962). Such changes are, however, superficial. As Christie writes, “The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different,...the clothes were different, but the human beings were the same as they had always been.”
If live-in maids have vanished, a part-time cleaning person will serve as well to keep a house tidy and a plot complicated. Though the village is no longer the closed world it once was, all the suspects can still fit into the Blacklock drawing room or the dining room of Bertram’s Hotel. The real action in Christie’s works occurs within the reader’s mind while sorting real clues from false, innocent characters from guilty. As long as people enjoy such intellectual games, Christie’s books will endure, for, with her masterful talent to deceive, she has created highly absorbing puzzles. She will always be the first lady of crime.
Further Reading
Aldridge, Mark. Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World. New York: Harper Collins, 2020. Highly praised, this book traces numerous aspects of Hercule Poirot’s career decade-by-decade.
Bargainner, Earl F. The Gentle Art of Murder. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1980. With an extensive bibliography and two indexes of characters and short-story titles, this book is a boon to those searching for an elusive reference. Bargainner analyzes Christie’s works as separate achievements, each a pearl on an exquisite necklace, and he praises her ability to experiment with detective fiction “by employing elements not generally considered compatible with it.”
Barnard, Robert. A Talent to Deceive. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980. Intended to inform and entertain the casual Christie reader, this book follows Christie’s writings as they developed in theme and plot throughout her lifetime. While there are good analyses of novels and detectives, the truly admirable features of this book are the exhaustive indices and annotated lists—including films—compiled by Barnard’s wife.
Bayard, Pierre. Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery. London: Fourth Estate, 2000. Detailed study of Christie’s unfinished final project.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Agatha Christie. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. Compilation of essays on Christie’s work and its place in the detective genre and in English literature by leading literary and cultural scholars. Bibliographic references and index.
Bunson, Matthew. The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia. New York: Pocket Books, 2001. Comprehensive reference volume contains alphabetical entries on all characters in Christie’s works, cross-referenced to the works in which they appear; plot synopses; listings of all film, television, and radio adaptations of Christie’s works and of documentaries about Christie; a biography; and a bibliography.
Cade, Jared. Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days. London: Peter Owen, 1998. Questions Christie’s disappearance. Includes bibliographical references, a list of works, and an index.
Cassidy, Bruce, ed. Modern Mystery, Fantasy, and Science Fiction Writers: A Library of Literary Criticism. New York: Continuum, 1993. Contains useful excerpts from critical commentary on Christie.
Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977. Although published the year after her death, this book, which was written over a fifteen-year period, concludes in 1965, when the author was seventy-five years old. Although she does not explain her mysterious disappearance in the 1920’s, probably because of her desire for privacy, she provides interesting details about happier events and invaluable commentary on the creation of her works.
———. Come Tell Me How You Live. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1946. Published under the name of Agatha Christie Mallowan, a lighthearted book of reminiscences about archaeological experiences with Max Mallowan, her husband, in the Middle East. Reflects the happiness of Christie’s second marriage, as well as her own sense of humor.
Daniels, Anthony. “Killing time with Agatha Christie.” New Criterion 39, no. 3 (November 2020): 34-37. Explains, “I am a great admirer of Mrs. Christie. I enjoy her irony, and she sometimes reveals herself to be an acute psychologist. Quite apart from the pleasure she gives, reading her is not entirely a waste of time. She conveys to the reader the impression of enjoying the human comedy without bitterness or rancor, and thereby acts as an antidote to our resentment of the imperfections of the world and existence.”
de Vito, Stefania and Sergio Della Sala. “Was Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Amnesia Real or Revenge on Her Cheating Spouse?” Scientific American Mind 28, no. 6 (November /December 2017): 30-34. Concludes that Christie “could have suffered from a dissociative fugue, or state of psychological flight. Persons with this disorder exhibit all the symptoms of dissociative amnesia. Additionally, a person suffering from this disorder may seek to move well beyond his or her usual sphere of travel. And although the individual may suffer amnesia during a fugue state, behavior may seem completely normal to outsiders.”
Dommermuth-Costa, Carol. Agatha Christie: Writer of Mystery. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1997.
Escott, John. Agatha Christie, Woman of Mystery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Fido, Martin. The World of Agatha Christie: The Facts and Fiction Behind the World’s Greatest Crime Writer. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media, 1999. An extremely critical account of Christie and her fiction.
Gerald, Michael C. The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Gill, Gillian. Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries. New York: Free Press, 1990. Short and highly readable biography is definitely of the popular, rather than critical, variety, employing as chapter titles seven different names used at one time or another by the mystery writer (including the assumed name she used during her infamous disappearance in 1926). Still, Gill goes out of her way to emphasize Christie’s dedication to her art and the discipline of her life.
Haining, Peter. Agatha Christie’s Poirot: A Celebration of the Great Detective. London: Boxtree, 1995.
Hart, Anne. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot: The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot. London: HarperCollins, 1997.
———. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple. London: HarperCollins, 1985.
Ibarguengoitia, Jorge. “Agatha Christie: An Unlikely Obituary,” translated by F. Soicher. The Literary Review 38 (Fall, 1994): 45-46. Claims he finds Christie’s detective fiction unreadable because he either uncovers the murderer early on or else is unable to understand the detective’s explanation.
Irons, Glenwood, and Joan Warthling Roberts. “From Spinster to Hipster: The ‘Suitability’ of Miss Marple and Anna Lee.” In Feminism in Women’s Detective Fiction, edited by Glenwood Irons. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Discusses Christie’s creation of Miss Marple as the archetypal British sinister detective figure in stories and novels. Analyzes Marple’s basic methodology in The Tuesday Club Murders.
Keating, H. R. F., ed. Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. A collection of essays by several writers on topics varying from sales figures and Christie’s audience in the United States to her plays and films. Also includes interesting “portraits” of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.
Maida, Patricia, and Nicholas B. Spornick. Murder She Wrote. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1982. Divided neatly into sections by detective, this book allows its reader to go right to a necessary section without paging through much unneeded information. The authors confirm that Christie’s characters and their “creative puzzles” gave the world a lasting gift.
Makinen, Merja. Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Sets out to disprove what many critics have asserted: that Agatha Christie created her female characters to be weak and inferior to their male counterparts. Emphasizes the ways in which the female characters play vital roles outside the domestic sphere and therefore challenge traditional notions of femininity.
———. Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Makinen sets out to disprove what many critics before her have asserted: that Agatha Christie created her female characters to be weak and inferior to their male counterparts. She does this by emphasizing the ways in which the female characters play vital roles outside of the domestic sphere and therefore challenge traditional notions of femininity. Ultimately, Makinen succeeds in proving that Christie’s female characters are as successful and strong as her male characters.
Mallowan, Max. Mallowan’s Memoirs. New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1977. Finished just before his wife’s death, this autobiography of Mallowan is helpful both for the details concerning Christie and for the revelation of Mallowan’s own personality. Because both he and his profession were of central importance to Christie, an important source.
Morgan, Janet. Agatha Christie: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.
Osborne, Charles. The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001. Presents a chronological listing of Christie’s works accompanied by biographical notes that place the writings within the context of the events of the author’s life. Includes bibliographical references and index.
Paul, Robert S. Whatever Happened to Sherlock Holmes? Detective Fiction, Popular Theology, and Society. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. A study of detective fiction based on the general premise that detective stories mirror the morals and theological assumptions of their time. The chapter on Agatha Christie explores how her stories reflect what happens in a society when compassion is lacking.
Powers, Anne. True Crime Parallels to the Mysteries of Agatha Christie. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020. Selects “ten of Agatha Christie’s most famous works and shows their relationship to ten of crime history’s most famous and sensational cases.”
Riley, Dick, and Pam McAllister, eds. The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. Containing more than two hundred illustrations, this handbook also provides plot summaries of all Christie’s novels, plays, and many of her short stories arranged chronologically by first date of publication.
Robyns, Gwen. The Mystery of Agatha Christie. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Provides a well-written and well-rounded popular biography of Christie. Richly illustrated and contains an appendix with a chronological listing of all Christie’s writings. Perhaps the best place to begin a further study of Christie.
Sanders, Dennis and Len Lovallo. The Agatha Christie Companion: The Complete Guide to Agatha Christie’s Life and Work. Rev. ed. New York: Delacorte Press, 1989.
Shaw, Marion, and Sabine Vanacker. Reflecting on Miss Marple. New York: Routledge, 1991. Presents a brief chronology of Christie’s life and then devotes four chapters to one of her most memorable detectives, making a case for viewing Miss Marple as a feminist heroine. Reviews the history of women writers and the golden age of detective fiction as well as the social context of Christie’s Miss Marple books. Asserts that the spinster Miss Marple is able to solve her cases by exploiting prejudices against unmarried older women.
Shenker, Israel. “The Past Master of Mysteries, She Built a Better Mousetrap.” Smithsonian 21, no. 6 (1990): 86-95. For those who have neither the time nor the patience to wade through Christie’s An Autobiography, this article provides a concise portrait of the author. Completed in honor of the one hundredth anniversary of her birthday, this carefully written biographical article lays the necessary groundwork for any Christie researcher.
Sova, Dawn B. Agatha Christie A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Writings. New York: Facts on File, 1996. Provides information on all aspects of Christie’s life and career.
Symons, Julian. Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1972. An illuminating study which places the Christie books in a larger perspective, pointing out the later deviations from the conventions of the classic mystery.
Thompson, Laura. Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. London: Headline Review, 2007. Comprehensive biography, written with the cooperation of Christie’s family and with full access to the author’s unpublished letters and notebooks. Includes information about Christie’s eleven-day disappearance in 1926 and about the novels she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
Toye, Randall. The Agatha Christie Who’s Who. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980. A fascinating reference. Traces the many appearances of characters such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. Identifies minor characters. Particularly useful for the Christie enthusiast.
Wagoner, Mary S. Agatha Christie. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Scholarly but readable study of Christie and her writings. A brief biography of Christie in the first chapter is followed by analytical chapters focusing on the different genres of her works, such as short stories. Contains a good bibliography, an index, and a chronological table of Christie’s life.
Winks, Robin. Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribners, 1998. Contains a very thorough essay on Christie.
York, R. A. Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Reevaluates Christie’s novels, which traditionally have been described as “cozy” mysteries. Asserts that although these works may appear to depict a stable world of political conservatism, conventional sex and class roles, and clear moral choices, this world is not as safe as it appears to be. Notes how Christie’s mysteries also depict war, social mobility, ambiguous morality, violence, and, of course, murder.