A To Z Blogging Challenge 2025: Mysteries: Q Is For Queen of Crime

 Q is for Queen of crime! Who else but Agatha Christie? But my C post was C is for Cosies. So, here she is.

My sister has read all of her books. I have still plenty more to read, but I seem to have read some of the best known. 

Her books have sold two billion copies! She is the third bestseller of all time, only outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare. There have been films and TV shows based on her books and several actors who have played her main characters Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. There are even Poirot novels written by Sophie Hannah, daughter of children’s writer Adele Geras. 

Agatha Christie is an entire industry. Is she over hyped? 

I don’t think so. There are books of hers I prefer to others, but they are generally worth reading. Even if you have read them often enough to know whodunnit, you don’t care. I have certainly read and reread some of them. 

Murder On The Orient Express is one novel where everyone knows how it ends, but people will reread it and go and see any dramatisation anyway. There have been only four dramatisations so far, the most recent with Kenneth Branagh - a wonderful actor, but not, in my opinion, Poirot. Too tall and thin, with an overdone moustache. But the novel does give film makers an excuse to cast many big name actors. 

It’s briefly mentioned in the British SF comedy series Red Dwarf, when Holly the ship’s computer asks to have the novels of a Agatha Christie deleted so he can read them again, and mentions he is reading that one.

I have a wonderful audiobook of the novel read by David Suchet, the best Poirot of them all. 

Although her best known characters are Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, she does have others, such as Tommy and Tuppence, a married couple who work together. There are also standalone novels, such as Murder Is Easy and The Man In The Brown Suit.

Her first novel was The Mysterious Affair At Styles, which introduced Poirot and his “Watson” Captain Arthur Hastings. She had in it a character who worked in a hospital pharmacy during the Great War, as Agatha herself did, something that helped her in her writing.

Agatha Christie didn’t mess around with mysterious non-existent poisons from South America. She used real ones. She was also part of a group of writers who agreed not to cheat readers. If you read one of her novels, you can generally work out whodunnit because it’s going to be one of a group of characters you have met already. No last-minute additions. Furthermore, it could be anyone - the Colonel, the doctor, even the sweet young thing. Nobody is out of the running. And yet, though she seems to have created the house party story, I can’t remember it ever being the butler, except one novel - not telling you which one because spoilers - in which the butler was actually an actor pretending to be a butler.

Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher novel Urn Burial was a tribute to Christie and her house party stories. It even had a character called Mary Mead after the home of Miss Marple. She did a lot of knitting and listening and was obviously inspired by Jane Marple. 

If you are interested, Project Gutenberg has several Christie books for free, as they go out of copyright. Or you can buy them. They may go out of copyright, but will be very unlikely to go out of print!