Agatha Christie

English crime writer (1890–1976) who created Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and wrote 66 detective novels and the play The Mousetrap.

MysteryThriller

Notable work: Murder on the Orient Express

About Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was born in Torquay, Devon, in 1890 and wrote her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1916, in the middle of the First World War. After six consecutive rejections, she broke through when it was published in 1920, introducing the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Over the next five decades she published 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, plus six non-mystery novels under the pen name Mary Westmacott. Her play The Mousetrap opened in London's West End in 1952 and has had the longest run of any play in the world.

Much of her material came from her own life. Work in hospital dispensaries during both world wars gave her a detailed knowledge of the poisons that recur in her plots. A 1928 journey on the Orient Express fed Murder on the Orient Express (1934), and her 1930 marriage to the archaeologist Max Mallowan took her to excavations in the Middle East, the background for Death on the Nile and Murder in Mesopotamia. Guinness World Records lists her as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, with more than two billion copies sold. Her usual pattern is a closed circle of suspects and a final scene in which the detective gathers them and explains the solution.

Where to Start With Agatha Christie

Start with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), and read it before anyone can spoil the ending. It is the third Poirot novel but needs nothing from the first two, and in 2013 the members of the Crime Writers' Association voted it the best crime novel ever written. Murder on the Orient Express makes a good second book: a train stopped by heavy snow, a murdered passenger, and a fixed set of suspects who cannot leave.

For Miss Marple, begin with The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), her first full-length case. Readers who prefer suspense to puzzle-solving should try And Then There Were None (1939), a standalone set on a small island in which ten people die; it is the best-selling mystery novel in the world. The Mysterious Affair at Styles can wait. It is where Poirot starts, but nothing later depends on it.

How the Books Connect

Christie's books do not need to be read in publication order. Each Poirot, Marple, and Tommy and Tuppence novel is a self-contained case, so it is easier to choose by detective or setting than to work through all 66. The exceptions come at the very end: Curtain and Sleeping Murder were written during the Second World War as final cases for Poirot and Marple, then held back for decades and published in 1975 and 1976. Save each one until you have read a good number of that detective's earlier books.