Agatha Christie is the Queen of Crime, one of my favourite authors, and according to the Guinness Book of World Records the novelist who has sold the most books ever.
But what makes her so great?
Why are her books still so popular?
And has anyone not seen The Mousetrap?
Who was Agatha Christie?
Agatha Christie was born in Torquay in 1890, she was homeschooled by her mother, before going to Paris for finishing school when she was 16.
She married her first husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, in 1914. During The First World War, Christie worked in a doctors and a pharmacy, this helped develop her knowledge of poison that she would later use so effectively in her writing.
She published her first novel 'A Mysterious Affair at Styles' in 1920, introducing the world to the now iconic Inspector Hercule Poirot.
In 1926, Christie was reported missing, her car was found abandoned in a chalk pit in Surrey. The disappearance was covered extensively by the media of the day and led to a national search for the author. She was found 11 days later at a hotel in Harrogate.
Christie claimed to have had a nervous breakdown and had no memory of the days that she was missing. She said the episode was brought on by the death of her mother and Archibald requesting a divorce so he could marry another woman. The couple divorced in 1928 having had one child, a daughter named Rosalind.
Christie went on to marry Sir Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, in 1930. The pair travelled extensively, inspiring Christie to write stories set abroad such as 'Death on the Nile.'
Over her career Christie developed two of the most famous protagonists of all time in Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, wrote over 75 novels under her own name and under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and a number of plays including The Mousetrap, the longest running play in history.
I was lucky enough to see its 29,518th performance earlier this year.
Why do people like Agatha Christie?
Because she's brilliant.
A simple answer to a difficult question, but it's true.
Christie is so beloved because she wrote with such a wonderful imagination and style. She could take something as mundane as a vicarage in a small village and make it into the centre of a wild web of secrets and lies with a murder on the top. She could develop characters who were noble and kind and by the end of a story make you certain that they were a cold blooded killer.
She is the Queen of Crime because of her unparalleled ability to use the conventions of the genre to both comfort and confuse you. There have been multiple times I have read a story and guessed the killer immediately, only to have Poirot reveal a myriad of clues I'd blundered past. Each of her crime novels are wildly different in their style and execution, meaning you never know what to expect.
She seems to have been an ardent believer in Checkov's gun. By which I mean she has a beautifully direct style to her writing that makes her books easily digestible. If Christie decides to show you something or allow you to overhear a character she has done it for a reason. This ensures that scenes are constantly intriguing, helping to guide you in the right direction or lead you down the garden path.
The time period, settings, and characters that she creates parallels beautifully to the stories she writes. Wealthy, untouchable aristocrats; beautiful women; gruff old soldiers; priests and doctors meld and blend together in her tales. As the case progresses we see their walls come down and their secrets revealed, sometimes in exceedingly ugly ways.
Her ingenuity in murders is simply astounding. The breadth of means, motive, and opportunities that appear in Christie's novels not to mention the different tools of dispatch would make the most prolific serial killers feel inadequate. Cyanide, gunshot, stabbed, or drowned while apple bobbing, it's quite a collection.
But I think one of the biggest reasons that people love Agatha Christie, is that her books are cosy.
They are the perfect foil for a cup of tea and an armchair. Her novels are witty, exciting, thought provoking, scary, thrilling, and so so clever. It's so easy to curl up on a sofa with a book like 'Five Little Pigs' and suddenly realise it's been 5 hours, you've read the entire book, and you're now sitting in the dark.
So why do people love her? Because she is utterly brilliant.
If you're yet to dip your toe into any Agatha Christie, I would highly recommend 'And Then There Were None.' Widely regarded as Christie's masterpiece, and my personal favourite, it is a book everyone should read at least once. If you can work out the killer you're a better detective than anyone I've met.
'The young people think the old people are fools -- but the old people know the young people are fools.'
Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage
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