Agatha Christie's Detective Novels

Agatha Christie is perhaps the best-known mystery writer in the world, and her novels, short stories, and plays have been translated into numerous languages, reprinted many times, presented on film and television, and remain important and widely read works to this day. She created numerous popular characters, with the two most important of these being the Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, and the elderly woman of a small English village who solves crimes because she knows human nature, Miss Marple. Agatha Christie came to typify the English murder mystery of the Golden Age of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and her style and range would have a major influence on the development of the mystery novel in both England and America that continues as writers try either to emulate her or differentiate themselves from her as a way of making their own mark.

Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay on September 15, 1890, the third child of American born Franklin Alvah Miller and English-born Clarissa Margaret Beochmer Miller. Her childhood was passed in a fairly affluent household. She had an older sister and brother who were away at school during her early years, so she was for all practical purposes an only child indulged by an agreeable father and a sensitive mother. She also had two eccentric grandmothers who influenced her. Her parents enjoyed entertaining, and their guest list included a number of literary figures such as Henry James and Rudyard Kiplin

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g volumes of detective stories increased rather than diminished. She started writing two or three books a year, a pace that would continue for decades (Wagoner 10-11). Christie was often asked how she managed to create the plots for he stories, but she was never able to articular how this process worked. She simply said that for her, it was easy to do but difficult if not impossible to explain. When she first started writing mysteries, it was a major change from the sorts of things she had produced before: . . . Agatha Christie had been writing up to that time "stories of unrelieved gloom, in which most of the characters died," according to her own admission (Ramsey 13). She started writing at the beginning of what would become known as the golden Age, the era between the two World Wars when the crime story became a popular genre. The detective novel developed form a range of different backgrounds and produced diverse detectives and differing ideologies of detection, from Edgar Allan Poe's Paris-based stories of the austere and remote Auguste Dupin to the more sensational figure of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in England: In the inter-war period, the humorous detachment of the crime-puzzle novels of [Dorothy L.] Sayers a

Category: Literature - A