Books and their authors. The secret of Agatha Christie's enduring popularity.

Did you know that well over 2 billion copies of Agatha Christie's books are sold every year across the globe? No matter how ingenuous and relevant modern crime fiction authors try to be, none of them has been able to match Dame Agatha's massive popularity.

Read our post below to discover why her books have timeless appeal.

‘Reading Christie is like being taken for a pleasant garden tour by a gardener who really loves flowers and wants you to love them, too’, wrote James Zemboy, the author of ‘The Detective Novels Of Agatha Christie: A Reader's Guide’. It seems inconceivable that reading a murder mystery book could be compared to walking in a lovely garden but it can and there are a few reasons for it.

First of all, Agatha Christie avoided violence. She wrote: ‘I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest’. In her books you will never see a murder actually happen. Under no circumstances do her amateur sleuths, Poirot or Miss Marple, threaten anyone with a gun or inflict physical harm to others. The only weapons they use are their analytical brains and acute powers of observation. Moreover, Agatha Christie deliberately made her chief characters amusing. The first name of Poirot, a little Belgian with an egg-shaped head, a waxed moustache and small feet, is Hercule, the French version of Hercules. He is compulsively tidy, ‘arranging things, liking things in pairs, liking things square instead of round’. Miss Marple, ‘a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands’, enjoys prying into other people’s life and calls herself ‘an emissary of justice’. Agatha Christie’s dislike of violence is also revealed through her choice of the murder method. In about 50% of her murder mysteries death is caused by poison. 

Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple

Secondly, Agatha Christie rarely modelled her characters on real people. She wrote: 'It's no good thinking about real people - you must create your characters for yourself. Someone you see in a tram or a train or in a restaurant is a possible starting point because you can make up something for yourself about them'. As a consequence, you are not likely to recognize yourself in any of the people populating her books. Besides, Christie made up her characters leaving a lot of scope for the reader's imagination- read and take pleasure in thinking up your own details for each character filling in the gaps left by the benevolent author.

Thirdly, Agatha Christie was a remarkably inventive writer and her inventiveness never fails to make the reader’s mind work. She was hardly ever content to rest on the laurels and introduced a number of new plot devices. In ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ she made the murderer someone who the readers of any book trust the most. It hits the reader like a thunderbolt to discover who is to blame but when the reader analyzes the facts, everything falls into place – strange but true. Another case in point is one of her most famous books ‘And Then There Were None’. That’s what she wrote about it:..‘a difficult technique which was a challenge and so I enjoyed it, and I think dealt with it satisfactorily.’ Indeed, in this book when the last person on an island cut off from the mainland is killed, the reader is amazed and is bound to ask the question: ‘If there is no one left, who is the murderer’? The answer is in the book, which is universally considered to be Christie’s masterpiece. 

Agatha Christie at work

Yet, when the riddle is explained, there are no feelings of anger, frustration or annoyance on the part of the reader. It seems so obvious that the reader inevitably thinks: I should have figured that out myself if I had been a little more attentive’. Thus, Christie’s books are like crossword puzzles – you often fail to complete them but you know that there is no cheating and if you try, you will succeed.