Agatha Christie and the murder mystery: A bloody-good legacy
Kate Green takes a closer look at the goddess of the murder mystery, 100 years after the author was catapulted to literary stardom.
'To tell the truth, I was considerably upset and worried. I am not going to pretend that at that moment I foresaw the events of the next few weeks. I emphatically did not do so.’ These are the words of Dr Sheppard, inscrutable narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was published 100 years ago this spring and is the book that propelled its author Agatha Christie to literary stardom.
The third to feature the finicky Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, it was voted the best crime novel of all time in 2013 by the British Crime Writers’ Association for its unexpected denouement. The New York Times opined that few detective stories ‘provide greater analytical stimulation’; The Observer said it made ‘breathless reading’ and was distinguished ‘by its coherence, its reasonableness and the fact that the characters live and move and have their being’; Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson wrote that it was ‘the ultimate detective novel’, sculpted into ‘a dazzling new shape’.
A young Christie.
A selection of Christie novels.
Christie (1890–1976) is the bestselling and most translated novelist of all time — her 66 detective novels have sold more than two billion copies in English and translations — and is the author of the world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which started life as Three Blind Mice, written for radio for Queen Mary’s 80th birthday. Although she undoubtedly pioneered today’s ‘cosy crime’ genre, in which the murder doesn’t feel too frightening and takes place in salubrious surroundings, Christie was an astute observer of human nature, of petty village politics and family dissent. ‘Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop,’ she said.
'The Mousetrap' — the world's longest running play.
Kenneth Branagh as Christie's detective Hercule Poirot in a film adaptation of 'Murder on the Orient Express'.
She was also a quick, decisive writer, who worked out the plot first in notes and then dictated it. When each book was finished, she would read it to her family after dinner, omitting the denouement. Her grandson, Mathew Prichard, recalls a reading of A Pocket Full of Rye: ‘My grandfather Max [her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan]… consistently and obstinately plumped for the most unlikely and impossible suspect and went to sleep again. My mother maintained the solution was, of course, crystal clear to any-one with a grain of intelligence.’ Both were right.
This feature originally appeared in the January 7 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
