Agatha Christie: The Queen of Crime

Dame Agatha Christie is rightly called the Queen of Crime. She wrote 66 novels and 14 short stories as well as the longest running play in London’s West End, The Mousetrap. Her books have been adapted for televison and film numerous times. No doubt they will continue to be for many years to come. Not only that, Christie defined the murder mystery and was an inspirsation to future crime writers.

Christie is the exemplar of the ‘whodunnit’. In her stories there are red herrings and surprises until the very end. It keeps you guessing and while about death is also fun. Famously, Dashiell Hammett wanted to take murder out of the drawing room and put it back on the street. His version of the whodunnit is very different to Christie. His books are full of ethical dilemmas and heroes with dubious characters. Hammett gave us some of the best American crime writing (The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key and more) but without Christie he may not have been inspired to put pen to paper. Hammett was instrumental in establishing a new genre, the private detective as moral agent.

Years later we got the ‘whydunnit’ version of mystery. Again, without Christie this brand of crime story may never have come about.

Christie was also the inspiration for the board game Cluedo and for the boom in Murder Mystery parties that took off in the 1990s.

Aside from intrictate plotting and complelling writing, Christie created fascinating detectives. Her most famous and successful being Hercule Poirot.

Much of this makes people think of Christie as very twee and representing a slice of a by-gone England. Superficially that is the easy conclusion to reach. However, there was more to Christie’s writing that the drawing room murder mystery. Like her contemporary P.G. Wodehouse she was holding a mirror up to Britain showing us the social relationships that existed and the views that Britains had of non-Brits, notably Poirot, at the time. Christie was guilty of using language that we now rightly condemn but she clearly didn’t think that the British were paragons of virtue.

She is deservedly up there with the great popular writers and will continue to intrigue and mystify audiences whether they read her or watch her stories on film.