brief biography of agatha christie

Agatha Christie

Mystery writer Agatha Christie became one of the world’s top-selling authors with famous books like Murder on the Orient Express and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd .

Quick Facts

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Dubbed the “Queen of Mystery,” Agatha Christie was an author and playwright known for books such as Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile , as well as characters like Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. Christie published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles , in 1920 and went on to become one of the most famous writers in history with 83 books to her name (and her pseudonym, Mary Westmacott). She also became a noted playwright with The Mousetrap , which is still running today on London’s West End. Christie died in January 1976 at age 85 and remains one of the top-selling authors ever, with her combined works selling more than 2 billion copies worldwide.

FULL NAME: Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller BORN: September 15, 1890 DIED: January 12, 1976 BIRTHPLACE: Torquay, England SPOUSES: Archie Christie (1914-1928) and Max Mallowan (1930-1976) CHILDREN: Rosalind ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Virgo

Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, Devon, in the southwest part of England. The youngest of three siblings, she was educated at home by her mother, who encouraged her daughter to write. As a child, Agatha enjoyed fantasy play and creating characters, and, when she was 16, she moved to Paris for a time to study vocals and piano.

In October 1912, Agatha met Archibald “Archie” Christie at a dance. The pair became engaged in 1913 , just before Archie entered military training. At the outset of World War I, he was stationed in France and became a pilot. The couple married during his first period of leave, on Christmas Eve in 1914, and they relocated to London at the conclusion of the war.

Agatha and Archie had one child, Rosalind Hicks, born in August 1919. Their marriage began crumbling in 1926, when Archie revealed in August that he had begun a relationship with a woman named Nancy Neele and asked for a divorce. Agatha, who was also grieving the death of her mother, had an alarming response to the revelation.

On December 3 after an argument, the author, who had published the popular book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd that year, left her home in Sunningdale and disappeared. Christie’s disappearance set off a manhunt involving both police and civilians. According to the U.K. National Archives , her flight became a media sensation and writer Arthur Conan Doyle even consulted a medium in an attempt to find her whereabouts.

On December 14, a stranger recognized Christie at the Swan Hydro hotel in Harrogate, where she had checked in using Neele’s name. She had no recollection of the prior 11 days, and her biographer later wrote she was in a “fugue” state caused by trauma or depression. However, some believed she had left on purpose to embarrass her husband. Christie ultimately recovered, with she and Archie finally divorcing in 1928.

In 1930, Agatha remarried with archaeology professor Max Mallowan, with whom she traveled on several expeditions, later recounting her trips in the 1946 memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live .

As she was growing her family, Christie’s writing career ascended. She published her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles , in 1920. The story focused on the murder of a rich heiress and introduced readers to one of Christie’s most famous characters: Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Poirot returned in The Murder on the Links (1923) and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), a hit that was later marked as a genre classic and one of the author’s all-time favorites. The year of Christie’s second nuptials saw the release of Murder at the Vicarage (1930), which became another classic and introduced readers to Miss Jane Marple, an enquiring village lady.

Poirot and Marple are Christie’s most well-known detectives, with the two featured in dozens of novels and short stories. Poirot made the most appearances in Christie’s work in titles that include Ackroyd , The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), and Death in the Clouds (1935). Miss Marple was featured in books like The Moving Finger (1942) and A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) and been played onscreen by actors like Angela Lansbury , Helen Hayes, and Geraldine McEwan. Other notable Christie characters include Tuppence and Tommy Beresford, Colonel Race, Parker Pyne, and Ariadne Oliver.

Writing well into her later years, Christie wrote more than 70 detective novels as well as short fiction. Christie’s success as an author of sleuth stories has earned her titles like the “Queen of Crime” and the “Queen of Mystery.” She also wrote romance novels like Unfinished Portrait (1934) and A Daughter’s a Daughter (1952) under the name Mary Westmacott. In total, Christie published 83 books, including works using her pseudonym.

Christie was a renowned playwright as well, with works like The Hollow (1951) and Verdict (1958). Her play The Mousetrap opened in 1952 at the Ambassador Theatre and—at more than 8,800 showings during 21 years—set the record for the longest unbroken run in a London theater. After a brief hiatus amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the show is still going strong today with more than 27,500 performances as of February 2022 .

Queen Elizabeth II bestowed Christie with damehood in 1971 for her contributions to literature. Three years later, Christie made her last public appearance for the opening night of the play version of her 1934 book Murder on the Orient Express .

Christie died at her home, Winterbrook House, at age 85 on January 12, 1976. That night, the lead actor of The Mousetrap , Brian McDermot, led a theater audience in a silent tribute to the author . At her death, it was estimated that Christie’s thrillers had sold around 300 million copies. She is buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s Church in Cholsey, where she attended worship services.

It was reported Christie was in poor health in her later years, and she complained of an inability to concentrate. Friends also said she had fits of anger and began to speak nonsensically in conversation. This has led to speculation that she might have suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, though Christie was never officially diagnosed. A study by Ian Lancashire , an English professor at the University of Toronto, showed that Christie’s vocabulary had declined by about 20 percent based on words used in 16 of her novels over a 50-year-period—giving credence to this theory.

Several of Christie’s works have been adapted into popular movies and television shows, including as recently as 2023.

Murder on the Orient Express

In 1974, Albert Finney starred as detective Poirot in a film version of Murder on the Orient Express , featuring an ensemble cast that included Ingrid Bergman , Lauren Bacall , Sean Connery , and Vanessa Redgrave . Bergman won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, with Finney receiving a Best Actor nomination and the movie earning a nod for adapted screenplay. Murder on the Orient Express also inspired a 2001 made-for-TV movie.

In 2017, Kenneth Branagh directed and portrayed Poirot alongside Penélope Cruz , Judi Dench , Johnny Depp , and Michelle Pfeiffer in a reimagined movie version.

Death on the Nile

In 1978, Death on the Nile premiered and starred Peter Ustinov as Poirot, along with Mia Farrow , Bette Davis , and Angela Lansbury in supporting roles. Meanwhile, for a 2022 remake, Branagh again played Poirot alongside Annette Bening , Gal Gadot , and Armie Hammer .

See How They Run and A Haunting in Venice

Also in 2022, the mystery spoof See How They Run , starring Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan , took inspiration from Christie’s play The Mousetrap and featured Shirley Henderson as a fictional version of the author. A year later, Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party served as the basis for another Poirot movie mystery, A Haunting in Venice .

TV Miniseries: Ordeal By Innocence and The Pale Horse

Several of Christie’s works have been adapted for the small screen in the form of TV miniseries, including And Then There Were None (2015); The Witness for the Prosecution (2016); The ABC Murders (2018), starring John Malkovich as Poirot; Ordeal By Innocence (2018); The Pale Horse (2020); and Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (2022).

• People often ask me what made me take up writing... I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts. There’s nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time I was 16 or 17, I’d written quite a number of short stories and one long, dreary novel. By the time I was 21, I finished the first book of mine ever to be published.
• I think the real work is done in thinking out the development of your story and worrying about it until it comes right. That may take quite a while. Then when you’ve got all your materials together, as it were, all that remains is to try and find time to write the thing.

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Agatha Christie Biography

“One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood. I had a very happy childhood. I had a home and a garden that I loved; a wise and patient Nanny; as father and mother two people who loved each other dearly and made a success of their marriage and of parenthood.” A. Christie Autobiography

In 1905, she went to Paris where she was educated at finishing schools and hoped to become a singer, however, she realised that her voice was not strong enough to make it a career. She experimented with writing short novels, but not much came of it. She approached several publishers but, in the period before the First World War, received several rejections.

In 1914, Agatha Christie met Archibald Christie an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps – they married a few months after the outbreak of war in December 1914. They had a child, Rosalind in August 1919.

During the First World war, with her husband away in France, she trained and worked as a nurse helping to treat wounded soldiers. She also became educated in the field of pharmacy. She recalled her time as a nurse with great fondness, saying it was one of the most rewarding jobs she ever undertook.

Writing Career of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie was first published in 1920. Her first book was The Mysterious Affair at Styles , (1920) which featured the detective – Hercule Poirot, who at the time was portrayed as a Belgian refugee from the Great War. Poirot is one of the most recognised fictional characters in English with his mixture of personal pride, broken English and immaculate appearance and moustache. The book sold reasonably well and helped meet the public’s great appetite for detective novels. It was a genre that had been popularised through Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories at the turn of the century. In 1926, she made her big breakthrough with the publication of “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” This became a best-seller and made Christie famous as a writer.

Mysterious disappearance

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly despairing, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.” – Foreward to Autobiography

After the affair, with created negative publicity towards her, she travelled to the Canary Islands for recuperation. In 1930, she married her second husband, Max Mallowan. This marriage was happier, though her only child, Rosalind Hicks, came from her first marriage. Her second husband Max Mallowan was an archaeologist and she often accompanied him on trips to the Middle East. She learnt to help in archaeological digs, taking photographs and working on the sites. Christie paid her own way and tried to keep out of the limelight, working anonymously.

Writings of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie preferred her other great detective – the quiet but effective old lady – Miss Marple, who used to solve crimes through her intricate knowledge of how people in English villages behave. The character of Miss Marple was based on the traditional English country lady – and her own relatives. In later life, she increasingly preferred Miss Marple to Poirot.

The plot of Agatha Christies novels could be described as formulaic. Murders were committed by ingenious methods – often involving poison, which Agatha Christie had great knowledge of. After interrogating all the main suspects, the detective would bring all the participants into some drawing-room before explaining who was the murderer. Her writing was quite clear and it is easy to get absorbed in the flow of the story. It also gave readers the chance to try and work out who the murderer was before it was revealed at the end.

Agatha Christie enjoyed writing. For her there was great satisfaction in creating plots and stories. She also wrote six novels in the genre of romance and suspense under a pseudonym – Mary Westmacott.

During the Second World War, Christie worked in the pharmacy of the University College London, which gave her ideas for some of her murder methods. After the war, her books continued to grow in international popularity. In 1952, her play The Mousetrap was debuted at the Ambassador’s Theatre in London and has been performed without a break ever since. Her success led to her being honoured in the New Year’s honour list. In 1971 she was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire.

Personal life

Agatha Christie loved embroidery, travelling and gardening – she won various horticultural prizes. She expressed a dislike of alcohol, smoking and the gramophone. She preferred to avoid the limelight and rarely gave public interviews. To some extent she hankered after the more idyllic days of Edwardian England she experienced in her childhood and was dubious about aspects of modern life.

“The quality of agreeableness is not much stressed nowadays. People tend to ask if a man is clever, industrious, if he contributes to the well-being of the community, if he ‘counts’ in the scheme of things.” -A. Christie, Part I of Autobiography

Religious views

Agatha Christie was baptised in the Anglican Church and remained a Christian throughout her life, though she went through periods of difficulty. She was very close to her mother, who was a practising Christian but also was willing to experiment in following practices of Catholocism and spiritualism. Agatha and her other siblings believed that her mother had a degree of psychic ability. Her own writings are not explicitly Christian, but generally have a theme of justice with the sinners unable to escape the consequences of their bad actions, and the moral universe restored. She kept her mother’s copy of “Imitation of Christ” by Thomas à Kempis – close to her bed. In her own autobiography, she writes about her own awareness and interest in the inner spiritual sense.

“We never know the whole man, though sometimes, in quick flashes, we know the true man. I think, myself, that one’s memories represent those moments which, insignificant as they may seem, nevertheless represent the inner self and oneself as most really oneself.” – A. Christie

She died in 1976 aged 85 from natural causes, though may have experienced some dementia in her final years.

Citation:  Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Agatha Christie”, Oxford,  www.biographyonline.net Last updated 18 March 2020. Originally published 5 February 2013.

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Agatha Christie (September 15, 1890 – January 12, 1976) was an English mystery author. After working as a nurse during World War I , she became a successful writer, thanks to her Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mystery series. Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, as well as the most-translated individual author of all time.

Fast Facts: Agatha Christie

• Full Name:  Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie Mallowan
• Also Known As: Lady Mallowan, Mary Westmacott
• Known For:  Mystery novelist
• Born:  September 15, 1890 in Torquay, Devon, England
• Parents:  Frederick Alvah Miller and Clarissa (Clara) Margaret Boehmer
• Died: January 12, 1976 in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England
• Spouses:  Archibald Christie (m. 1914–28), Sir Max Mallowan (m. 1930)
• Children:  Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie
• Selected Works : Partners in Crime (1929), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937), And Then There Were None (1939), The Mousetrap (1952)
• Notable Quote:  "I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”

Agatha Christie was the youngest of three children born to Frederick Alvah Miller and his wife, Clara Boehmer, a well-off upper-middle-class couple. Miller was the American-born son of a dry goods merchant whose second wife, Margaret, was Boehmer’s aunt. They settled in Torquay, Devon, and had two children before Agatha. Their oldest child, a daughter named Madge (short for Margaret) was born in 1879, and their son, Louis (who went by “Monty”), was born in Morristown, New Jersey, during an 1880 visit to the United States. Agatha, like her sister, was born in Torquay, ten years after her brother.

By most accounts, Christie’s childhood was a happy and fulfilling one. Along with her immediate family, she spent time with Margaret Miller (her mother’s aunt/father’s stepmother) and her maternal grandmother, Mary Boehmer. The family held an eclectic set of beliefs—including the idea that Christie’s mother Clara had psychic abilities—and Christie herself was homeschooled, with her parents teaching her reading, writing, math, and music. Although Christie’s mother wanted to wait until she was eight to begin teaching her to read, Christie essentially taught herself to read much earlier and became a passionate reader from a very young age. Her favorites included the work of children’s authors Edith Nesbit and Mrs. Molesworth, and, later, Lewis Carroll .

Because of her homeschooling, Christie didn’t have as much of an opportunity to form close friendships with other children in the first decade of her life. In 1901, her father died from chronic kidney disease and pneumonia after being in failing health for some time. The following year, she was sent to a regular school for the first time. Christie was enrolled at Miss Guyer's Girls' School in Torquay, but after years of a less-structured educational atmosphere at home, she found it hard to adjust. She was sent to Paris in 1905, where she attended a series of boarding and finishing schools.

Travel, Marriage, and World War I Experience

Christie returned to England in 1910, and, with her mother’s health failing, decided to move to Cairo in hopes that a warmer climate might help her health. She visited monuments and attended social events; the ancient world and archaeology would play a role in some of her later writings. Eventually, they returned to England, just as Europe was drawing nearer to a full-scale conflict .

As an apparently popular and charming young woman, Christie’s social and romantic life expanded considerably. She reportedly had several short-lived romances, as well as an engagement that was soon called off. In 1913, she met Archibald “Archie” Christie at a dance. He was the son of a lawyer in the Indian Civil Service and an army officer who eventually joined the Royal Flying Corps. They fell in love quickly and married on Christmas Eve, 1914.

World War I had begun a few months before their marriage, and Archie was sent to France. In fact, their wedding took place when he was home on leave after being away for months. While he was serving in France, Christie worked back at home as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment. She worked for over 3,400 hours at the Red Cross hospital in Torquay, first as a nurse, then as a dispenser once she qualified as an apothecary’s assistant. During this time, she encountered refugees, particularly Belgians, and those experiences would stay with her and inspire some of her early writing, including her famous Poirot novels.

Fortunately for the young couple, Archie survived his stint abroad and actually rose through the military ranks. In 1918, he was sent back to England as a colonel in the Air Ministry, and Christie ceased her VAD work. They settled in Westminster, and after the war, her husband left the military and began working in London’s financial world. The Christies welcomed their first child, Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie, in August 1919.

Pseudonym Submissions and Poirot (1912-1926)

• The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921)
• The Secret Adversary (1922)
• The Murder on the Links (1923)
• Poirot Investigates (1924)
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Before the war, Christie wrote her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert , set in Cairo. The novel was summarily rejected by all the publishers she sent it to, but writer Eden Philpotts, a family friend, put her in touch with his agent, who rejected Snow Upon the Desert but encouraged her to write a new novel. During this time, Christie also wrote a handful of short stories, including “The House of Beauty,” “The Call of Wings,” and “The Little Lonely God.” These early stories, which were written early in her career but not published until decades later, were all submitted (and rejected) under various pseudonyms.

As a reader, Christie had been a fan of detective novels for some time, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1916, she began working on her first mystery novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles . It was not published until 1920, after several failed submissions and, eventually, a publishing contract that required her to change the ending of the novel and that she later called exploitative. The novel was the first appearance of what would become one of her most iconic characters: Hercule Poirot , a former Belgian police officer who had fled to England when Germany invaded Belgium. Her experiences working with Belgian refugees during the war inspired the creation of this character.

Over the next few years, Christie wrote more mystery novels, including a continuation of the Poirot series. In fact, over the course of her career, she would write 33 novels and 54 short stories featuring the character. In between working on the popular Poirot novels, Christie also published a different mystery novel in 1922, titled The Secret Adversary , which introduced a lesser-known character duo, Tommy and Tuppence. She also wrote short stories, many on commission from Sketch magazine.

It was in 1926 that the strangest moment in Christie’s life occurred: her infamous brief disappearance. That year, her husband asked for a divorce and revealed he’d fallen in love with a woman named Nancy Neele. On the evening of December 3, Christie and her husband argued, and she disappeared that night. After nearly two weeks of public furor and confusion, she was found at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel on December 11, then left for her sister’s home soon after. Christie’s autobiography ignores this incident, and to this day, the actual reasons for her disappearance remain unknown. At the time, the public largely suspected that it was either a publicity stunt or an attempt to frame her husband, but the real reasons remain forever unknown and the subject of much speculation and debate.

Introducing Miss Marple (1927-1939)

• Partners in Crime (1929)
• The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)
• The Thirteen Problems (1932)
• Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
• The A.B.C. Murders (1936)
• Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)
• Death on the Nile (1937)
• And Then There Were None (1939)

In 1932, Christie published the short story collection The Thirteen Problems . In it, she introduced the character of Miss Jane Marple, a sharp-witted elderly spinster (who was somewhat based on Christie’s great-aunt Margaret Miller) who became another of her iconic characters. Although Miss Marple would not take off quite as quickly as Poirot did, she was eventually featured in 12 novels and 20 short stories; Christie reputedly preferred writing about Marple, but wrote more Poirot stories to meet public demand.

The following year, Christie filed for divorce, which was finalized in October 1928. While her now-ex husband almost immediately married his mistress, Christie left England for the Middle East, where she befriended archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katharine, who invited her along on their expeditions. In February 1930, she met Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan, a young archaeologist 13 years her junior who took her and her group on a tour of his expedition site in Iraq. The two fell in love quickly and married just seven months later in September 1930.

Christie often accompanied her husband on his expeditions, and the locations they visited frequently provided inspiration or a setting for her stories. During the 1930s, Christie published some of her best-known works, including her 1934 Poirot novel Murder on the Orient Express . In 1939, she published And Then There Were None , which remains, to this day, the best-selling mystery novel in the world. Christie later adapted her own novel for the stage in 1943.

World War II and Later Mysteries (1940-1976)

• Sad Cypress (1940)
• N or M? (1941)
• The Labors of Hercules (1947)
• Crooked House (1949)
• They Do It With Mirrors (1952)
• The Mousetrap (1952)
• Ordeal by Innocence (1958)
• The Clocks (1963)
• Hallowe'en Party (1969)
• Curtain (1975)
• Sleeping Murder (1976)
• Agatha Christie: An Autobiography (1977)

The breakout of World War II did not stop Christie from writing, although she split her time working at a pharmacy at University College Hospital in London. As a matter of fact, her pharmacy work ended up benefitting her writing, as she learned more about chemical compounds and poisons that she was able to use in her novels. Her 1941 novel N or M? briefly placed Christie under suspicion from MI5 because she named a character Major Bletchley, the same name as a top-secret codebreaking operation’s location. As it turned out, she had simply been stuck nearby on a train and, in frustration, gave the place’s name to an unlikeable character. During the war, she also wrote Curtains and Sleeping Murder , intended as the last novels for Poirot and Miss Marple, but the manuscripts were sealed away until the end of her life.

Christie continued writing prolifically in the decades after the war. By the late 1950s, she was reportedly earning around ₤100,000 per year. This era included one of her most famous plays , The Mousetrap , which famously features a twist ending (subverting the usual formula found in most of Christie’s works) that audiences are asked to not reveal when they leave the theater. It is the longest-running play in history and has been running continuously on the West End in London since its debut in 1952.

Christie continued writing her Poirot novels, despite growing increasingly tired of the character. Despite her personal feelings, though, she, unlike fellow mystery writer Arthur Conan Doyle , refused to kill off the character because of how beloved he was by the public. However, 1969’s Hallowe’en Party marked her final Poirot novel (although he did appear in short stories for a few more years) aside from Curtains , which was published in 1975 as her health declined and it became increasingly likely that she would write no more novels.

Literary Themes and Styles

One subject that frequently appeared in Christie’s novels was the topic of archaeology—no real surprise, given her own personal interest in the field. After marrying Mallowan, who spent large amounts of time on archaeological expeditions, she often accompanied him on trips and assisted with some of the preservation, restoration, and cataloging work. Her fascination with archaeology—and, specifically, with the ancient Middle East —came to play a major role in her writings, providing everything from settings to details and plot points.

In some ways, Christie perfected what we now consider the classic mystery novel structure . There is a crime—usually a murder—committed at the beginning, with several suspects who all are concealing secrets of their own. A detective slowly unravels these secrets, with several red herrings and complicating twists along the way. Then, at the end, he gathers all the suspects (that is, the ones who are still alive), and gradually reveals the culprit and the logic that led to this conclusion. In some of her stories, the culprits evade traditional justice (although adaptations, many subject to censors and morality codes, sometimes changed this). Most of Christie’s mysteries follow this style, with a few variations.

In hindsight, some of Christie’s works embraced racial and cultural stereotypes to an occasionally uncomfortable degree, particularly with regard to Jewish characters. That being said, she did often portray “outsiders” as potential victims at the hands of British villains, rather than placing them into the roles of villain. Americans, too, are the subject of some stereotypes and ribbing, but overall do not suffer from wholly negative portrayals.

By the early 1970s, Christie’s health began to fade, but she kept writing. Modern, experimental textual analysis suggests that she may have begun suffering from age-related neurological issues, such as Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. She spent her later years living a quiet life, enjoying hobbies such as gardening, but continuing to write until the last years of her life.

Agatha Christie died of natural causes at age 85 on January 12, 1976, at her home in Wallington, Oxfordshire. Before her death, she made burial plans with her husband and was buried in the plot they purchased in the churchyard of St. Mary's, Cholsey. Sir Max survived her by about two years and was buried beside her upon his death in 1978. Her funeral attendees included reporters from around the world, and wreaths were sent by several organizations, including the cast of her play The Mousetrap .

Along with a few other authors, Christie’s writing came to define the classic “whodunit” mystery genre , which persists to this day. A large number of her stories have been adapted for film, television, theater, and radio over the years, which has kept her perpetually in popular culture. She remains the most popular novelist of all time.

Christie’s heirs continue to hold a minority stake in her company and estate. In 2013, the Christie family gave their "full backing" to the release of a new Poirot story, The Monogram Murders , which was written by British author Sophie Hannah. She later released two more books under the Christie umbrella, Closed Casket in 2016 and The Mystery of the Three Quarters in 2018.

• Mallowan, Agatha Christie.  An Autobiography . New York, NY: Bantam, 1990.
• Prichard, Mathew.  The Grand Tour: Around The World With The Queen Of Mystery . New York, US: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012.
• Thompson, Laura. Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life . Pegasus Books, 2018.
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Who Was Agatha Christie?

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The Queen of Crime, the creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, the best-selling novelist of all time — even people who don’t read detective novels know the name Agatha Christie. In her long and prolific career, Christie wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections, as well as several plays, one of which, The Mousetrap , is the longest-running play in history. I’ve loved Agatha Christie’s work ever since I watched my first episode of Poirot starring David Suchet (one of the best castings in literary adaptation history), and spent lockdown rereading my favourite Christie mysteries. But who was Agatha Christie?

Who was Agatha Christie?

Agatha Christie’s work was hugely influential, not only on the detective genre, but on broader popular culture; she’s been parodied in everything from The Simpsons to Muppets Tonight . Christie popularised the country house mystery, and the trope of gathering all the suspects together in one place for the denouement is strongly associated with Christie’s work. In addition to many Christie-inspired spoofs and pastiches, from Murder by Death to Knives Out , Agatha Christie’s work has also influenced multiple serious detective stories. Robin Stevens, author of the Murder Most Unladylike series, has spoken about Christie as one of her main inspirations; Stuart Turton’s The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is a Christie mystery with a time loop; and books like The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley draw from Christie, with a country-house setting and a group of friends being picked off one by one.

Christie’s real life was often as fascinating and unexpected as her stories. Like many of her characters, Agatha Christie travelled the world, visited archaeological sites, and worked in the medical field in both the First and Second World Wars, a background which came into play in her writing. She also had a complex and, at some points, heartbreaking romantic life, which at one point led to a major mystery that still surrounds this beloved literary figure.

Agatha Christie was born in 1890 to a well-off family, and was a voracious reader from a young age, after teaching herself to read aged five. She began writing short stories at the age of 18, and, in her early 20s, travelled to Egypt with her mother. During her time in Egypt, Agatha met her first husband, Archie Christie, whom she married in 1914. The couple were soon separated by the First World War — Archie fought in France, while Agatha worked as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment in Torquay, Devon. Here, Agatha met several Belgian refugees who inspired her first detective creation, Hercule Poirot. (Like Arthur Conan Doyle, Christie became quite annoyed with her most famous creation. Ariadne Oliver, her self-insert character, was her way of expressing this irritation; crime writer Mrs Oliver writes stories about a fussy Finnish detective Sven Hjerson, whose idiosyncrasies that she established in earlier stories make him very difficult to write).

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The first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles , was written in 1916, but Christie didn’t find a publisher until 1920. The book was well-received, and had the unusual honour for a fiction novel of being reviewed in the Pharmaceutical Journal , because of the accuracy of Christie’s descriptions of the use of poison — unsurprising, as Christie’s work for the Voluntary Aid Detachment included working in the hospital’s dispensary. Christie continued this interest in medication and poisons throughout her life, spending the Second World War working in the pharmacy at University College Hospital, London.

Behind Agatha Christie’s Disappearance

While Christie’s marriage was initially happy, disaster struck in 1926, when Archie Christie informed her that he had met someone else and asked for a divorce. Christie left their home on 3 December, and her car was found the next day, with some clothes and a driving licence left inside.

By this point in her life, Christie was a popular and famous writer, and her disappearance soon became a huge news story. A large team of police officers and volunteers searched for her, and a newspaper offered a large reward for any information on what could have happened to the beloved author. It was initially feared that Christie had died by suicide; however, ten days after she disappeared, she was found at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, nearly 200 miles from her home.

Christie never discussed what happened during the ten days that she was missing, and theories abound; some believe that she experienced a breakdown that led to a total loss of memory, while others have suggested that she staged the disappearance in order to embarrass her soon-to-be-ex-husband. The disappearance has been the subject of several fiction stories, including The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont, and an episode of Doctor Who , “The Unicorn and the Wasp”.

While Christie’s first marriage ended in heartbreak, her romantic life wasn’t over. On one of the archaeological expeditions that she loved to attend, Christie met her second husband, Max Mallowan. The two married in 1930, and their relationship lasted until Christie’s death in 1976. She left behind her only child, her daughter Rosalind, and a legacy in the form of the Agatha Christie Trust for Children.

Literary Successes

While Christie’s literary career debuted with The Mysterious Affair at Styles , this is far from her best-known work. She cemented her reputation as a gifted detective novelist with another Poirot story, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , and a later adventure of the Belgian detective, Murder on the Orient Express , has gone down in history as one of the best-known crime stories ever written; even people who haven’t read the book are likely to know both the tale and the twist.

In addition to Poirot, Miss Marple, and Tommy and Tuppence, Christie wrote several standalone stories. One of these, And Then There Were None (renamed because its original title included a horrific racist slur), tells the story of ten strangers who are lured to an island and then picked off one by one. The group discover along the way that they have all got away with murder, and are being punished for their past sins. And Then There Were None is one of the strongest examples of Christie’s legacy; it is the world’s best-selling mystery, over 80 years after its first publication in 1940, and has sold over 100 million copies worldwide. Its popularity is understandable; while I usually prefer reading Poirot and Miss Marple, And Then There Were None has a creeping, terrifying atmosphere and an immensely satisfying plot that keeps you on edge to the last page.

Christie received acclaim and recognition for her work both in her lifetime and after her death. She was the first winner of the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award, in 1955, and was voted the best crime writer of all time by the Crime Writers’ Association in 2013. Her books have been adapted for stage and screen from the 1920s onwards, and several of these adaptations, such as the Poirot series starring David Suchet, have been award-winning productions in their own right.

While she is best-known for her crime novels and short stories, Christie also wrote in other genres. She wrote six literary novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and some nonfiction works about her time on an archaeological dig and her travels around the world. She even tried her hand at horror; I remember being quite creeped out by a haunted doll story that appears in one of her short story collections.

Agatha Christie Trivia

Christie’s knowledge of poisons and medicine as a result of her pharmaceutical work is well-known, and particularly notable for its accuracy. Indeed, Agatha Christie helped solve a real-life mystery after her death; in 1977, a case of thallium poisoning was identified when one of the people working on it recognised the symptoms from a Christie novel.

While Agatha Christie is known for her love of travel and archaeology, she also had some more unexpected hobbies. In 1922, she tried surfing for the first time, and grew to love the sport. She remained a keen surfer for much of her life, as well as a devoted swimmer.

In 1941, Christie almost fell afoul of MI5, Britain’s intelligence service. She’d named a character in her Tommy and Tuppence book N or M? Major Bletchley, because she’d been stuck near the town of Bletchley on a train journey and named the unpleasant character after the place in a fit of pique; however, MI5 investigated her because they feared that she had somehow discovered the truth about Britain’s wartime codebreaking centre, based at the famous Bletchley Park.

Agatha Christie isn’t the only writer to have had a long legacy and a fascinating life; if you want to know more about one of the world’s most influential sci-fi authors, try Who Was Ursula K LeGuin? For a deep dive into Christie’s beloved old lady detective, read How I Learned to Stop Being Sexist and Love Miss Marple . You might also be interested in Why is Agatha Christie the Best-Selling Author of All Time?

A Brief Biography of Agatha Christie

By Tim Lambert

Her Early Life

Agatha Christie was a great crime writer of the 20th century. She was born Agatha May Clarissa Miller on 13 September 1890 in Torquay, Devon, England. Her father was named Alvan Miller and her mother was called Clarissa Margaret. The family was well off. Sadly when Agatha was 11 her father died.

On 24 December 1914 Agatha married an aviator named Archibald Christie. They had a daughter named Rosalind in 1919. During the First World War, she volunteered to work in a red cross hospital. In 1917 she became a dispenser.

Agatha turned to writing. Her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in the USA in 1920 and in Britain in 1921. It introduced the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Miss Marple appeared in 1927. Agatha was a prolific writer. She wrote many books including Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937) and And Then There Were None (1939).

In December 1926 Agatha disappeared. She went to Harrogate and booked into a hotel. After 10 days she was recognized. Archie and Agatha Christie were divorced the same year, 1928. On 11 September 1930 Agatha married an archaeologist named Max Mallowan.

During the Second World War, Agatha Christie worked as a pharmacist, which gave her a good knowledge of poisons. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976. She was buried in a churchyard in Cholsey, Oxfordshire.

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Agatha Christie

Agatha Mary Clarissa Mille known as Agatha Christie to most readers was the famed playwright, crime novelist, and short story author. She was born on 15th September 1890, in Torquay, Devon, England. She was a brilliant daughter of Frederick Alvah Miller, a stockbroker from New York, while her mother, Clara Boehmer, with an army background. She enjoyed a prosperous childhood with her loving family that admired and valued her choices and provided her with a comfort zone where she could grow, keeping her interests aligned with her personality. Their lives took a tragic turn in 1901 when her father succumbed to chronic pneumonia and kidney disease. His death stole the joys and colors of their lives, throwing the family deep into despair. However, Agatha’s creativity didn’t get restricted by her tragedies .

Agatha Christie was initially home-schooled by her parents who adored her keen interest in reading writing and playing music. Her mother played a significant role in shaping her creative brain. She inspired her to transfer her emotions and ideas on paper. After getting initial grounding from home, she began her formal education at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School in Torquay. Later, in 1905, she traveled to France and attended three different Persian Schools where she further polished her writing talent. She returned to England in 1910 and composed her first literary piece “The House of Dreams ,” which was later published in The Sovereign Magazine.

Personal Life

Christie married twice in life. She met her first husband, Archie Christie, in a dance ball, and they fell in love with each other. The couple tied the knot in 1914 and had one daughter, Rosalind. Unfortunately, they failed to create a strong love bond and parted ways in 1928. After two years, she remarried Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, in September 1930.

Some Important Facts about Her

• Her detective and mystery stories have been adapted to films, video games, and TV screens.
• Agatha Christie was presented with a damehood by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to literature in 1971.
• She is listed as the best-selling fiction writer in the Guinness World Records as more than two billion copies of her writings have been sold worldwide.
• Her writings have also been translated into more than a hundred languages.
• Entertaining the world with her magical writings, her health began to deteriorate in the 1970s. She died on the 12 th of January in 1976 at 85 at the Winter Brook House.

Agatha Christie became a published writer in 1926 with her first short story “The House of Dreams.” She published her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920, weaving a detective tale revolving around her famous character , Hercule Poirot. Later, in 1926, she came up with another significant work, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which added more glory to her fortune. Her other notable works include A Murder Is Announced, And Then There Were None, Murder in the Calais Coach, Easy to Kill, and Black Coffee.

Agatha’s writing style in her murder mystery continues to mesmerize the world as she brilliantly put reality into fiction by developing many characters from scratch. She grabs the reader’s attention by setting a catchy link between delicate storylines, plot structures, and psychological links, such as in Curtain. Also, her succinct use of language and unique characterization make it easy for the viewers to understand the mystery she intends to reveal. A common trait in many of her novels is that she develops the psychological reality in a way that a reader can put himself into the situation. Also, using a catchy description of the character and events, the interaction between characters and captivating conclusion keeps the readers engaging until the end. Regarding literary devices , she often turns toward imagery , symbolism , foreshadowing , and rhetorical statements. Some of the important themes in most of her writings are law versus ethics, violence, psychology, mystery, and detection and intellect.

Some Important Works of Agatha Christie

• Best Novels:  Some of her remarkable novels include  The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder on the Links, The Mystery of the Blue Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Appointment with Death, and The Moving Finger .
• Other Works:  Besides writing marvelous novels, she tried her hands in other areas. Some of them include  Poirot Investigates, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, Murder in the Mews , “The Million Dollar Bond Robbery”,  Star Over Bethlehem, and The Scoop and Behind the Screen.

Agatha Christie’s impacts on Future Literature

Agatha Christie’s remarkable legacy and reader’s interest in her writings speak much about her influence. She is an iconic writer as her works continue to benefit the readers even after the ages of her demise. Her crime fiction equips the readers with problem-solving techniques, visual and auditory perceptiveness, and regional knowledge. Therefore, writers and readers who share interests in puzzles and mysteries keep her popularity going. She expresses her ideas in her pieces so well that writers tend to opt for her distinctly exclusive style to shape their thoughts even today.

Important Quotes

• “As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be safe to tell any man the truth about his wife! Funnily enough, I’d trust most women with the truth about their husbands. Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists.” (Murder in Mesopotamia)
• “Why shouldn’t I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they’re loved and wanted and then show them that it’s all a sham.” (The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side)
• “I know there’s a proverb which that says ‘ To err is human ,’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.” (Hallowe’en Party)

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Agatha Christie

• Born September 15 , 1890 · Torquay, Devon, England, UK
• Died January 12 , 1976 · Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England, UK (natural causes)
• Birth name Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller
• The Queen of Crime
• Height 5′ 7¾″ (1.72 m)
• Agatha was born as "Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller" in 1890 to Frederick Alvah Miller and Clara Boehmer. Agatha was of American and British descent, her father being American and her mother British. Her father was a relatively affluent stockbroker. Agatha received home education from early childhood to when she turned 12-years-old in 1902. Her parents taught her how to read, write, perform arithmetic, and play music. Her father died in 1901. Agatha was sent to a girl's school in Torquay, Devon, where she studied from 1902 to 1905. She continued her education in Paris, France from 1905 to 1910. She then returned to her surviving family in England. As a young adult, Agatha aspired to be a writer and produced a number of unpublished short stories and novels. She submitted them to various publishers and literary magazines, but they were all rejected. Several of these unpublished works were later revised into more successful ones. While still in this point of her life, Agatha sought advise from professional writer Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960). Meanwhile she was searching for a suitable husband and in 1913 accepted a marriage proposal from military officer and pilot-in-training Archibald "Archie" Christie. They married in late 1914. Her married name became "Agatha Christie" and she used it for most of her literary works, including ones created decades following the end of her first marriage. During World War I, Archie Christie was send to fight in the war and Agatha joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment, a British voluntary unit providing field nursing services. She performed unpaid work as a volunteer nurse from 1914 to 1916. Then she was promoted to "apothecaries' assistant" (dispenser), a position which earned her a small salary until the end of the war. She ended her service in September, 1918. Agatha wrote "The Mysterious Affair at Styles", her debut novel ,in 1916, but was unable to find a publisher for it until 1920. The novel introduced her famous character Hercule Poirot and his supporting characters Inspector Japp and Arthur Hastings. The novel is set in World War I and is one of the few of her works which are connected to a specific time period. Following the end of World War I and their retirement from military life, Agatha and Archie Christie moved to London and settled into civilian life. Their only child Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie (1919-2004) was born early in the marriage. Agatha's debut novel was first published in 1920 and turned out to be a hit. It was soon followed by the successful novels "The Secret Adversary" (1922) and "Murder on the Links" (1923) and various short stories. Agatha soon became a celebrated writer. In 1926, Archie Christie announced to Agatha that he had a mistress and that he wanted a divorce. Agatha took it hard and mysteriously disappeared for a period of 10 days. After an extensive manhunt and much publicity, she was found living under a false name in Yorkshire. She had assumed the last name of Archie's mistress and claimed to have no memory of how she ended up there. The doctors who attended to her determined that she had amnesia. Despite various theories by multiple sources, these 10 days are the most mysterious chapter in Agatha's life. Agatha and Archie divorced in 1928, though she kept the last name Christie. She gained sole custody of her daughter Rosalind. In 1930, Agatha married her second (and last) husband Max Mallowan, a professional archaeologist. They would remain married until her death in 1976.Christie often used places that she was familiar with as settings for her novels and short stories. Her various travels with Max introduced her to locations of the Middle East, and provided inspiration for a number of novels. In 1934, Agatha and Max settled in Winterbrook, Oxfordshire, which served as their main residence until their respective deaths. During World War II, she served in the pharmacy at the University College Hospital, where she gained additional training about substances used for poisoning cases. She incorporated such knowledge for realistic details in her stories. She became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1956 and a Dame Commander of the same order in 1971. Her husband was knighted in 1968. They are among the relatively few couples where both members have been honored for their work. Agatha continued writing until 1974, though her health problems affected her writing style. Her memory was problematic for several years and she had trouble remembering the details of her own work, even while she was writing it. Recent researches on her medical condition suggest that she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease or other dementia. She died of natural causes in early 1976. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Dimos I Ntikoudis
• Spouses Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan (September 11, 1930 - January 12, 1976) (her death) Archibald Christie (December 24, 1914 - April 20, 1928) (divorced, 1 child)
• Relatives Mathew Prichard (Grandchild) James Prichard (Great Grandchild)
• All her books and short stories feature some kind of plot twist or surprising ending with the least expected person being the bad guy.
• Over two billion copies of her books have been sold worldwide. Her book sales are surpassed only by the Bible and by William Shakespeare . She is the best-selling author of all time.
• She wrote Hercule Poirot's Christmas for her godson James (an avid fan of her books), after he complained her murders were getting too refined. He wanted a good solid murder, with lots of blood, and the body positioned in such a way that it couldn't be anything but murder. There is a dedication to him in the book.
• The last two novels published were Curtain (chronicling Hercule Poirot's last case) and Sleeping Murder (the last Miss Marple novel). She wrote both books in the 1940s, and then locked them in a safe deposit box. It is stated in her biography, that she wrote the two final cases for Marple and Poirot early, in case she was killed in WWII. This way fans would have closure concerning her characters fates.
• Disappeared for several days in 1926. Disappearance remains unexplained.
• While her fans loved Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie herself was increasingly fed up with her creation. Late in her career, she described him as "an egocentric creep".
• An archaelogist is the best husband a women can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.
• I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
• Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.
• If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles one would hardly see anybody.
• Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.

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An Autobiography

• ⌸ Nonfiction-about
•  1977

When Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976, she was known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime, unrivalled as the best-selling novelist of all time with two billion books sold in more than 100 languages. Though she kept her private life a mystery, for some years Agatha had secretly written her autobiography, and when it was published after her death, millions of her fans agreed - this was her best story!

From early childhood at the end of the 19th century, through two marriages and two World Wars, and her experiences both as a writer and on archaeological expeditions with her second husband, Max Mallowan, this book reveals the true genius of her legendary success with real passion and openness.

Read an extract

There is nothing more wonderful to have in one's life, than time. I don't believe people get enough of it nowadays. Agatha Christie, An Autobiography

More about this story

Begun in 1950 and eventually completed in 1965, Agatha Christie recounts her life from early childhood until the end of the memoir’s composition. The book came about from her reluctance to let others tell her story, as she explained to her agent Edmund Cork of Hughes Massie. Aware that the prospect was now inevitable, Agatha Christie took it upon herself to have the first word, although insisted that the book should not be published until after her death.

The best thing she has ever written. Woman’s Own

After Agatha Christie passed away in 1976, the manuscript was edited by her long-standing publishers Collins and her only daughter, Rosalind Hicks and her husband Anthony. As a result the narrative ends in 1966, and does not include some of Christie’s later achievements such as her DBE in 1971 or the success of the 1974 film of Murder on the Orient Express .

While there have been films inspired by specific events in Christie’s life, such as Agatha (1979) and the Doctor Who episode The Unicorn and the Wasp (2008), none of these are true adaptations of her autobiography.

Buy An Autobiography

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Agatha Christie’s Latest Biographer Plumbs a Life of Mystery

In “Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman,” Lucy Worsley revisits the weird story of one of the 20th century’s most popular and enduring authors.

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By Molly Young

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AGATHA CHRISTIE An Elusive Woman By Lucy Worsley 415 pages. Pegasus Crime. $29.95.

Agatha Christie’s best books have crisp dialogue and high-velocity plots. The bad ones have a Mad Libs quality: feeble prose studded with blank spots into which you can picture the prolific Christie plugging a random “BODY PART” or “WEAPON.” In a 1971 study of English crime fiction, Colin Watson snickered that Christie “seems to have been well aware that intelligence and readership-potential are quite unrelated.”

Watson’s barb was unfair. Few readers turn to detective novels for complex cerebral rewards. Detective novels are games, and require a different method of evaluation (and construction) than works of capital-L Literature. Christie understood this. As with any game-player, an author can be accused of not playing fair , and Christie’s finest novels, like “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” tiptoe deliciously close to the cheating line without crossing it. The goal is to leave a reader thwarted and thrilled, not stumped and resentful.

There have been at least a dozen books devoted to Christie in the past two decades, and Lucy Worsley’s “Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman” is a pleasant but inessential addition to the stack. Fans will admire Worsley’s identification of real-life people, places and phrases that Christie upcycled into her fiction. They will delight in seeing photographs of the author surfing in Hawaii, or learning that her favorite drink was a glass of neat cream. (“Cream, neat” should be an acceptable order at a bar. If we work together, maybe we can make it happen.)

But the book also contains a great deal of padding — perhaps because the terrain has been so thoroughly mapped before — and an unsubtle dose of moralizing. A line in the preface sets an ominous tone, warning that Christie’s work “contains views on race and class that are unacceptable today” — a common refrain in recent biographies but totally unnecessary for readers whose knowledge of history extends more than five minutes.

Worsley moves through Christie’s childhood at a brisk pace. Her birth year: 1890. Location: Southwest England. Mother: creative, enigmatic. Father: blessed with a decent inheritance but cursed with a shopping addiction. Siblings: two. Home: sprawling villa with a view of the sea. Education: spotty.

In 1914 Christie married a handsome pilot named Archie and, while he was at war, worked in the wards and the pharmacy of an auxiliary hospital. During work lulls she filled notebooks with story ideas and lists of poisons. In 1919 she gave birth to a daughter, Rosalind. That same year, a publisher invited Christie for a meeting after reviewing the manuscript that would become her first book, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles.”

Along with demonstrating Christie’s gifts for puzzle-crafting and dialogue, “Styles” brought Hercule Poirot into the world. Poirot and Jane Marple, who debuted in late 1927, are two of the most indelible characters ever to grace detective fiction. Observing the similarities between these two offers a glimpse of Christie’s unique project.

Both Poirot and Marple are unglamorous, unmarried and without children. Their strengths are rationality, competence and a lack of squeamishness. The Belgian dandy and the elderly knitter are perpetually underestimated — a social penalty they convert into a deadly weapon. Most important for Christie’s audience, neither Poirot nor Marple are prodigies of technique, which renders them easy stand-ins for the reader. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, Sherlock Holmes tested blood, analyzed soil and published a monograph on footprint analysis. If Poirot and Marple issued monographs, they’d be on mustache husbandry and fiber crafts.

Christie’s home life sputtered at approximately the rate her career took off. She seems to have had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude to motherhood, ditching Rosalind for months at a stretch and neglecting to answer the unhappy girl’s letters. Later Christie would describe Rosalind as playing “the valuable role in life of eternally trying to discourage me without success.” Ouch.

Worsley takes a charitable view of the relationship. “Would all this make Agatha that endlessly satisfying target to aim at, the ‘bad mother’? Of course not, for there is no such thing as a ‘bad mother.’” (Berthe Bovary would like a word!)

In 1926, Archie dumped Christie for a hot young golfer named Nancy, which may have been the precipitating event of the author’s notorious 11-day disappearance. After falling into an Archie-induced depression, Christie went for a drive. There was a car crash. The crash may or may not have been a suicide attempt; all we know is that Christie rolled her vehicle down a hill and into a hedge. She then made her way to a spa hotel and registered under the false name of Teresa Neele. (“Neele” was Nancy the golfer’s last name.)

It seems clear, from all available accounts, that Christie lapsed into a fugue of grief after Archie’s betrayal. But elements of her behavior also suggest a kind of psychotic break. During her hotel stay, she placed a newspaper ad requesting that “FRIENDS and RELATIVES of TERESA NEELE, late of South Africa, please COMMUNICATE.” What to make of that?

Equally disconcerting was what occurred toward the end of the incident. On a Sunday evening, two musicians from the hotel band informed local police that one of the guests looked an awful lot like a certain missing celebrity author. The police contacted Archie, who boarded a train toward the hotel. When he arrived, Christie introduced him to guests as her brother . Whatever the true circumstances of Christie’s severance with reality, the media had a field day. Her book sales shot up.

Worsley’s timeline of the disappearance is admirably scrupulous, but the sheer weirdness of the events can’t be brushed away with phrases like “veiled plea for help” (to explain Christie’s bizarre newspaper ad) or “coping mechanism” (to explain the introduction of Archie as her brother).

In a biographer you want someone who finds her subject immensely but not indiscriminately fascinating, and Worsley doesn’t quite clear that bar. The second half of the book is padded with tedious information. Do we need quotations from a letter written by Christie’s second husband to his mother as a teenager, years before he met the subject of this biography? Or a dispatch from Christie about buying furniture on sale?

Meanwhile, the author’s craft is only glancingly studied. We learn what Christie did but not how she did it. In Worsley’s telling, best sellers emerge as suddenly and effortlessly as sneezes. The book makes a bubbly supplement for a reader with prior interest in Agatha Christie, but it doesn’t explain how she became, by some accounts, the most widely read novelist who ever lived. Another unsolved mystery for the ages.

Molly Young is a book critic for The Times, a contributing writer to The Times Magazine and the author of the newsletter Read Like the Wind . She was previously the book critic for New York magazine. More about Molly Young

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Every Agatha Christie Book in Order, with Summaries and a Printable Checklist

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As a big Agatha Christie fan, I wanted to create a list of all the Agatha Christie books in order. This ultimate Agatha Christie bibliography organizes all her published work by series detective and genre (I’ve included all the Agatha Christie plays and Mary Westmacott books, too!). Get to know the Queen of Crime, and download the free printable Agatha Christie reading order checklist I’ve included at the end of the post!

The Ultimate Guide to Agatha Christie Books in Order (Sorted by Series Detective)

Agatha Christie is a force of literature. 

She’s the world record holder for most translated author of all time , and is the world’s bestselling novelist. Her books have sold over 2 billion copies; the only bodies of work that can beat her for sales are The Bible and Shakespeare.

So what’s her secret?

Well, at first glance it’s a mystery. Sixty-six mysteries, in fact. 

Beginning in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair at Styles , Agatha Christie spent the next nearly six decades writing books, most of them mystery novels. There were dozens of other mystery authors at that time, perhaps especially after Christie’s book sales showed how eager the public was for the genre. But Christie stands ahead of the pack for her ingenious plots, surprise endings, deceptively simple economy of prose, revealing character dialogue, and iconic detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. These ingredients combine to make reading any Agatha Christie book an extremely satisfying experience–and one you’re going to want to repeat! 

But with such a large body of work, it can be daunting to know what all Agatha Christie wrote, or to keep track of which of her books you’ve already read. And that’s why I’ve written this ultimate guide to all the Agatha Christie books in order. This guide is for all the Agatha Christie fans out there…current and yet to be fanned. Maybe, like me, you developed an insatiable taste for Agatha Christie’s books as a child . Or perhaps you’re wanting to give them a try for the very first time after watching one of the recent Kenneth Branagh movie adaptations, or the Christie-inspired Knives Out . 

Use this list of Agatha Christie books in order to pick your next Christie book, to get to know her recurring detectives, or to see what else she wrote besides mysteries novels. This is the guide I wish I’d had when I was thirteen, choosing Christie books at random from my Dad’s bookshelf or the used bookstore. Happenstance is a fine way to encounter any Christie novel, but I also would’ve liked to read the Tommy and Tuppence books in order, for instance, rather than start with M or N ? and feel like I was missing the backstory. 

This list of books by Agatha Christie is grouped by series detective. I’ve also written premise summaries of every Agatha Christie book, so you can get an inkling of what each book is about and whether or not you’d like to read it. These are not publisher summaries, which do occasionally give too much away! In addition, I’ve created a printable PDF checklist of every Agatha Christie book in publication order, which you can get as a Tea and Ink Society subscriber .

Agatha Christie Biography

But before we dive in, here’s a short biography of Christie, nicknamed the “Queen of Crime.”

Agatha Christie (christened Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller) was born in 1890 in her family’s home in Torquay in southwest England. She had two older siblings, but there was such an age gap that Christie sometimes felt like an only child. She was homeschooled by her parents and sister, showing a particular interest in math and music, and learning to read at age four. As a teenager, she completed her education in Parisian boarding schools. 

Agatha married military officer Archie Christie in 1914 and they had one child together–Rosalind. In 1916, Christie wrote her first mystery novel after a challenge from her sister. She eventually found a publisher and The Mysterious Affair at Styles released in 1920. 

Despite literary success, Agatha’s personal life declined and the Christies divorced in 1928 due to Archie Christie’s infidelity and wish to marry another woman. The turmoil leading up to their divorce resulted in Agatha’s mysterious eleven-day disappearance, which sparked international headlines and one of the biggest manhunts in British history. She was eventually discovered under an alias at a hotel in north Yorkshire, claiming she had no memory of how she’d gotten there.

In 1930, Christie began a long and much happier marriage with the archaeologist Max Mallowan. She accompanied him on his expeditions, working on her books while he worked in the dig sites. Christie became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1971. She published her last book in 1973, and passed away in 1976 at the age of 85.

Hercule Poirot Books in Order

Hercule Poirot was Agatha Christie’s first detective, and remains her most famous. He features in 33 novels, 51 short stories, and 3 plays. While many people initially misjudge him or treat him as ridiculous, Poirot takes himself very seriously. He commands himself with dignity and takes immaculate care of his personal appearance, particularly his famous mustache. He relies on his keen insight into human nature and his formidable intelligence to solve cases, referring to his mind as his “little grey cells.” Although he attempts to be humble, Poirot has a very high opinion of himself and his abilities, even calling himself the Greatest Detective in the World!

Poirot lives in a flat in London, but his nationality is Belgian. A former member of the Belgian police, Poirot was displaced by World War I, and his character was inspired in part by real-life Belgian refugees that Christie had met. We later learn that Poirot is Catholic, although his religious background is not a prevalent theme (as it is in Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, for instance.) He drinks hot chocolate, always carries a pocket watch, and is fastidious to a fault. Despite his eccentricities, Poirot has many friends. He’s a good listener, sympathetic, unfailingly polite, and loyal to the allies that appear in many of his novels: Captain Hastings, Inspector Japp, and Ariadne Oliver.

Note: This list of Hercule Poirot books includes the novels he features in and all short story collections that feature Poirot exclusively. The short story collections that contain a mix of Christie detectives are in a separate section.

1. The Mysterious Affair at Styles  (published 1920)

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was the first book Agatha Christie published, and it proves that she was a talented author right out of the gate. The novel has all the markers of the quintessential Golden Age detective novel which Christie helped to popularize: an isolated country manor, a slough of suspects (all with something to hide), a drawing room dénouement, and handy floor plans to aid the reader in visualizing the setting of the crime.

In the story, Arthur Hastings is staying as a house guest at Styles Court when his hostess is found poisoned one morning. Hastings seeks the aid of his friend Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective and war refugee. Heading up the official police investigation is Inspector Japp, who finds Poirot’s detection methods eccentric. But Poirot uses his “little grey cells” to cut through the red herrings and land on the elegant, logical solution to the mystery.

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2. The Murder on the Links  (1923)

Poirot and Hastings travel to France at the request of a wealthy businessman who believes his life is in danger. They arrive only to find that their client was recently murdered–stabbed in the back and left next to a golf course. In The Murder on the Links , Agatha Christie pays tribute to the French detectives and mystery novelists she loved.

3. Poirot Investigates  (1924), short story collection

Poirot Investigates was Agatha Christie’s first published collection of short stories, and includes plenty of cases for Poirot to solve, not all of them murders. In the style of Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings encounter a number of baffling crimes involving jewel theft, abductions, murder…even an ancient Egyptian curse! The U.K. edition included eleven stories, while the 1925 U.S. edition included fourteen.

4. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd  (1926)

Narrated from the perspective of one Dr. Sheppard of the quiet village of King’s Abbot, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd sees Poirot coming out of retirement to investigate the murder of a local businessman. Dr. Sheppard stands in for Hastings (who’s off in Argentina), following Poirot’s investigation with increasing interest. Thanks to its ingenious plotting and solution, Ackroyd is one of Agatha Christie’s most famous novels.

5. The Big Four  (1927)

Poirot and Hastings receive a cryptic message from a dying man that puts them on the trail of The Big 4, an international crime cartel of supervillains bent on world domination. Christie composed the book out of separately-published short stories, which she tied together with an overarching plot. It’s known for being one of her weaker novels, but it stood in for a time when Christie was undergoing intense personal struggles due to her mother’s death and the breakdown of her first marriage.

6. The Mystery of the Blue Train  (1928)

The Mystery of the Blue Trains centers around a famous black market ruby known as the “Heart of Fire.” Someone may be willing to kill for it, and when a murder occurs on a luxury overnight train bound for the French Riviera, it’s hardly a surprise that the ruby is missing. Luckily, Poirot was a passenger on the train that night, and he cuts through a web of motives and lies to discover who has murder at their heart. Still in a dark period of her life, Christie found the book difficult to write, but her critics were kinder to the novel than she was.

7. Peril at End House  (1932)

While on vacation in Cornwall, Poirot and Hastings meet Magdala “Nick” Buckley, who tells them in passing of her recent near escapes from death. But when Poirot discovers a bullet hole through Nick’s sun hut, he becomes convinced that someone is out to kill her. Can he prevent a murder from happening?

8. Lord Edgware Dies  (1933), also published as  Thirteen at Dinner

The beautiful Jane Adams asks Poirot to help her get a divorce from her estranged husband, Lord Edgware. But when Lord Edgware claims he’s already sent his wife a letter granting a divorce, Jane claims she never received it. To complicate matters Lord Edgware dies (no spoilers there) and Poirot is left with a tangle of clues and alibis to unwind.

9. Murder on the Orient Express  (1934), also published as  Murder in the Calais Coach

One of Agatha Christie’s most famous novels, and one of her few locked-room mysteries. Poirot is traveling on the luxurious Orient Express when the train gets stuck in a snowdrift in the dead of night. The next morning, one of the passengers is dead from multiple stab wounds, his compartment locked from the inside. With the train still stranded and full of passengers, Poirot must unmask the killer in their midst.

10. Three Act Tragedy  (1935), also published as  Murder in Three Acts

Poirot is at a dinner party for thirteen guests (not an auspicious number), when the Reverend Stephen Babbington chokes on his cocktail and dies in convulsions. But there are no traces of poison found in his glass, and what’s more–no one had a motive for killing the mild-mannered Reverend. Among its cast, Three Act Tragedy includes Mr. Satterthwaite, a character crossover from The Mysterious Mr. Quin , who appears in a handful of Poirot short stories as well.

11. Death in the Clouds  (1935), also published as  Death in the Air

Like Murder on the Orient Express , the murder in Death in the Clouds occurs in a claustrophobic environment, but this time on a plane. There are eleven passengers in the rear compartment, and Christie takes us into each character’s thoughts. One of them will be dead before the plane lands, but somehow no one saw it happen–not even the inimitable Hercule Poirot, who was seating just a few seats away from the victim.

12. The A.B.C. Murders  (1936), also published as  The Alphabet Murders

There’s a serial killer at large, who’s choosing victims with alliterative names and murdering them in alphabetical order. No one in England knows where the murderer will strike next…except Poirot and his friends. For the murderer prefaces each killing by sending Poirot a letter, signed only with the initials “A.B.C.” Will Poirot rise to the murderer’s taunts, and is the killer making a grave mistake by pitting himself against the famous detective?

13. Murder in Mesopotamia  (1936)

Murder in Mesopotamia is narrated by Amy Leatheran, an English nurse who travels to a dig site in the Iraqi desert to care for Louise Leidner, the wife of the lead archaeologist. Louise has been seeing strange visions and receiving threatening letters, seemingly from her deceased husband. When a murder occurs, everyone is very lucky indeed that Hercule Poirot happens to be traveling through Iraq himself, and can help solve the case.

Christie based the book’s setting on the archaeological dig site of Ur, where she met her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan.

14. Cards on the Table  (1936)

Mr. Shaitana is a notorious party host, and he gives Hercule Poirot a stunning invitation: Come to his next party and meet his private “collection” of people who got away with murder. Poirot agrees, and finds that the party includes four supposed murderers, along with Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, Colonel Race (formerly of MI5), and the celebrated mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver (Mrs. Oliver becomes a recurring character in later Christie novels). But when one of Mr. Shaitana’s murderers decides to stab him with a stiletto, the crime professionals must use all their knowledge and expertise to determine which of the four equally-likely suspects could’ve done this final crime.

15. Murder in the Mews  (1937), also published as  Dead Man’s Mirror . Short story collection.

Murder in the Mews contains four long Poirot short stories, including “Murder in the Mews,” “The Incredible Theft,” “Dead Man’s Mirror,” and “Triangle at Rhodes.”

16. Dumb Witness  (1937), also published as  Poirot Loses a Client

Elderly Miss Arundell’s death wasn’t really a surprise considering her age and health, but what truly shocked her family was that she had changed her will just before her death–and her large fortune wasn’t going where they expected it to! After a fall down the stairs, Miss Arundell had become convinced someone was trying to kill her, but her family claimed she tripped on a ball left by her beloved fox terrier, Bob. Miss Arundell writes of her suspicions to Poirot, but unfortunately she’s dead before the letter arrives. Suspecting foul play, Poirot and Hastings head to her village to quietly investigate.

Note: This is Hastings’ last appearance in a novel until Curtain , the final Poirot novel.

17. Death on the Nile  (1937), also published as  Murder on the Nile  and as  Hidden Horizon

Poirot is taking a holiday on a luxury steamer cruise on the Nile River, where of course he meets a colorful cast of fellow passengers. But there are tense undercurrents on this cruise, and Poirot must pinpoint where the danger lies. Is it with the newlywed couple and their stalker–a jealous former lover? Is it with the outspoken and irascible Communist? Or the controlling and spoiled American with her beleaguered cousin? At least Poirot has one true friend in the mix, for Colonel Race is aboard the boat on a little mission of his own.

18. Appointment with Death  (1938)

Taking another holiday in the Middle East, Poirot overhears a brother and sister discussing their wish to kill their stepmother. Their stepmother, Mrs. Boynton, is a domineering tyrant who delights in tormenting her family, and no one is exactly sorry when she’s found dead among the cliffs at Petra, a small puncture wound in her wrist. Despite Mrs. Boynton’s unlikability, Poirot undertakes to solve the mystery of her death, giving himself 24 hours to arrive at the truth.

19. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas  (1938), also published as  Murder for Christmas  and as  A Holiday for Murder

Unlikeable patriarch Simeon Lee gathers his large family together for the holidays…and then upsets everyone by telephoning his attorney in front of them and announcing his intention to update his will. On Christmas Eve there’s a tremendous commotion in Simeon’s bedroom and the family must break down his door to get inside, only to discover the old man brutally murdered. Poirot assists in the investigation of this brilliant locked-room case.

20. Sad Cypress  (1940)

One of Christie’s few courtroom dramas, Sad Cypress traces the lead-up to the murder conviction of Elinor Carlisle, and then follows her trial in court. Elinor is accused of killing her romantic rival, and besides motive she had the means and opportunity for committing the crime. Hercule Poirot believes she’s innocent, but can he guide the trial to the right conclusion? This is one of Christie’s more character-driven novels, and is a unique one for Poirot because there’s no “drawing room” style dénouement.

21. One, Two, Buckle My Shoe  (1940), also published as  An Overdose of Death

Hercule Poirot is going on another trip–but this time it’s only to the dentist! But it seems that death is never far from the Belgian detective, and a few hours after Poirot’s appointment, his dentist is found dead with a gun in his hand. Poirot doesn’t have much to go on, but curiously, a shoe buckle may hold an important clue. Christie uses her recurring nursery rhyme motif to structure the book with clues corresponding to the rhyme.

22. Evil Under the Sun  (1941)

Poirot is on holiday in a secluded seaside hotel in Devon. Also a guest is Arlena Marshall, a beautiful actress and wife of four years to a stolid and reserved man. Arlena makes a splash wherever she goes, flirting shamelessly with the men (even the married ones), and treating her husband and stepdaughter with contempt. She loves to sunbathe, but one day she’s found lying on the beach not as a warm body, but a dead one–strangled. Evil Under the Sun has a dizzying number of clues, even for Christie, but leads to a dazzling conclusion that cements the book as one of her top Poirot stories.

23. Five Little Pigs  (1942), also published as  Murder in Retrospect

In Five Little Pigs , Poirot reopens a sixteen-year-old murder case at the request of Carla Lemarchant, who’s engaged to be married but wants an old family crime to be cleared up first. Carla’s mother had been convicted of murdering her husband, but she left a letter for her daughter insisting on her innocence. Now that Carla has come of age, she has the letter and she wants the full truth. There were five other people that could’ve killed Carla’s father, but none of them seemed to have a motive for doing so.

Agatha Christie based the setting for this novel on her own summer home of Greenway on the River Dart, which she called “a dream house.”

24. The Hollow  (1946), also published as  Murder after Hours

Poirot is a guest in a cottage near The Hollow, Lucy Angkatell’s estate. One day Lady Angkatell invites Poirot to an outdoor luncheon around her swimming pool, but when Poirot arrives he witnesses a strange scene that appears to be a prank. One of the guests is standing with a gun in her outstretched hand, while her dead husband’s blood drips into the pool. But no one is playing a joke on Poirot. The crime is all too real, but is there more going on than meets the eye? This is a haunting and poignant novel that puts more emphasis on the characters, rather than being a mechanical puzzle plot.

25. The Labors of Hercules  (1947), short story collection

The Labors of Hercules collects twelve Poirot short stories that were originally published in periodicals. Each story corresponds to one of the twelve labors of the mythological Greek hero Hercules.

26. Taken at the Flood  (1948), also published as  There Is a Tide

Gordon Cloade is killed in a London air raid in 1944, leaving his much younger wife, Rosaleen, a widow for the second time. Gordon had always been generous with his extended family, so they were counting on the sizeable fortune from his will. But there had been no time to update it after his impromptu marriage, and now Rosaleen is an heiress and the family is left out to dry. But things aren’t what they seem…Poirot remembers a story he heard about Rosaleen’s first husband, and the fact that he might not be dead after all.

27. The Under Dog and Other Stories  (1951), short story collection

The Under Dog includes nine Poirot short stories that Christie had published in periodicals early in her career. Many of these also feature Poirot’s sidekick Captain Hastings.

28. Mrs. McGinty’s Dead  (1952), also published as  Blood Will Tell

Mrs. McGinty’s death appears to be the result of senseless brutality. The verdict is that she was bludgeoned by her lodger, a young man who was down on his luck, for the sake of a mere £ 30. But Poirot’s friend Superintendent Spence doesn’t believe the man is guilty, and asks Poirot to help. Poirot is joined in his investigations by Ariadne Oliver, his mystery novelist friend whom he met in Cards on the Tabl e.

29. After the Funeral  (1953), also published as  Funerals are Fatal

After the funeral of Richard Abernethie, his large family gathers in Abernethie’s Victorian mansion to hear the will read. In the crowded room, Abernethie’s sister Cora remarks that her brother was murdered and everything’s been hushed up. But if her brother was murdered, perhaps she should’ve guessed the murderer would be listening in that day. When Cora’s found dead the next morning, the family solicitor calls in Poirot to discover the truth within this complicated family web.

30. Hickory Dickory Dock  (1955), also published as  Hickory Dickory Death

Poirot’s secretary, Miss Lemon, introduces a most unusual case to her employer. Miss Lemon’s sister is the matron of a student hostel where an odd assortment of objects have gone missing–everything from a stethoscope to bath salts. It appears to be the work of a kleptomaniac, yet there’s a deeper atmosphere of unease around the hostel, and a feeling that something more sinister is hiding behind the petty thefts.

31. Dead Man’s Folly  (1956)

Ariadne Oliver invites Poirot to a house in Devon, where she’s been hired to plan a Murder Game for a summer party. During her preparations, Mrs. Oliver has become increasingly suspicious that someone amongst the guests is intending a real murder, and she wants Poirot on hand to deter any would-be killers. With Poirot on site, the party goes ahead…and so, in fact, does the murder.

Dead Man’s Folly is another instance of Christie using the grounds of Greenway house as inspiration for her setting.

32. Cat Among the Pigeons  (1959)

A dash of intrigue in a small Middle Eastern kingdom results in a collection of costly jewels smuggled into the most unlikely of places–a prestigious girls’ boarding school in England. There’s quite a range of personalities at Meadowbank among the students and teachers, but headmistress Miss Bulstrode oversees everything with her strict regulations and customary finesse. But when murder shatters the school, fear becomes the pervading atmosphere, and one student will sneak out to call on that famous detective she heard of–Monsieur Poirot.

33. The Clocks  (1963)

When typist Sheila Webb arrives at her afternoon stenography appointment, she’s shocked to discover the corpse of a man lying across the floor. The body is surrounded by clocks–four of which are stopped at 4:13, while a cuckoo clock announces 3:00. Just then, the owner of the house returns–a blind woman, who claims she never sent for Sheila at all.

This is an interesting novel for Poirot as he never visits the crime scene or interviews the suspects, proving to his friends in the police force that he can solve the case through intellect alone.

34. Third Girl  (1966)

Poirot is sipping hot chocolate one morning when a young woman bursts into his room, claiming to be a murderer. Poirot learns that his friend Ariadne Oliver has sent this distraught client his way, and that Norma Restarick, the woman in question, has been having dangerous lapses of memory. Who has been murdered? And is Norma really to blame?

35. Hallowe’en Party  (1969)

Thirteen-year-old Joyce Reynolds is found drowned in an apple-bobbing tub at a Halloween party. It could’ve been an unfortunate accident, but hours earlier, Joyce had announced that she once witnessed a murder. Ariadne Oliver thinks there may be foul play afoot, and calls in Poirot. Together, they investigate all of the unsolved murder cases in the village from years past, hoping to discover what Joyce saw and bring her own killer to justice.

36. Elephants Can Remember  (1972)

Along with Hercule Poirot, Ariadne Oliver investigates the death of her goddaughter’s parents, which occurred twelve years earlier. The apparently happy couple had been found dead on a clifftop, a gun between them that bore only their fingerprints. Had one murdered the other? Was it a double suicide? Poirot and Mrs. Oliver question a number of elderly witnesses (the “elephants”), who may hold clues to the tragedy that happened so many years ago.

37. Poirot’s Early Cases  (1974, short story collection)

This is a compilation of eighteen stories previously collected in other books, including The Under Dog and the U.S. edition of Poirot Investigates .

38. Curtain  (written about 1940, published 1975), also published as  Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

Poirot and Hastings reunite for one last baffling mystery, this one taking them full circle to Styles Court, the site of their first case together. Styles has been turned into a hotel, and there is a serial killer among the guests who has already gotten away with murder five times. Only Poirot knows the killer’s identity, but he must collect his proof and build his case before the killer claims a sixth victim. Now crippled from arthritis, Poirot relies on Hastings to be his ears and eyes, while he himself employs his “little grey cells” to solve the final problem.

Along with Sleeping Murder , the last Miss Marple novel, Agatha Christie wrote Curtain in the 1940s. In the event of her death (at that time the concern was the London bombings during World War II), she wanted her family to have two final novels to publish. The manuscripts remained locked in a bank vault for nearly forty years. When failing health finally made Christie unable to write, her daughter published Curtain in 1975, and Sleeping Murder was published in 1976 after the author passed away.

Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories  (1999), U.K and U.S. (2013)

This volume gathers all the Poirot short stories into one omnibus volume. Although there were some previous volumes of collected Poirot stories, this is the edition that’s currently available. (Here’s what the U.K. edition looks like.)

Miss Marple Books in Order

Miss Jane Marple is one of Agatha Christie’s most popular detectives, appearing in 12 novels and 20 short stories. Described as “a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner,” Miss Marple enjoys knitting, gardening, and gathering local gossip. She doesn’t solve crimes in an official capacity, but her shrewd observations and agile memory supply the police with vital clues that help put criminals behind bars. Miss Marple lives in the fictional village of St. Mary Mead, located somewhere in the southeast of England, which serves as the setting for several of the novels and short stories she’s featured in.

Note: This list of Miss Marple books includes the novels she features in and all short story collections that feature Marple exclusively. The short story collections that contain a mix of Christie detectives are in a separate section.

1. The Murder at the Vicarage  (1930)

Although Miss Marple had previously appeared in some of Christie’s short stories, The Murder at the Vicarage was the first novel to feature her, and the story takes place in her home town of St. Mary Mead. The story begins with the narrator, Reverend Clement, recalling a joke he made that everyone would be better off if a certain parishioner was murdered. Unfortunately, Clement’s words come to pass when the same parishioner is found shot through the head in the vicar’s study. The vicar’s neighbour Miss Marple uses her shrewd observation of human nature to help bring the killer to justice.

2. The Thirteen Problems  (1932), also published as  The Tuesday Club Murders . Short story collection.

In this short story collection set in St. Mary Mead, Miss Marple is presented with cases that have already been solved by the police. After hearing the facts of each case but before learning the outcome, she provides her own solution…which of course, always turns out to be correct!

3. The Body in the Library  (1942)

Mrs. Bantry is awakened one morning with surprising news: there’s a dead body in her library. Wearing a flamboyant evening gown and heavy makeup, the victim is completely incongruous in the Bantry’s respectable library–and she’s also a total stranger. Hoping to avoid a scandal, the Bantrys turn to their friend Miss Marple for advice.

4. The Moving Finger  (1943)

There’s a poison pen rampant in the village of Lymstock, writing all sorts of nasty things about the villagers and sending everyone into a tizzy of suspicion. When one of the recipients of the poison pen letters ends up dead, the situation calls for Scotland Yard. But the police are baffled until quiet Miss Marple points them in the right direction.

5. A Murder Is Announced  (1950)

The villagers of Chipping Cleghorn are astonished to read a notice in the local newspaper announcing the time and place of an upcoming murder. Full of curiosity, several villagers gather at the appointed residence, but the homeowner is as mystified as they are. And then on cue, the lights go out and shots are fired. A murder has indeed occurred, but thankfully Miss Marple is close at hand to help the police crack the case.

6. They Do It with Mirrors  (1952), also published as  Murder With Mirrors

Miss Marple goes to visit a girlhood friend at Stonygates, a Victorian estate that also houses a rehab home for junior delinquents. But there are strange undercurrents at Stonygates, and soon murder darkens its rooms.

7. A Pocket Full of Rye  (1953)

London businessman Rex Fortescue dies after drinking his morning tea, and curiously, the police discover a large amount of rye grains in his pocket. Then two more deaths occur, leaving the police mystified. When Miss Marple arrives to give information on one of the murder victims, she suggests to the police that the deaths may be connected to the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.”

8. 4.50 from Paddington  (1957), also published as  What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!

Mrs. McGillicuddy is taking a train to visit her friend Miss Marple when she witnesses a man strangling a woman in another train running parallel to hers. Miss Marple believes her story, but when no murders are reported Miss Marple decides to find the body herself.

9. The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side ( 1962)

Once again set in St. Mary Mead, Miss Marple investigates the death of a gossipy middle-aged woman–who just might have taken a poisoned cocktail actually meant for someone else. Agatha Christie shows St. Mary Mead (and the quaint villages it typifies) beset with growing pains as housing developments spring up and a brand-new supermarket dominates the village street. But as Miss Marple discovers, human nature is still the same.

10. A Caribbean Mystery  (1964)

Miss Marple’s only foreign case, A Caribbean Mystery sees the elderly woman on holiday for her health at the Golden Palm Hotel in the Caribbean. She listens absentmindedly to the ramblings of another guest, Major Palgrave, who suddenly catches her attention when he offers to show her a picture of a murderer who has never been caught. But when other guests arrive on the scene, Major Palgrave changes his mind. And the next day, he’s found dead in his room.

11. At Bertram’s Hotel  (1965)

Miss Marple is taking a two-week retreat at a tasteful London hotel, where many fascinating guests fall under her keen eye. But then some of the guests and staff begin acting very suspiciously, and the police seem to think the hotel may be connected with a series of London robberies. What dark secrets are hiding at Bertram’s Hotel?

12. Nemesis  (1971)

Miss Marple receives a cryptic letter from a friend she met in A Caribbean Mystery , promising to leave her a legacy of £ 20,000…if she can solve a certain crime within a year. The problem is, the letter is very vague on the details, and her friend is now deceased and therefore can’t offer much in the way of clues. Nevertheless, Miss Marple accepts the challenge, and embarks on a quest around England to sniff out the evil lurking in unlikely places.

13. Sleeping Murder  (1976)

Gwenda Reed is newly married, and is eager to renovate Hillside, the old house she and her husband have purchased as their first home. But certain things about the house seem oddly familiar, and later when attending a play Gwenda hears a line that triggers a traumatic memory for her. Gwenda teams up with Miss Marple to unlock the secrets that still haunt Hillside, and solve a perfect crime committed nearly two decades earlier.

Although intended as the final Miss Marple novel, Agatha Christie wrote Sleeping Murder in the 1940s, sealing it away for publication in the event of her death in London air raids.

Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories  (1985), U.S. only

This volume gathers all the Miss Marple stories into one omnibus. I don’t think it was released in the U.K., but a later volume titled Miss Marple and Mystery was published in the U.K. and includes all the Marple stories as well as many standalones.

Tommy and Tuppence Books in Order

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are a detective couple that feature in 4 of Agatha Christie’s novels and 1 exclusive short story collection. They are lifelong friends and partners in adventure before also becoming marriage partners at the end of the first book. Tommy is solid and practical, with features that are “pleasantly ugly–nondescript, yet unmistakably the face of a gentleman.” In contrast, Tuppence (Prudence) is vivacious and charismatic, relying on her intuition to explore leads in a case.

The Beresfords are Christie’s only detectives to age in real time. They’re in their twenties when we first meet them in The Secret Adversary , (the second book Agatha Christie wrote) and are in their 70s in Postern of Fate (the last book Christie wrote). During those years they have three children: Derek and Deborah (twins), and an adopted daughter, Betty.

1. The Secret Adversary  (1922)

In need of jobs after World War I, childhood friends Tommy and Tuppence join forces to establish The Young Adventurers, Ltd. and proclaim that they are “willing to do anything, go anywhere–no unreasonable offer refused.” Soon they receive a commission to find one Jane Finn, a missing survivor of the RMS Lusitania who possesses classified government documents.

2. Partners in Crime  (1929), short story collection

Tommy and Tuppence take on various mystery cases at the International Detective Agency. Their “Agency,” however, is also a front: the whole thing has been arranged with an old friend of theirs–a member of the British secret service–to intercept messages from foreign spies! As Tommy and Tuppence wait for intel on the overarching case, they enjoy the smaller mysteries that come to them. Christie had a little fun with them, too, having her detectives solve each case in the manner of a famous fictional detective, such as Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and Hercule Poirot!

3. N or M?  (1941)

It’s now World War II, and Tommy and Tuppence are feeling middle aged. They long for the adventures of their youth. Then Tommy’s asked to go undercover once again–this time to discover the identities of German spies lurking in a seaside resort in the south of England. Of course, Tuppence won’t let Tommy have all the fun by himself; she dons an alias and beats him to the hotel to help solve the case!

4. By the Pricking of My Thumbs  (1968)

Christie dedicated her fourth Tommy and Tuppence book “to the many readers in this and other countries who write to me asking: ‘What has happened to Tommy and Tuppence? What are they doing now?'” While the couple are visiting Tommy’s aunt in a retirement home, Tuppence has a strange conversation with another resident, a certain Mrs. Lancaster. When Mrs. Lancaster is suddenly removed from the home, Tuppence gets suspicious and begins to investigate, with only sparse clues to go on. Like several of the novels published near the end of Christie’s career, By the Pricking of My Thumbs has a particularly haunting, unsettling atmosphere.

5. Postern of Fate  (1973)

Now in their seventies and living in a quiet English village, a cryptic message discovered in an old book lead Tommy and Tuppence to explore a sixty-year-old cold case involving the murder of a governess. Postern of Fate was the last novel Agatha Christie wrote, although two previously-written novels were published later– Curtain in 1975, and Sleeping Murder in 1976.

Superintendent Battle Books in Order

Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard is one of Agatha Christie’s minor detectives, appearing in 5 novels. He is a “big, square, wooden-faced man,” who lets his unassuming features serve as a mask for the sharp intelligence underneath. Christie and Battle both play with the stereotype that in crime stories, the police are supposed to be bumbling idiots in order to set off the brilliance of the private detective. Battle lets everyone underestimate him and think him stupid, while he meanwhile observes everything and closes in on the criminal with deadly accuracy. Of Battle’s personal life not much is known, other than the fact that he is devoted to his wife, Mary, and has five children.

Sidenote: Superintendent Battle is one my favourite fictional detectives, and the stories he appears in are some of my favourite Christies! I only wish he’d been in more books!

1. The Secret of Chimneys  (1925)

The Secret of Chimneys is an adventuresome political thriller, murder mystery, and treasure hunt all wrapped into one, with so many twists and reveals it seems like the plot itself is a foil to Superintendent Battle’s stolid character. Most of the action centers around the stately home of Chimneys during a house party, where the life of a Balkan prince is in danger, and the famous Koh-i-noor diamond may be hidden somewhere near by.

2. The Seven Dials Mystery  (1929)

The Seven Dials Mystery is a sequel to The Secret of Chimneys , and features several repeat characters. During another house party at Chimneys, a group of young twenty-somethings decide to play a prank on their friend Gerry Wade by hiding eight alarm clocks in his bedroom, set to go off at intervals. But Wade is found dead the next morning. And mysteriously, one of the alarm clocks is missing. Once again, Christie blends detective story with political espionage, throwing state secrets and a masked society into the mix.

3. Cards on the Table  (1936)

Superintendent Battle joins three other crime experts: Hercule Poirot, Col. Race, and Ariadne Oliver to meet four people who supposedly got away with murder. Bringing them all together under one roof is party host Mr. Shaitana, who unfortunately doesn’t survive the night. The crime experts must combine their strengths to determine which of the four criminals could’ve killed Mr. Shaitana.

4. Murder is Easy  (1939), also published as  Easy To Kill

Retired police officer Luke Fitzwilliam shares a train carriage with an elderly spinster who tells him she’s on her way to Scotland Yard to report a serial killer lurking in her quiet village of Wychwood under Ashe. She claims the killer has already struck twice, and she knows who the next victim will be. Fitzwilliam merely humors her, but when he later learns of another death in Wychwood, he decides to visit the village himself to investigate. Superintendent Battle is only a minor character this time, stepping in at the end to close the case.

5. Towards Zero  (1944)

Lady Tressilian is holding her annual summer house party at Gull’s Point, her seaside home. But her ward insists on bringing both his new wife and his ex-wife, which makes for a predictably awkward set up. Despite tensions, no dead bodies show up in the novel for quite some time…but all of the players are unknowingly converging towards “zero hour,” when the murderer will claim their victim.

Colonel Race Books in Order

Colonel Johnnie Race appears in 4 Agatha Christie novels, two of which are crossovers with Hercule Poirot. (He is also name-dropped in a couple of other novels, a practice Christie frequently used with her minor characters). Race never plays a leading role as a detective, but he uses his keen mind and background as an MI5 agent to help put criminals behind bars. Other things we know about Colonel Race are that he is extremely rich, having inherited a large fortune, is well traveled, is tall and tanned, can dance well, and has a composed and thoughtful manner. Could he perhaps give Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey a run for his money as a man devoid of on-page flaws? 

1. The Man in the Brown Suit  (1924)

Anne Beddingfeld wants excitement, and she gets plenty when she witnesses a man fall to his death on a live track in the London Underground. But what was it that made him look so terrified just before he fell? When Anne discovers a dropped scrap of paper with an odd message, she follows the clue to Africa. Along the way she’ll travel deep into a web of adventure and blackmail, and cross paths with a host of interesting characters–among them Colonel Race.

Although Anne isn’t featured in any other novels, she’s the literary progenitor of a series of plucky, adventuresome heroines who would appear throughout Christie’s writing career in novels like The Seven Dials Mystery , The Mystery of the Blue Train , and They Came to Baghdad .

2. Cards on the Table  (1936)

Colonel Race joins three other crime experts: Hercule Poirot, Superintendent Battle, and Ariadne Oliver to meet four people who supposedly got away with murder. Bringing them all together under one roof is party host Mr. Shaitana, who unfortunately doesn’t survive the night. The crime experts must combine their strengths to determine which of the four criminals could’ve killed Mr. Shaitana.

3. Death on the Nile  (1937)

Colonel Race is a passenger aboard the luxury steamer Karnak , on a Nile River cruise. But it’s business–not pleasure–for Race, as his real objective is to track down a murderer. Although Race is among the cast in Death on the Nile , Hercule Poirot takes center stage as the main detective in the novel, solving a much more complicated crime that occurs during the cruise itself.

4. Sparkling Cyanide  (1945), also published as Remembered Death

One night, rich and beautiful Rosemary Barton drank cyanide in her champagne at a fashionable restaurant, and six people watched her die. Her death was ruled a suicide but her husband George isn’t so sure, and shares his concerns with his friend Colonel Race. Exactly one year later, George assembles the same guests at the same restaurant, hoping to uncover the truth.

Harley Quin Books in Order

Harley Quin is Agatha Christie’s most enigmatic character, and was also the author’s personal favourite. Quin’s character is closely connected to his friend Mr. Satterthwaite, an elderly socialite and patron of the arts. Quin always appears in Satterthwaite’s presence quite suddenly and mysteriously, at the opportune moment to help Satterthwaite solve a problem.

There is only one book dedicated solely to Quin and Satterthwaite, but Quin also appears in two later short stories: “The Harlequin Tea Set” and “The Love Detectives.” Satterthwaite appears in the Poirot novel Three Act Tragedy and the short story “Dead Man’s Mirror.”

The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930), short story collection

This collection features twelve short stories, many with a darker, supernatural flavour. Each story unfolds a separate mystery involving affairs of the heart, jewel thefts, and sometimes murder. Associated with both love and death, Harley Quin acts as a puppet-master behind the scenes, helping Mr. Satterthwaite to restore order and a peaceful ending for each melodrama.

Parker Pyne Books in Order

James Parker Pyne appears in 14 short stories by Agatha Christie. A retired civil servant, Pyne has a private practice where he investigates “matters of the heart.” He has a head for statistics and believes there are five main types of unhappiness, all of which can be resolved logically. Pyne advertises his services in The Times with the headline “Are you happy? If not consult Mr Parker Pyne, 17 Richmond Street.” His methods of solving clients’ problems are equally unique, often involving elaborate disguises by himself or one of his cohorts.

Parker Pyne Investigates (1934), also published as Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective , short story collection

In this short story collection, Parker Pyne first takes six cases in his London office, solving marital problems, restoring stolen valuables, and helping people find the excitement in life they’re longing for. These cases also see the first appearance of two recurring characters in Christie’s universe: the detective novelist Ariadne Oliver, and the secretary Miss Felicity Lemon. Mrs. Oliver becomes good friends with Poirot, and Poirot later employs Miss Lemon as his own secretary.

The next six stories in the collection see Pyne on vacation, first on the Orient Express and later on a Nile steamer cruise in a short story titled “Death on the Nile.” However, the plots of these stories do not bear any resemblance to the Poirot novels involving the same settings!

The current edition of Parker Pyne Investigates adds a further two Parker Pyne stories (“The Problem at Pollensa Bay,” and “The Regatta Mystery”) which originally only appeared in short story compilations alongside Marple and Poirot.

Standalone Agatha Christie Books in Publication Order

Depending on who you ask, Agatha Christie wrote either 11 or 13 standalone mystery novels. If you include two novels Col. Race appears in ( The Man in the Brown Suit and Sparkling Cyanide ), the count will be 13. For the purposes of organizing this post, I’ve listed the Col. Race novels in their own section. My reasoning for this is that in The Man in the Brown Suit , Race is introduced independently of Poirot (although he later appears in two novels with him).

Several of the following standalone mysteries have been adapted for TV series using Miss Marple as the sleuth, although she does not actually appear in any of these novels.

1. The Sittaford Mystery (1931), also published as The Murder at Hazelmoor

It’s a snowy winter night on Dartmoor in the south of England, and six people in an isolated estate decide to have a séance to pass the time. What could possibly go wrong? It’s all fun and games until the group receives a cryptic message from beyond that seems to indicate a murder has been committed nearby.

One of the most famous mysteries of all time, The Hound of the Baskervilles , is also set on Dartmoor, and Christie pays homage to Doyle’s book with several references throughout her novel.

2. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?  (1934), also published as The Boomerang Clue

Bobby Jones is playing golf when he loses his ball over the edge of a sea cliff. When he goes to find it, he instead discovers an injured man among the rocks, on the brink of death. With his last breath, the man utters the cryptic message “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” Bobby and his friend, Lady Frances Derwent, team up as amateur sleuths to discover the identity of “Evans,” and determine if there was foul play afoot all along.

3. And Then There Were None  (1939)

Eight strangers are invited to a mansion on a rocky island off the coast of England. But when they arrive, their mysterious host is nowhere to be found. And then one of the guests falls dead that first night. Over the course of the next few days the stranded victims are picked off one by one, each killed in the manner of an old nursery rhyme. With no detective to turn to, they must attempt to identify the murderer among them. And Then There Were None is one of Christie’s most famous books, and one of the bestselling mystery novels of all time.

4. Death Comes as the End  (1944)

Christie’s only historical fiction mystery, Death Comes as the End is set in Thebes in ancient Egypt, around 2000 B.C. The novel was inspired in part by real letters from a mortuary priest, which gave archaeologists insights into daily life in ancient Egypt. Christie also consulted a family friend and Egyptologist, and drew on her own experiences in the Middle East with her archaeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan. The mystery revolves around a priest who brings a new concubine, Nofret, to live with his dysfunctional family. But when Nofret sows further discord among the household, hostility soon devolves into outright murder.

5. Crooked House  (1949)

When family patriarch Aristide Leonides is found dead in his sprawling London mansion, there’s plenty of suspects. His household encompasses three generations of the family, most of which appear to have a motive for killing Aristide–and none of whom have an alibi. Scotland Yard steps in to investigate, aided by Charles Hayward, who has a vested interest in the family–his fiancé is one of the suspects!

6. They Came to Baghdad  (1951)

They Came to Baghdad is one of Christie’s forays into the spy thriller genre. Victoria Jones is going to Baghdad for a job, for adventure, and hopefully a little romance, too. Little does she know what she’s really in for…through a few twists of fate, Victoria becomes enmeshed in a nefarious plot that threatens world peace! Stalin and the U.S. President are on their way to Baghdad for an important summit, but conspirators are working to sabotage the meeting. And Victoria may hold the vital clue to the conspirators’ identity.

7. Destination Unknown  (1954), also published as So Many Steps to Death

Here’s another spy thriller from Agatha Christie! Hilary Craven, reeling from a failed marriage and the death of her daughter, is preparing to take her own life in a hotel room in Morocco, when a British secret agent interrupts. He offers her an alternative: will she go undercover to help the government discover why so many of their leading scientists have gone missing?

8. Ordeal by Innocence  (1958)

Despite his insistence on innocence, Jacko Argyle was convicted of bludgeoning his mother to death, and he dies while in prison. Now two years later, someone comes along who can back up Jacko’s story with an alibi. But the Argyle family isn’t pleased with the exoneration, for it means that a murderer is still among them. Ordeal by Innocence was one of Christie’s favourite of her novels, and exemplifies her shift towards more psychological thrillers in her late career.

9. The Pale Horse  (1961)

It seems that there’s witchcraft afoot in the village of Much Deeping, but how is it connected to the list of names found in the shoe of a murdered priest? A local witch who lives in the Pale Horse Inn claims she can kill from a distance, and some of the people on Father Gorman’s list are already dead. Mark Easterbrook, in the role of protagonist and narrator, takes it upon himself to discover the truth.

Several characters in The Pale Horse appear in earlier Christie novels, including Ariadne Oliver, an author friend of Poirot’s. The book is also notable for having prevented multiple deaths in real life–as well as inspiring an actual murderer. I can’t tell you anything else about those incidents without spoiling the book, but I recommend you look them up after you read the novel!

10. Endless Night  (1967)

Christie once told an interviewer that Endless Night was “my own favourite at present” out of all her novels. With no one in the role of detective, the book is less of a whodunnit and more of a psychological thriller. No one dies for the first half of the book, but there’s a growing sense of tragedy and foreboding. The book is told from the perspective of young Mike Rogers, whose one great wish is to build a dream house with the girl he loves. But the site of his dream house bears a local curse, and as one villager warns him, “There’s no luck for them as meddles with Gipsy’s Acre.” Part Gothic novel, part love story with a dash of the supernatural, this is an unusual but fascinating Christie.

11. Passenger to Frankfurt  (1970)

On his way home from Malaya to England, diplomat Sir Stafford Nye encounters a desperate woman who claims her life is in danger. Sir Stafford agrees to lend her his passport and traveling cloak so she can take his spot. Later, their paths will cross again, and as Sir Stafford becomes increasingly fascinated by the mystery woman he’s drawn deeper into a web of global intrigue, culminating in a shocking dénouement in northern Scotland.

Other Agatha Christie Short Short Collections

Agatha Christie wrote numerous short stories throughout her career, initially publishing them in periodicals such as The Story-Teller , The Strand , Ladies’ Home Journal , and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine . Many of these stories were later collected and sold in book form. However, unlike her novels which were published in the U.K. and the U.S. only months apart, her short story collections sometimes were published only in the U.K. or only in the U.S., and featured different combinations of her stories!

This makes it rather tricky to know which editions to read in order to avoid overlap among the stories–or to make sure you’re not missing any! Thankfully, almost all of Christie’s short stories were eventually published on both sides of the pond, so really all you need to do is pick whether you want to go the U.K. route or the U.S route. The only caveat is that if you are reading U.K. editions, you will also need to read “Three Blind Mice” and “The Wife of the Kenite,” which are not published in any U.K. editions. If you’re going the U.S. route, you’ll just need to add “The Wife of the Kenite.”

The Hound of Death and Other Stories (1933), U.K. only

Included here are twelve standalone short stories with a darker tone, many of which stray into the supernatural. (They are “standalone” in the sense that none of them include Agatha Christie’s series detectives.) These stories and several more were republished in the recent compilation The Last Seance .

The Listerdale Mystery (1934), U.K. only

This edition features twelve standalone short stories.

The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories  (1939), U.S. only

This collection includes nine short stories featuring Parker Pyne, Hercule Poirot, or Miss Marple.

The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories  (1948), U.S. only

This book contains eleven short stories, one of which features Hercule Poirot. The titular story is the most famous, and served as the basis for an extremely popular West End play and a 1957 film.

Three Blind Mice and Other Stories  (1950), U.S. only

There are nine stories in Three Blind Mice , including three featuring Poirot, three featuring Miss Marple, and one featuring Mr. Satterthwaite and Harley Quin. Christie adapted the titular story into the play The Mousetrap , which opened in 1952 and is the longest-running show in history.

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding  (1960), U.K. only

This book features five Poirot stories and one Miss Marple story.

Double Sin and Other Stories  (1961), U.S. only

This edition features eight stories, some with Poirot and some with Miss Marple.

The Golden Ball and Other Stories (1971), U.S. only

This book includes fifteen standalone short stories.

Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories (1979), U.K. only

This collection includes seven Marple stories and two standalone stories, which previously had been only available in the U.S.

Problem at Pollensa Bay and Other Stories  (1991), U.K. only

This U.K. edition includes an eclectic collection of eight short stories gleaned from earlier U.S. book editions. It includes two Poirot stories, two Parker Pyne stories, and two Harley Quin stories, as well as two standalones.

The Harlequin Tea Set  (1997), U.S. only

This collection features nine short stories, including one with Poirot and one with Harley Quin.

While the Light Lasts and Other Stories  (1997), U.K. only

Includes nine stories, most of which overlap with the U.S. collection The Harlequin Tea Set .

Mary Westmacott Books in Order

Mary Westmacott is not one of Agatha Christie’s detectives! Rather, she is a pseudonym for Agatha Christie herself. Christie wanted the freedom to write non-mystery novels that could be judged on their own merit, free from comparisons with her detective novels. Her identity as Mary Westmacott remained a secret for fifteen years, until a journalist revealed it. Side note: Doesn’t this remind you of J. K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith? It does me.

The Mary Westmacott novels are psychological portraits of deeply flawed characters, and explore human nature and love in various forms.

Giant’s Bread (1930)

The book was publicized as being written under a pen name of an already-established author, and one review commented: “Who she is does not matter, for her book is far above the average of current fiction.”

2. Unfinished Portrait (1934)

On an exotic island, a portrait painter named Larraby happens upon a woman on the verge of committing suicide. He brings Celia back to his hotel room and through the night listens to her life story, leading up to what brought her to her current state.

Unfinished Portrait is even more autobiographical than Giant’s Bread , and Christie’s husband Max Mallowan even stated “In Celia we have more nearly than anywhere else a portrait of Agatha.”

3. Absent in the Spring (1944)

Like the two Mary Westmacott novels before it, Absent in the Spring is a novel told in retrospect, and plays out as an intimate character portrait and psychological drama. Returning from a visit to Iraq to visit her daughter and new grandbaby, Joan Scudamore misses her train connection and is stranded in a small rest house in the desert. The unexpected days of solitude prompt Joan to reflect on her life, and as she does so she begins to see clearly–perhaps for the first time–many things about herself and the people in her life.

As she does in a number of her novels, Christie employs free indirect discourse, a narrative technique pioneered by Jane Austen. The story is narrated in the third person but told through Joan’s eyes, so that it’s almost as if the narrator has been “infected” by Joan’s perspective.

4. The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948)

In the vein of George Elliot’s Middlemarch and Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Chronicles, The Rose and the Yew Tree is about a small English town–this time in Cornwall–in the midst of social and political change. The 1945 General Election is coming and everyone is caught up in the country’s political climate, played out in microcosm in their little village and entangled with their own everyday loves and jealousies. Watching it all is our narrator, Hugh Norreys, crippled after a recent car accident and observing with cynicism as the opportunistic John Gabriel vies for a Parliamentary seat.

5. A Daughter’s a Daughter (1952)

A Daughter’s a Daughter explores the complex relationship between a mother and her nearly-grown-up daughter. Ann Prentice is a widow who seems to have made peace with her lot: she leads a quiet life and is devoted to her daughter Sarah. But while Sarah’s gone on a three-week ski trip, Ann meets a man and falls in love. Sarah is shocked by her mother’s plan to remarry and determines to thwart the match, leading to painful repercussions for all involved.

6. The Burden (1956)

The Burden centers around the relationship between two sisters. Laura, the elder, resents it when her baby sister Shirley is born, and even wishes her dead. But when Laura saves Shirley from a fire a few years later, Laura’s perspective shifts and she becomes fiercely, possessively protective of her sister. As the two sisters grow up, both must come to terms with Laura’s overbearing love: is it ultimately blocking their paths to happiness?

Other Books by Agatha Christie

The road of dreams (1925).

The Road of Dreams is an early volume of poetry that Agatha Christie published at her own expense. All of the poems were later reproduced (with slight changes) in her 1973 volume Poems .

Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946)

Published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan, this is a nonfiction book that combines memoir and travelogue, as Christie reflects on her time in Syria and Iraq with her husband Max.

Star Over Bethlehem (1965)

Another work published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan, this book is an illustrated collection of poems and short stories with religious themes. The 2011 edition I’ve linked to also includes all of her poetry from The Road of Dreams and Poems .

Poems (1973)

Containing poems from throughout her life, this book was published at the same time as Postern of Fate , the final book Agatha Christie wrote. The volume included the poems previously published in The Road of Dreams .

Agatha Christie: An Autobiography (1977)

Written over a fifteen-year period from 1950 to 1965, Christie requested that her autobiography remain unpublished until her death.

The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery (2012)

This is a collection of letters from 1922, when Christie took a ten-month tour around the world with her first husband, Archie Christie. Most of the letters were written to her beloved mother, and the collection is edited and introduced by Christie’s grandson, Matthew Prichard.

Agatha Christie Plays in Order

Besides being a novelist, Christie was a successful playwright, writing twenty-seven plays that have been performed for the stage, radio, and television, as well as several plays that have never been published or performed. In 1962, she was paid by MGM to write a screenplay for Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House . Although she sent them a script, the film was never produced.

Christie’s favourite of her plays was The Witness for the Prosecution . Eight of her plays are collected in this volume . To learn more about Christie’s connection to the theater, read Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre by Julius Green.

Each of the Agatha Christie plays below are listed in the order of when they were first performed. All of them are stage plays unless otherwise noted.

• Black Coffee (1930). Features Poirot. Novelization by Charles Osborne .
• Wasp’s Nest (1937). A short television play featuring Poirot, based on a short story of the same name.
• The Yellow Iris (1937). A radio play featuring Poirot. Based on a short story of the same name, and later adapted into the novel Sparkling Cyanide .
• And Then There Were None (1943). Based on the novel of the same name.
• Murder on the Nile (1944). The play is based on the novel Death on the Nile , but does not feature Poirot.
• Appointment with Death (1945). Based on the novel of the same name, but with significant differences, such as the identity of the killer and the omission of Poirot.
• Towards Zero (1945). An outdoors version of the novel, this play ran for just one week on Martha’s Vineyard.
• Three Blind Mice (1947). A short radio play later adapted for the stage as The Mousetrap .
• Butter in a Lordly Dish (1948). A short radio play.
• The Hollow (1951). Based on the novel The Hollow , but does not feature Poirot.
• The Mousetrap (1952). Based on the early radio broadcast and short story Three Blind Mice .
• Witness for the Prosecution (1953). Based on the short story of the same name.
• Personal Call (1954). A short radio play.
• Spider’s Web (1954). Adapted as a novel by Charles Osborne.
• A Daughter’s a Daughter (1956). Billed under the name Westmacott (Christie’s pseudonym) this play was actually written before the novel of the same title.
• Towards Zero (1956). Collaboration with Gerald Verner. Based on the novel of the same name.
• Verdict (1958)
• The Unexpected Guest (1958). Adapted as a novel by Charles Osborne.
• Go Back for Murder (1960). Based on the novel Five Little Pigs , but does not feature Poirot.
• Rule of Three (1962). A triple bill collection of three works: Afternoon at the Sea-side , The Patient , and The Rats .
• Fiddlers Three (1975)
• Akhnaton (1979)
• Chimneys (2003). Based on the novel The Secret of Chimneys . Written early in Christie’s career but never published or performed until recently.
• The Stranger (2017). Not performed or published during her lifetime, The Stranger was a small-cast, short version of her psychological thriller short story “Philomel Cottage.” The Stranger was later adapted for a full-length stage production by Frank Vosper and titled Love from a Stranger , which premiered in 1936.
• The Lie (2018). Written in the 1920s but never published or performed until recently.

Every Agatha Christie Book in Order: Printable PDF Checklist

Would you like a master list of all the Agatha Christie books, plays, and short story collections all in one place? I’ve created a free printable PDF checklist of all the Agatha Christie books in order. Read them, check them off at your leisure, look up film adaptations, and pay court to the Queen of Crime. The checklist is coded with icons so you can see at a glance which books include Poirot, Marple, or other recurring Christie characters.

This checklist is an exclusive freebie for Tea and Ink Society email subscribers . You can sign up using the form below to get instant access. (If you’re already a Tea and Ink Society subscriber, you’ll find the checklist in our “Rare Books Room” page.) If the form does not display below, you can sign up for the Tea and Ink Society via this page .

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21 Comments

Oh my gosh, what an amazing gift for all us Agatha Christie fans! Thank you so much, Elsie. I look forward to checking off all these titles!

You’re quite welcome! I thought I knew Agatha Christie “fairly well,” but I learned so much more about her from writing this, and my respect for the Queen of Crime has only grown!

Hello! Excellent article! Would love to have a copy of it. Is there a way to get a copy? Are you selling it on Amazon as a book? Regards, S. Kilpatrick

That is something I’ve considered, actually, although I don’t have that available yet. If I do publish it as an eBook/book on Amazon later this year, I’ll be sure to post about it in our email newsletter or Facebook group!

Thank you for creating this resource! I haven’t read any Christie yet—want to dive in, but didn’t know where to start. Now I can begin the adventure! Thanks again!

Oh, good! You have so much good reading ahead of you! Christie is a master of surprise. For some mystery authors, a surprise ending isn’t really a given…sometimes it’s more about the “how” than the “who.” But with Christie it’s always both!

Sorry but the link is broken.

Let me know which link you’re referring to and I can help you out!

I have read all of her works several times, but I still often have trouble remembering them by title. This is a godsend! I am printing it out and keeping it on the bookshelf next to her books, so I can choose the one I want. I also want to say that your summaries of her books are masterful. Clear, accurate, and without giving away too much. Congratulation.s.

You are a Christie superfan!! Thank you so much for your comment, and I’m so glad this will be a helpful resource for you! I feel like sometimes even the back-of-the-book blurbs give too much away, so I wanted these summaries to just be a little flavour without spoiling any stage of the discovery!

I am not sure where to sign up to be an e-mail subscriber. I can’t seem to find any links. Help! Thanks in advance.

I’m sorry! There should be a sign-up form that appears right above the “Other Posts You Might Enjoy” heading right at the end of the blog post. But if it’s glitching you can also sign up on this page: https://teaandinksociety.com/flowchart-next-favorite-novel/ . That will get you into the newsletter and give you access to all the freebies I have, including the Agatha Christie checklist printable.

I have submitted my name and email three times, but I have yet to get my checklist. Anyone else experiencing this issue?

This probably goes without saying these days, but just in case…have you checked your spam folder? Search your email for a message with the subject line “Welcome to our Tea and Ink Society! (+ how to get your freebies)” In that email, there’s a link to access all the freebies–the Agatha Christie checklist as well as the 101 Classics printable, reading challenge checklist, etc. I checked my email system and you are indeed subscribed, so let me know if you still can’t find the emails coming from Tea and Ink!

Hi Elsie What a wonderful website! I’m amazed by how much work went into preparing all this!!! I signed up, downloaded the list of A.C. books to my phone – but I don’t see how to print it. My printer is wireless and I have managed to print from my phone beforehand. Would u or anyone else know what to do?

Thank you so much! I enjoy writing this site for readers like you! As far as printing from your phone, I’m not sure, but I’ll do my best to help! What kind of phone do you have?

i cannot find the agatha christie checklist to download. Elsie says it’s in the Rare Books Collection – cannot find that either. Can somebody please help me????

Hi Racquel! After you sign up for the Tea and Ink newsletter, you’ll receive an email in your inbox with a link to the Rare Books page, where you can download the Agatha Christie checklist as well as the other freebies!

I also just sent you an email to help, (coming from [email protected] ) so let me know if you don’t see that! It might be in your Spam folder!

Looking for complete list of Agatha Christie books

Once you sign up for the Tea and Ink newsletter, you’ll get a link to the freebies page that includes the Agatha Christie checklist! If the sign-up for isn’t working on this page, please go here: https://teaandinksociety.com/flowchart-next-favorite-novel/

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Murder most necessary: why Agatha Christie justified killing

C an murder ever be justified? What can law-abiding people do if the justice system betrays them? This isn’t the sort of moral dilemma you expect to find in the stories of Agatha Christie or other writers of “the Golden Age of detective fiction” between the world wars. Their stories are stereotyped as cosily conventional. That supposed cosiness is today reflected in mysteries dominating the bestseller charts and TV schedules.

In detective fiction, though, appearances are always deceptive. There was much more to Christie and the work of her contemporaries than met the eye. In the years leading up to the Second World War, she and other British crime novelists  wrestled with the trickiest puzzle – can it ever be right to kill a fellow human being? Christie and company weren’t sanctimonious, so they wrapped up their social and political concerns in mysteries so ingenious that most readers never noticed what they were up to. But the clues are there, if you look for them.

Christie’s most famous mysteries of the 1930s show her preoccupations with tantalising moral questions about the sanctity of human life.  Murder on the Orient Express  is a clever whodunit, but the central theme concerns justice. A ruthless criminal responsible for the death of a child has escaped unpunished. The story is all about how he gets his just deserts.

At the end, Hercule Poirot solves a tantalising mystery – but nobody is arrested, let alone charged. And Then There Were None , the bestselling whodunit of all time, handles the same idea even more brilliantly. Ten people cut off on an island are killed one by one. Why? Dig deep, and you discover that the answer, again, is all about justice being served in a realistic, rather than technically legal sense. Again, the theme is integrated into the puzzle so subtly that it’s easy not to notice. In both books, Christie shows a scepticism about conventional justice that makes a nonsense of the view that her novels are always comforting and cosy. 

Christie’s interest in the nature of justice developed over her career and reflected changing times. When her first novel appeared in 1920, she and other crime writers reacted to the horror of the Great War and the trauma of Spanish flu by treating detective fiction as a game. The lives of everyone had been mired in suffering for years. Now people were desperate to have fun and this took various forms – such as solving crosswords, dancing the Charleston, and reading ingenious whodunits. Readers were challenged to solve a fiendish mystery before the great detective revealed all, often in a country house library. But as the Roaring Twenties clattered to an end, her books became even more fascinated by puzzles of character, psychology, and morality. The troubled state of the world gave them plenty of raw material to weave into intricate mysteries. 

In 1930, Anthony Berkeley (a witty and ironic writer famous for creating the amateur sleuth Roger Sheringham), along with Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and a few friends founded the Detection Club, the world’s first social network of crime writers. The combination of economic misery and the rise of populist rabble-rousers in Britain and overseas made them fear for the future. Although they traded in fictional death, they were alarmed by eugenicists such as John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, and a who’s who of Fabian socialists who favoured selective breeding. 

The Club’s first President, G K Chesterton, raised his powerful voice against eugenics and Nazism, and the threats facing civilisation were a hot topic at the Club’s monthly dinners in Soho. So were real-life murder trials involving flagrant miscarriages of justice in the era of capital punishment. Among the cases they discussed was the trial of Edith Thompson, charged along with her lover with killing her husband. Berkeley argued that there was no real evidence against her and that she was “executed for adultery”. 

Their anxieties about the true nature of justice were mirrored in the stories they wrote. Increasingly, they wrestled with the question of whether killing another person could ever be justified and, if so, when. 

Christie’s fellow Club members included Ronald Knox, an Anglo-Catholic priest and prominent broadcaster who was the Richard Coles of his day. He dreamed up the “Ten Commandments” of detective fiction and mocked Mussolini in The Fallen Idol (not to be confused with Carol Reed’s 1948 film, based upon a Graham Greene short story). In Knox’s story ,  Gamba, a dictator, is shot after he has liberated his country on April Fools’ Day, “abolished the national debt and exchanged a flood of telegrams with the League of Nations”. Gamba’s death isn’t mourned and the culprit goes unpunished.

Knox’s fellow crime novelist ,  Milward Kennedy – a leading diplomat with the International Labour Organisation – explored how ordinary people might respond to the inadequacy of domestic criminal law in his novel Sic Transit Gloria. In a London flat, the hero discovers a corpse (whose name is Gloria) and takes matters into his own hands: “People talked of judicial murder: was not judicial failure to secure the just punishment of a murder just as bad?”

These doubts about conventional justice were shared by Richard Hull, an accountant who moonlighted as a mystery writer and became secretary of the Detection Club. In Excellent Intentions, which features one of the genre’s more odious victims, Inspector Fenby reflects that “to commit a murder because it is a Good Thing is a new idea”. Increasingly, it was in keeping with the mood of the times. Fear of miscarriages of justice at home, and the rise of ruthless demagogues who made a mockery of conventional ideas of how the legal system should operate in modern society caused writers – and their readers – to wrestle with a huge moral dilemma. Could it ever be legitimate to kill a fellow human being for the greater good?

Anthony Berkeley, who was Christie’s favourite detective writer, flavoured his crafty mysteries with biting irony. He flirted with the idea of the “altruistic murder” – killing someone for the benefit of society as a whole – in The Poisoned Chocolates Case, a dazzling whodunit with multiple solutions, much admired by Christie and Dorothy L Sayers. 

Gladys Mitchell went several steps further by having her psychiatrist-detective Mrs Bradley commit murder not once but twice – in different books. She acts from the best of motives, needless to say. The same was even true of Hercule Poirot himself. He often spoke of his bourgeois disapproval of murder, yet he commits the ultimate crime in Curtain, an astonishingly under-estimated whodunit written shortly after the Second World War began, although not published until 1975. In his final message to his friend Captain Hastings, Poirot agonises over the consequences of taking the law into his own hands and confesses that he can’t be sure he is doing the right thing.

It was Berkeley, one of the crime genre’s greatest innovators, who showed the dangers inherent in “altruistic crimes” and he did so with ingenuity and wit. In Trial and Error, nice Mr Todhunter is told he only has a few months to live. He wants to devote his remaining time to a good cause, and contemplates murdering Hitler or Stalin, only to conclude that it’s too risky – they might be replaced by someone even more evil. 

So Todhunter settles for carrying out a domestic murder, and finds the ideal victim, whom everyone detests. The snag is that, after he’s committed the perfect crime, an innocent person is charged with the killing. Todhunter admits his guilt – but nobody believes him. 

Berkeley’s message is stark and compelling. Once we take the law into our own hands, however compelling our reasons, we enter a different kind of moral maze. Sometimes it’s impossible to find a safe way out. Agatha Christie herself came to realise that danger of trying to play God, as the murderer does in And Then There Were None. Four years into the Second World War, when the tide had finally turned against Hitler and Mussolini, she adapted her novel into a play. Significantly, she gave the stage version a brand new ending, which exposes a flaw in the killer’s attempt to do justice and is very different from the darkness of the novel’s devastating finale. As a result she offers the audience a sense of satisfaction – and hope that, even at the bleakest times, humanity will ultimately prevail.

The Life of Crime by Martin Edwards is out now

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