Agatha Christie's Books

Biography

Agatha Christie, née Miller, was born in 1890 into a well-off, middle-class British family. Whilst class doesn’t change (not in Britain anyway), finances do, and Agatha Christie had to earn a living.

Knowledge of Pharmacy

She qualified and worked as a pharmaceutical assistant. A bet made with her sister when she was 26 that she couldn’t write a detective novel became the ultimate source of her livelihood. Over the next 59 years, she wrote at least 76 books and sold over 2 billion copies, which is plenty no matter who you compare her with.

She didn’t write about gore and violence. She dispatched her victims quickly and painlessly behind the scenes. Whilst she wasn’t above shooting or bludgeoning her victims to death, her preferred method was poisoning. Her pharmaceutical training stood her in good stead. Unlike most crime writers, the Journal of Pharmaceutical Medicine has reviewed her work. So accurate were her descriptions of thallium poisoning in The Pale Horse that a nurse recognised the symptoms in a girl who was dying in a London hospital after reading the book. Later tests supported the diagnosis, and three weeks later, the girl left the hospital alive and well.

Critical Disdain

Critics describe Agatha Christie’s books as unrealistic and point out that they don’t represent today’s social norms. She wrote about the middle-class existence she knew; her stories abound with spinsters, widows, military officers and doctors. Her attitude towards the working class, Jews, and foreigners is painfully dated.

Yet her fans praise her eye for human character. Hercule Poirot is pompous and self-opinionated, and Miss Marple is a busybody. But the real reason to read Agatha Christie is for her tightly crafted mysteries. In And Then There Were None, ten people arrive on an island, and within four days, they are all dead, but the last to die wasn’t the murderer. As Christie said:

“Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous, or the murderer being obvious.” (The Home of Agatha Christie)

Style

Her plots are intricately crafted puzzles, not thrillers. Brian Aldiss claimed that Christie would write a story and then decide who was the most unlikely character to be the murderer. She would then go back through her story, planting clues to frame the guilty party. John Curran, who studied the notebooks Christie left behind after her death, is possibly better informed. According to him, she would start with the murderer and then work her way back through scenes, characters and clues before she wrote her mysteries.

Who knows quite how she did it, perhaps not even Christie herself

“Nothing turns out quite in the way that you thought it would when you are sketching out notes for the first chapter or walking about muttering to yourself and seeing a story unroll.” (Literary Ladies Guide)