British novelist (1890-1976)

Ingenuity is the essence of Christie's detective stories. She confined herself largely to two detectives, pompous Poirot and elderly, inquisitive Miss Marple. Nowadays, as well as her plots, it is the period detail of her books which fascinates: her English villages, spa hotels, 1930s cruise-ships and above all country houses are caught (as Poirot might put it) like ze flies in ze amber. She chronicles a vanished presecond-world-war, upper-middle-class Britain with an accuracy which is enhanced rather than diminished by the staginess of her characters and plots.

MURDER AT THE VICARAGE  (1930) This typical Miss Marple story is set in a picture-postcard English village riven by gossip and inhabited by as unlikely a collection of eccentrics as even Christie ever threw together. Everyone could be guilty of murder, and Miss Marple's investigation is so gently persistent, so self-effacingly officious, that one trembles in case she ends up as victim rather than as sleuth.

MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA  (1936) A nurse goes to look after the neurotic wife of an archaelogist on a dig, and is thrown into the middleof intriguem suspicion, ranorous insult and finally, inevitably, murder. At the end of it all Poirot applies his 'little grey cells' to unearthing means, motive and opportunity as painstankingly as an archaelogist trowelling treasure.

Among the best-known of Christie's 83 detective novels are The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ten Little Niggers/Ten Little Indians/Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express and The Crooked House. She also wrote stage plays (including The Mousetrap), an excellent second-world-war espionage thriller (N or M), and six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

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To Murder at the Vicarage :A Murder is Announced

Cyril Hare, An Ill Wind Margery Allingham, The Crime at Black Dudley Ngaio Marsh, Overture to Death Gladys Mitchell, Come Away, Death Dorothy Simpson, The Night She Died Dorothy Simpson, Wake the Dead Patricia Wentworth, Miss Silver Investigates