Agatha Christie: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring

Agatha Christie is a global bestseller. Her work has been translated into over 100 languages and adapted for stage and screen. Christie’s writing life ran from 1920 to the 1970s, and she didn’t just write puzzles, she wrote plays, supernatural stories, thrillers, satires, and domestic noir. She also commented obliquely but perceptively on the social and cultural changes of a troubled century. Christie’s work tells the story of a changing Britain, but perhaps her greatest achievement is not to be limited by that national context. Her stories achieve the rare feat of appearing both universal and specific and can seemingly be adapted for almost any context.

This Very Short Introduction investigates why the novels of a middle-class, middlebrow Englishwoman were so successful, and why they continue to appeal to such a broad range of readers. Chapters explore the context of Christie’s writing, and the clue-puzzle detective fiction structure at which she excelled, but they also question the familiar assumptions that surround her and what we think we know about her work. Gill Plain examines Christie’s capacity to register the zeitgeist, and consider how her novels reveal anxieties surrounding gender roles, the family, war, justice, ethics, and nation. Her fascination with hypocrisy, power, abuse, deceit, and despair continues to resonate with readers - and screenwriters - who respond to her light touch and dark imagination to repurpose her stories with the fears and desires most appropriate to their time.

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Gill Plain, Professor of English Literature and Popular Culture at the University of St Andrews

Gill Plain is Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. Alongside a lifelong preoccupation with crime fiction, she has research interests in British literature, cinema, and culture of the mid-twentieth century, war writing, feminist theory and gender studies. She is the author of Women’s Fiction of the Second World War (1996); Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body (2001); and Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ’Peace’ (2013).