101 Years of Agatha Christie

She gave us intricate plots, red herrings, and iconic detectives in the form of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple—born on this day in 1890, Agatha Christie is credited with revolutionising the mystery genre. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) which celebrated its hundred and first birthday this year, was written after a bet with her sister Madge and inspired by the Belgium refugees in the wake of the first world war. Four years and six rejections later, the novel was published—earning her the meagre price of twenty-five pounds for her pains.

Despite the often-disparaging label of simple popular fiction, Christie remains the best-selling novelist of all time, with total global sales exceeding two billion books in more than a hundred languages. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is often considered the quintessential Christie. The novel is many students of crime fiction (myself included) first peek into the breadth of Golden Age literature—infamous for breaking arguably the most crucial of Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction. Never one to follow the rules, Christie’s work challenged many of the assumptions around the genre. Despite the assumed cosy domesticity of the golden age, the genre is, in fact, a conduit for many social and political anxieties of the era often much more implicit than its counter, the American hard-boiled school of fiction—her novels affect the comfort of the golden age and often mask a complex myriad of gender, racial and class discourses of the period.

Christie wrote the final installations to both Miss Marple and Poirot series during the second world war—locking the novels away as insurance in the event that she passed away. She continued to write for another thirty years, writing over 60 detective novels and 14 short story collections, with the two novels, Curtain (1975) and Sleeping Murder (1976), published at the end of her life. Her play, The Mousetrap (1952), is still running in London today. It is the longest-running theatrical production in the West End, celebrating its twenty-five-thousandth performance on the 18th of November 2012—only coming to a standstill with the rest of the world due to the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Those lucky enough to see the show must take a vow of secrecy upon curtain call—so remember, no spoilers, please!

The legacy of her work continues today; Sophie Hannah took the mantle, reanimating Poirot and continuing his story with The Monogram Murders (2014), and has written four new Hercule Poirot novels to date with the approval of the Christie estate. Nonfiction has not escaped her influence; Katheryn Harkup explores the various poisons in Christie’s literary arsenal in her work A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie (2015). Love or hate her work, Christie’s influence over the genre cannot be overstated. Happy birthday to the Queen of Crime fiction herself, who, despite a hundred and one years since the publication of her first novel, continues to influence a generation of crime fiction authors today.