A Murder is Announced

“It might have the greatest premise I’ve ever heard in my entire life. And she pulls it off! She absolutely nails it. It’s not just a gimmick. She uses it to explore psychology, to explore how people just turn up to watch. It’s grotesque. She’s always fascinated by that, and this is the book where you see the idea absolutely coalesce: she turns murder into a spectator sport.” Read more...

The Best Murder Mystery Books

Stuart Turton, Novelist

“I’ve chosen this because it’s a great Miss Marple. It features my favourite murderer. He or she (I’m not going to reveal the plot) behaves predictably one moment and unpredictably the next. The setting is an English country house in a village: classic Miss Marple territory. It’s got what all good books have: a wonderful ending and a wonderful beginning.” Read more...

The Best Agatha Christie Books

Mathew Prichard

In writing The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman doubtless took inspiration from the Miss Marple books by Agatha Christie. Yes, everyone has heard of them, but they really are among the best. No one has really ever managed to do plots as well as Agatha Christie did, which is probably why she remains so widely read and translated. In terms of which Miss Marple to read, there are 15 of them (including two books of short stories) in total, but some of the best ones are A Murder is Announced, Murder at the Vicarage and 4.50 from Paddington. They’re also fun to listen to as audiobooks. Often Joan Hickson, who plays Miss Marple on TV, is the audiobook narrator (even when, as in the case of Murder at the Vicarage, the ‘I’ in the book is not Miss Marple, but the vicar). I found her voice hard to adjust to at first, but unforgettable: I can still hear her speaking to me now.

From our article Books like The Thursday Murder Club