Books by Agatha Christie

“The reason I picked Mrs. McGinty’s Dead is because it’s a personal favourite of mine. Poirot is my favourite of her fictional detectives, and the setup to this one is so good. What we have is Poirot called in by his friend Superintendent Spence to look into the case of a young man called James Bentley, who is accused of murdering his housekeeper, the titular Mrs. McGinty. Bentley is condemned to be executed, but Spence is not convinced of the man’s guilt, and so Poirot is summoned to this small village to try and pick apart the mystery and the circumstances that led to Mrs. McGinty’s death. The really irresistible gimmick that I absolutely love is the early revelation that Poirot makes when he discovers that Mrs. McGinty, in the days before her death, had clipped a newspaper article in which three mysterious women are discussed. These three women were involved in three separate murder cases and their fates are a mystery. Nobody knows what has become of these women.” Read more...

The Best Locked-Room or Puzzle Mysteries

Tom Mead, Thriller and Crime Writer

“A lot of people love the later Christie, I like the early ones. This one is from 1936. It’s set at an archaeological dig. There’s a plan of the dig and where everyone’s rooms are. I don’t want to ruin it for anybody, but it’s quite a neat solution. It’s a good problem-solving one…It’s a good setting. It’s a finite group of people who are suspects. I like the way it’s written. Her framing devices are really good—there’s not just a straightforward narrator. I love Hercule Poirot more than Miss Marple. I think Poirot is a more interesting figure. And I do have a fondness for the dramatic resolution. The ‘I’ve gathered you all in the room together and this is when I point the finger at the person who did it.’ The neatness of it is really appealing.” Read more...

The Best Classic Crime

Stig Abell, Journalist

“It’s a great set-up for a mystery that draws directly from Christie’s own experience of travelling in the Middle East. She was very familiar with that area, so the setting is very precise and well described, you really feel like you are there. And there’s this undercurrent of evil; she’s exploring the idea of how a disturbed and disturbing personality in a family can trickle down the generations. This woman who’s been murdered is truly horrible. She’s really done a number on her children. All together, this makes for a great mystery and it deserves to be more widely known.” Read more...

The Best Summer Mysteries

Caroline Crampton, Memoirist

“She has a very good plot with some good clueing and misdirection. It’s a good mystery in a country house setting, at Christmas. What more could you want but a murder? That murder involves an apparent impossibility.” Read more...

The Best Golden Age Mysteries

Martin Edwards, Literary Scholar

“This novel created a huge amount of publicity and discussion when it first came out because Christie did something that just broke every rule in the mystery genre playbook. . . . I come down on the side of the group that says it was a brilliant move. It was audacious.” Read more...

The Best Mystery Books

David Baldacci, Novelist

“I loved Agatha Christie when I was a teenager, and she is one of the reasons I became a mystery thriller writer. I still think that her books have a lot in them that a teenager would enjoy today. I think this is my favourite book of hers. It has the tightest plotting of all of them, and it’s very clever.” Read more...

The Best Thrillers for Teens

Kathryn Foxfield, Children's Author

“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

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

“Tommy and Tuppence a married couple, who used to be involved in espionage, and now there’s a war and no one seems to want them. Then they are recruited, or rather, Tommy is recruited to help find a mole in the British intelligence services. And Tuppence decides that she’s not being left behind, so she gets dressed up incognito, goes to join him, and they pursue this case together. It is all about finding fifth columnists. It was the one time that Christie tried to write about the war while it was happening, and she does it in a more lighthearted tone.” Read more...

The Best Wartime Mystery Books

Caroline Crampton, Memoirist

“Agatha Christie was married to a man named Max Mallowan, a well-known archaeologist, particularly in the Near East. She wrote Come, Tell Me How You Live in 1946. It’s a tremendously chirpy account of absolutely colonial archaeology: of expeditions in Syria or parts of Iraq and digging up mounds. It’s a fun read, very cheerful, but one of the difficulties archaeology has is to try to extract itself from being a colonial profession and one of the very big questions now is what does archaeology mean to indigenous people in post-colonial continents?” Read more...

The best books on Archaeology

Neal Ascherson, Journalist

“Witness for the Prosecution is one of the truly great theatrical murder-mysteries. It has an ingenious twist, it’s daring and adventurous. If you ever see the play, put yourself in the position of the writer and ask yourself how anyone could bring it off.” Read more...

The Best Agatha Christie Books

Mathew Prichard,

“Agatha Christie is one of the very few people to have sold more unabridged audiobooks than abridged ones. That says something about the quality of her writing and the difficulty of abridging detective stories. You can’t leave out the red herrings. Hugh Fraser reads it wonderfully. In many ways, it’s the most complicated challenge Poirot faced. When you come to the end, you really do put down the book and say to yourself: ‘Why on earth didn’t I think of that?’” Read more...

The Best Agatha Christie Books

Mathew Prichard,

“The book is about three young people; my grandmother was well into her 70s when she wrote it. As a young person myself in the early 1960s, I saw more of my grandmother than at any other time because I was studying at Oxford, not far from where she lived and worked at the time. There are, fortunately, no characters in Endless Night that she ‘copied’. But she does say somewhere in the book that it’s all about relationships. To me, it’s an astonishingly modern and human book. To write about people 50 years younger than herself was a tour de force. And that’s quite apart from the plot. It also illustrates her belief in evil as a force in the world.” Read more...

The Best Agatha Christie Books

Mathew Prichard,