Agatha Christie Re-Reading Project: Introduction

Some people read romance or humour novels to relax. Me, I don't really enjoy romance, and I have to be in exactly the right mood for comedy (and it has to be comedy that is well-pitched to my particular sense of humour). 

No, my relaxation genre is, and has always been, cosy / puzzle crime. I don't like or read the crime genre that one of my friends calls "grimdark" - the kind with lots of viscera and horror and awful things happening to people who may themselves also be awful. I also am not a huge police procedural or hardboiled detective aficionado, although I have of course read the greats in both those genres and enjoyed them.

For me, it's all about puzzle mysteries, preferably (although not exclusively) of the cosy variety. I like a perplexing plot. I like being challenged to work out whodunnit and nothing delights me more than being genuinely surprised at the end (it doesn't happen very often these days, having read so many of this style of book, but it does occasionally!)

And the wellspring of this taste, the progenitor, the Grande Dame of all of the great Golden Age mystery authors (all of whom, in my opinion, are women) - Agatha Christie.

I first read Christie aged 12, when on a family holiday in Merrimbula. I was slightly bored because I had finished the last book I took away with me on day 3, and as an incorrigible reader, I was getting twitchy. In the newsagent with my Mum as she bought postcards or something, I spotted a rack of novels for sale. "Muuuuum..." I whined hopefully. She, sighing, immediately ruled out all the bodice-rippers and such that mostly filled the stack, but lingered on a battered copy of Hickory Dickory Dock, one of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels. "Well, you could try this," she said, handing it to me. 

And the rest, as they say, is history. I was utterly hooked from the first chapter. Dame Agatha bewitched me. I loved the story, I loved the style, I loved the twistiness of the mystery, I loved the setting and milieu, I loved the characters. Reading that book gave me the same kind of physical pleasure that I had previously only had from a small number of excellent fantasy books (especially my best beloved Dark is Rising series).

Returning from that holiday, I went all in on my newfound Christie obsession. I borrowed, bought or acquired every book I could (I currently own 75 Christies, which is all but three of the novels and 4 of the story collections). My high school best friend and I started a Christie Club at the school and sat around earnestly discussing the relative merits of different plots over cucumber sandwiches and cupcakes, which was as close as we got to a Christie-esque high tea situation. Imagine my mid-teenage delight in 1990 when the BBC series of the Poirot stories, featuring the wonderful David Suchet, began airing in Australia. I was entranced, and honestly, I still am (I have rewatched those DVDs more times than any others in my collection).

Christie wrote 74 novels and 28 short story collections, as well as 16 plays (which includes the longest-running play of all time, The Mousetrap). Within that canon, she wrote 33 novels and more than 50 short stories featuring her inimitable Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, who is and remains my best and favourite of all her characters. The next most numerous "detective" was Miss Jane Marple, who featured in 12 novels and 20 stories, followed by Tommy and Tuppence Beresford (by far my least favourites) who appear in 4 novels and one collection of short stories. She also wrote stories featuring an assortment of other characters, a lot of them focused on her supernatural / spiritualist leanings, which I definitely don't rate as highly, but have nonetheless read.

Many people more scholarly than me have written about why Agatha Christie was, and remains, so seminal in the world of not just mystery fiction but also in popular fiction generally. For me, it remains the case that no writer since has achieved the magic mixture of cleverness and unadorned but intensely engagingly readable style that she produced, and no one has ever been tricksier to better effect when it comes to the puzzle part of the mystery story. She was ground zero for a lot of the devices that we now see in so many stories, not just mysteries.

That said, she was a woman and a writer very much of her time and her class, and it shows. Isaac Asimov wrote in one of his Black Widower short stories - I'm paraphrasing, because I can't find the exact quote - that she unceasingly cast aspersions on Americans, colonials, servants, actors, singers, the working class, the Irish, people of colour, illegitimate children, "fallen women", and Jewish people. Asimov is quite right. The Human sine qua non for Christie was a respectable Englishman (or woman) of middle class or above, and anyone who fell outside of that was subject to suspicion (although not usually frank invective). It is important not to try to elide that uneasy framing, or its implications, just because the stories themselves are so compelling.

All of which brings me to my current project!

I went to the theatre with a friend on the weekend to see the stageplay of the novel that is possibly Christie's best-known book, and certainly her best-selling one, with over 100 million copies sold: And Then There Were None. My friend and I, both being Christie devotees, already knew how this story ends, but it was a very good production and we had a great time. It got us both feeling a strong nostalgia for Christie, and a desire to re-read the novel And Then There Were None. In me, it went further - I developed a hankering to take a crack at a main canon re-read. At my leisure, of course, and interspersed with new book reading, but I decided, what they hey, I'm going to do it.

My ground rules for this project are:

1. Main canon is defined by me as Hercule Poirot novels and stories, Jane Marple novels and stories, and (sigh) the Beresfords. With two exceptions - And Then There Were None and The Pale Horse -  I'm leaving out the stand-alone novels, the romancey ones written as Mary Westmacott, the Harley Quinn stories (which are more supernatural) and the Parker Pyne stories (too slight). That makes a target of 61 novels and I think 10 short story collections (although I will have to doublecheck the story collection number).

2. I will alternate between protagonists, and as far as I can, read them in order of publication, with the variation that I will read And Then There Were None first because I'm fired up to do so. This means number two will be The Mysterious Affair at Styles (the first Poirot novel, and Christie's first published book), and number three will be the first Jane Marple book, The Murder at the Vicarage.

3. I will review them in pairs or triples, considering not just how good of a mystery the book is, but how well it stands up now that more time has passed. I am actually very interested to see if the ones that were my faves when I first read them (in some cases, almost 40 years ago) are still my faves now, and if I see different things in them than I did on first or later readings.

So there it is, my little reading project for 2025-2026 to go alongside exploring new books! I will always be interested in the thoughts of other mystery readers and indeed non-mystery readers as I go along, so please feel free to chime in on the review posts. I'm just started my re-read of And Then There Were None, so it's likely at least a week til the first post, but I'm excited for it.