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Why is Christie so popular? She produced almost a book a year since her debut in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair At Styles and was the chief proponent of the English village murder mystery. She created two enormously popular characters - the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, always on the brink of retirement, and the inquisitive elderly spinster and amateur sleuth Miss Jane Marple of St Mary Mead. Christie was never afraid to 'break the rules', provoking a storm of controversy with the unorthodox resolution of The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, now acclaimed as one of the classics of British crime fiction. Above all, she managed to write complex whodunits in a clear, easily readable style - a fact that has made her books as popular now as they were half a century ago.
Christie was publicity-shy for most of her life and the details about how she wrote her books, especially how she created such figures as Poirot and Miss Marple, will always remain elusive. Famously, she disappeared for ten days in December 1926 and to this day no-one knows the exact reason why. She wrote in many different genres: PG Wodehouse style comic mysteries (Why Didn't They Ask Evans?), atmospheric whodunits (Murder On The Orient Express), espionage thrillers (N or M?), romances (under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott), plays (The Mousetrap), and poetry.
All-star film adaptations such as Death On The Nile and Evil Under The Sun (both featuring Peter Ustinov as Poirot) confirmed Christie's popularity. For a long time Margaret Rutherford was Miss Marple in four 1960s films, until the late Joan Hickson provided her definitive interpretation in the BBC television series beginning in 1984. Meanwhile David Suchet has made the rôle of Poirot his own for the LWT series. The Mousetrap, approaching a record-breaking half-century, is one of London's greatest theatrical legends.
The Pocket Essential Guide To Agatha Christie provides an informed introduction to the whole Christie phenomenon; a biography of Dame Agatha Christie; in-depth profiles of ten of her most popular characters together with an analyses of the stories in which they appeared; a look at her espionage thrillers and non-crime titles; a section on film, TV and stage adaptations; appendices that include an exhaustive bibliography and an overview of the best Agatha Christie websites around.
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