A mysterious affair: the phenomenon of Agatha Christie

It’s 100 years since her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published. What is the secret of Agatha Christie’s enduring popularity? Emma Hughes investigates

- Emma Hughes

IT sounds as if it couldn’t possibly be true, but it is: the only books to outsell Agatha Christie’s are Shakespeare’s plays and the Bible. The woman labelled the queen of ‘cosy crime’ (quite wrongly; more on that later) is the world’s most translated author, has history’s longest continually running play to her name in The Mousetrap and has sold well over four billion books.

Greenways, her Devon holiday home on the Dart estuary, now in the care of the National Trust, attracts pilgrims in their thousands and she will feature on the new £2 coin released later this year. The Golden Age of detective fiction produced dozens of distinguished alumni, but only Christie remains a household name. What’s her secret?

Part of the answer can be found on Amazon. Her contemporaries seem frozen in aspic, but you only have to type Christie’s name into the search bar to see how adaptable she has proved. Over the years, her novels have been successfully reissued with covers that nod to the design cues of almost every genre, from Hitchcockian thriller to modern Scandi noir.

On the screen, it’s the same story. David Suchet’s Poirot may be the gold standard, but Christie’s influence stretches far beyond straight-up period pieces—last year saw rave reviews for Knives Out, a 21st-century love letter to her starring Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, an eccentric Louisiana detective. Director Rian Johnson (of ‘Star Wars’ fame), who discovered Christie as a little boy on his grandparents’ bookshelves, has gone out of his way to praise her ‘modern sensibility’.