And then there were more

Agatha Christie is one of the most widely adapted novelists of all time. Of her 66 tales, only four have not been retold. Her layered reveals, red herrings still inspire writers, filmmakers

- K Narayanan

In the latest Knives Out mystery, Wake Up Dead Man (2025), detective Benoit Blanc at one point examines a reading list of crime novels.

There's The Hollow Man (1935) by John Dickson Carr; Dorothy L Sayers’s Whose Body? (1923) and Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). The only author with two entries on the list is Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which celebrates its centenary this year, and The Murder at the Vicarage, the first Miss Marple novel.

Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed all three Knives Out films, has said they are directly inspired by Christie. There are several other such films, and filmmakers.

M Night Shyamalan said he consciously modelled ensemble “introduction scenes” in Old (2021) on what he calls the “Agatha Christie restaurant scene”, designed to efficiently set up every character at once.

Scream creator Kevin Williamson has credited Christie with teaching him to work backwards from revelations, rather than obsess over mystery mechanics, a process he says helped him find the franchise's distinctive rhythm of layered reveals.

Shane Black has cited And Then There Were None (1939) as a formative influence on his violent, intricately plotted mysteries. And James Vanderbilt, screenwriter of the comedy Murder Mystery (2019), summed up his approach as “an American couple (crashing) into an Agatha Christie story”.