AGATHA CHRISTIE MURDER BY THE BOOK

More widely read than any other English writer, she baffled the world with masterly tales of murder and remained something of a mystery herself

- Virginia Kelly

Last October, connoisseurs of detective fiction eagerly turned the pages of a new novel with special and apprehensive interest. Not only was it the final Agatha Christie book to be published—a mystery entitled Sleeping Murder—there were rumours that in it, the inquisitive Miss Marple, one of the best loved super sleuths ever created, would meet her match and die.

Happily, as critics noted with relief, this particular Agatha Christie trail—like so many others, ingeniously woven into her plot—proved false. The author who in Curtain, hadn’t hesitated to kill off her similarly renowned detective, Hercule Poirot, allowed Miss Marple to surmount all perils, alive and triumphant.

The Times critic, H. R. F. Keating, gladly recorded Miss Marple’s survival and enthused: “It’s vintage Christie, marvellously easy reading, constantly intriguing. How does she do it? Timing. Unerring timing.” But Agatha Christie remained modest about her achievements. She even played down her prodigious output, once calling herself “a sausage machine”.

By the time of her death, a year ago, last January, at the age of 85, the high priestess of detective fiction had 110 titles to her credit—66 of them fulllength murder mysteries—with estimated sales of more than 350 million copies. She has been translated into 157 languages, 63 more than Shakespeare.

Her stories have inspired 15 films, and 17 of her plays have been staged. The Mousetrap is the world’s longest running play, having opened in London 24 years ago; it is still going strong. Curtain was heading bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic the week she died.