PREFACE

      Agatha Christie’s novels are renown for being tightly worked detective novels. In total there are sixty-six of them but this collection contains two of the best, Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Adversary.

      These detective novels she wrote under her own name along with fourteen short story collections, but she has also published six romances under the name Mary Westmacott. She is best known for her detective novels and these tend to focus on much loved characters Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Parker Pyne, Harley Quin/Mr Satterthwaite, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford.

      Like many authors, Agatha Christie was unsuccessful at getting her work published first off, but in 1920 The Bodley Head press published her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles. This featured the prominent character Hercule Poirot and kick-started her literary career.

      Christie’s detective novels have given her the title of ‘Queen of Crime’ since she introduced of number of motifs into the genre which became classics. The genre of detective novels now pretty much follows the path laid by Christie: a murder is committed, there are several suspects who are all concealing their own secrets, the detective slowly uncovers these personal secrets over the course of the story and discovers a shocking twist towards the end. Agatha Christie novels pride themselves on shocking the reader. The culprits are so varied and usually the least suspecting person involved. They range from children to policemen and from narrators to people who have already died.

      At the end of most Agatha Christie novels the investigator will gather the surviving suspects into a single room and explain the course of his thinking. He will reveal the guilty person, usually to the surprise of several others in the room, although there are a few exceptions.

      There are certain flaws to the genre of realism, however, because they all work on such a tightly bound framework. By reading too many you can become pretty good at working out the twists. Many of the characters also fill stereotypes and so it can feel like reading the same novel on repeat. These stereotyped descriptions were more regular before the end of the Second World War, when such attitudes were more commonly expressed publicly, and focus largely around Italians, Jews, non-Europeans, and sometimes Americans, the last of which are usually described as impossibly naïve or uninformed.

      The repeatability factor is more to be said for modern detective novels than Agatha Christie’s