Mystery in Agatha Christie's novels

Agatha Christie is one of the most well-known authors regarding murder mystery novels. As the best British female writer of all times since March 2017 (Guinness World Records), she wrote a total of 66 mystery novels which are characterised by the use of mystery elements to engage the readers.

One mysterious element present in every novel written by Agatha Christie is the appearance of some characters which are based on real life people. Sometimes, Agatha Christie could not imagine characters who were able to commit the murders present in her novels. For this reason, she used features from real life people that she had seen on the street in order to create relatable characters for the readers. Therefore, some characters in Christie’s novels are based on daily people.

     Characters from the film Murder On the Orient Express (2017)

Another mysterious element is the crime. Most of Christie’s novels are based on a crime which must be solved. The development until the final resolution of the crime is based on thinking of who the murderer is, why this person has murdered another one and how this person has committed the murder. Then, suspects are guarded as well as their explanations in relation to the murder. Finally, Christie creates a network of suspects, suspicions and reasons whose main aim is to mislead the readers. In this way, Christie achieves her goal of leaving the reader perplexed with the end of the story and the discovery of the real killer. This plot is quite common in all her novels and its one of the reasons for Christie’s success due to the fact that it engages the readers until the last page of the story.

Main characters of Christie's novels: Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot

Related to the previous element, the last mysterious element is the development of psychological struggles. Agatha Christie loves to play with the thoughts of the characters as well as those of the readers. In this way, the mess and hidden details present in her novels lead characters and readers into a tangled mess of ideas that is eventually resolved in a wonderful way.

These three characteristics are common to all of Christie's novels and thanks to their use, the British writer has been so acclaimed during the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

The film American director John Curran, who is an expert in Agatha Christie, has created the following list. It contains the ten bestmystery novels written by Agatha Christie: 

1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

2. Peril at End House (1932)

3. Murder on the Orient Express (1934)

4. The ABC Murders (1935)

5. And Then There Were None (1939) 

6. Five Little Pigs (1943) 

7. Crooked House (1949) 

8. A Murder is Announced (1950) 

9. Endless Night (1967) 

10. Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (1975)

To finish with, we would like you to see this PowerPoint presentation where you can get more details about Agatha Christie’s life as well as the title of some other novels written by her. This PowerPoint presentation includes information corresponding to four posts written in this blog. We recommend you to see the PowerPoint presentation to get a panoramic view of Agatha Christie. 

Introduction

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, better known as Agatha Christie, was a writer and playwright mainly focused on the genre of mystery. Her production was very prolific, publishing 66 detective novels, 6 romantic novels, 14 short stories and multiple play scripts. Her works had a big impact on the history of the detective novels, becoming one of the best exponents of the detective stories of all time.

This blog is going to present a few of the mysterious events that occured in Christie's life and how she took advantage of these situations in order to use them in the development of some of her novels. But first of all, in order to test your knowledge about Agatha Christie, here is a questionnaire related to the topic. 

Useful information about Christie's life