THE MURDER GAME:

The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie

“Her gift is pure genius, of leading the reader by the nose in a zigzag course up the garden and dropping the lead just when she wishes him to scamper to the kill.”

– Torquemada, Observer, 6^th January 1935

– Nicholas Blake, Spectator, 17^th June 1938

– Maurice Richardson, Observer, 17^th May 1953

Agatha Christie (1890—1976) was without any doubt the best-known writer of detective stories (Sherlock Holmes is better known than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle): her plots are very often brilliant; her characterisation at the very least solid, and very often solid, excelling in miniature portraits; and her ability to lead the reader gleefully up the garden path comparable to very few. However, those few are rarely compared to her—instead, we see Christie compared to Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, and, less understandably, Ruth Rendell, to P.D. James, and to English muffins. It is one of the aims of this site not only to celebrate Christie's own out-put, but to see it in the light of her contemporaries: as a member of the Detection Club, and as a contemporary of G.D.H. & M. Cole, G.K. Chesterton, Nicholas Blake, John Dickson Carr and Anthony Berkeley.

• Murder on the Books: Bibliography.
• To the Main Page
• Links
• E-mail
  

• An Agatha Christie Tribute: The English Dust Wrappers
• Agatha Christie Unofficial Homepage
• American Tribute to Agatha Christie
• Delicious Death
• Hercule Poirot: le site! (in French)--the best site dedicated to the L.W.T. television series on the Internet.
• The Icelandic Homepage

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These pages copyright Nicholas Lester Fuller, 2001--2002.  Updated 4th December 2004.