Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was the best selling mystery author of all time and the only writer to have created two major detectives, Poirot and Marple. She also wrote the longest-running play in the modern theater, The Mousetrap. The daughter of an Amer...

Agatha Christie is a towering figure in the history of crime literature for two reasons. First, she consolidated the form of the pure mystery novel, achieving in five or six of her books puzzle stories that set a standard unlikely ever to be decisively b...

Agatha Christie is a towering figure in the history of crime literature for two reasons. First, she consolidated the form of the pure mystery novel, achieving in five or six of her books puzzle stories that set a standard unlikely ever to be decisively b...

And then there were none By FRANZEN Wednesday, October 18, 2000 In the first debate, with the candidates standing behind lecterns, Al Gore played the intellectual bully, a performance so extravagant that the satirists on "Saturday Night Live" found it irresistible....

November 1955 It was a "routine" flight by members of a reserve squadron. Eight pilots were scheduled. Seven got airborne. Five continued the flight to various unscheduled conclusions. One pilot died. In terms of experience and backgrounds, the pilots represented a...

A high school that canceled an upcoming performance of a play over complaints that the original title of the Agatha Christie novel on which it is based is racially offensive has decided the show will go on, with some changes.The play will be performed next...

Eight guests, two servants, but no host or hostess—that is the situation [of "And Then There Were None", published in Great Britain as "Ten Little Niggers"] in the luxurious mansion on Indian Island off the coast of Devon. The servants say that they have been hired from an employment agency and have never seen their employers. The guests have been brought to the place on various pretexts, and each of them professes to know nothing about the missing Mr. and Mrs. Owen, who a...

[It is no use trying to compare Mrs. Christie] with other writers of detection. She stands hors concours, in a class of her own. No one else in the world would have attempted seriously to manipulate a plot like that of Ten Little Niggers without a hopeless presentiment of failure…. Mrs. Christie disdains contraptions. She faces her readers with her bare hands and her sleeves rolled up; and she sells them ten dummies beautifully, one after the other, with the exquisite timing of a Rugby International ...