In the following essay, the reviewers argue that Christie's writing is more complex than critics credit her.

In the following essay, Grossvogel explores why Christie's works remain popular today.

In the following essay, Bargainnier analyzes Christie's collection of poetry, discussing what her poems reveal about her personality.

In the following essay, Fryxell argues that Christie's works have not been successfully adapted for film.

In the following essay, Vipond attempts to clarify Christie's representation of women, arguing that Christie's female characters are products of the time.

In the following essay, Slung argues that the female characters in Christie's mysteries provide role models for women.

In the following essay, Benedict considers the culpability of Christie's murders, arguing that Christie may have paved the way for justifiable murders in mystery fiction.

Why do Americans gulp down Agatha Christie in such quantity? Our most eminent literary critics have asked the question with genuine and growing bewilderment. Their pardonable zeal to espy a new [Leo] Tolstoy or [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky blinds them to the essence of Gutenberg's invention. They fail to recognize that, ever since the availability of the printing press, mankind has been evincing a dogged determination to read. And Americans, as usual, have taken a simple human desire and run away with it...

It was the plotting of crime that fascinated [Agatha Christie], not its often unpleasant end, and it is as a constructor of plots that she stands supreme among modern crime writers. Raymond Chandler once said that plotting was a bore, a necessary piece of journeywork that had to be done, and that the actual writing was the thing that gave the author pleasure. Agatha Christie's feelings were almost the opposite of these…. Her most stunningly original plots are those in The Murder of Roger Ackro...

It must have been the heady atmosphere of those World War II days that made Edmund Wilson mount a frontal assault at one of the mainstays of Western civilization. "Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd," he thundered in the title of his essay denigrating detective fiction. But having discharged this salvo the eminent critic must have been seized by some inner doubts. Obviously hundreds of thousands have cared, the vast legion of readers who for 300 pages have struggled with the plethora of clues,...

Critics of the British detective novel have generally agreed that it is a conservative genre. The detective functions as the guardian of the status quo: he brings to justice criminals who have threatened middle-class stability by threatening the foundation of that stability—money. Not surprisingly, the genre itself is a product of the nineteenth century, for only this century saw the triumph of a class into which an outsider could buy his way—as he could not into the aristocracy—if only...

"The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" really turns a new trick in detective fiction, surely a difficult enough achievement "with the competition so strong." Most writers of detective stories develop their own special detectives, following the lead of the famous. Agatha Christie's pet detective is Hercule Poirot…. Poirot is merely one factor in a tale so ingeniously constructed, so dextrously plotted as to warrant our complete admiration. It is unfortunate for us that we may...

Agatha Christie wisely refrains from overworking her star detective, Hercule Poirot, knowing that it's better for us to yearn for more Poirot stories than to complain of a surfeit…. ["Ordeal by Innocence"] introduces Dr. Arthur Calgary, Antarctic explorer. Once more Mrs. Christie's skill in puzzle-making and storytelling is so consummate that we never think of missing the little Belgian octogenarian…. The book is unusually long for Christie and may sag a bit in the ...

Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple are the detectives of Agatha Christie known to millions; somewhat less well known are Tuppence and Tommy Beresford and Inspector Battle. In all four cases, Christie wrote novels, as well as short stories, using these characters. However, there are two other Christie "detectives" who never appear in a novel, only in short stories. The quotation marks are necessary, for neither of these men fulfill the usual image of the British detective. They are Mr. C. Parker Py...

"An Autobiography," by Agatha Christie … is the work of a writer who depended upon a skeleton—the formal structure of the detective story—in order to allow herself to imagine in public. These memoirs are like nothing else she wrote: they are vivid, stylish, subtle, relaxed, and wholly uncarpentered…. [Mrs. Christie's] tone provides a sense of freshness, of discovery, as if she were inviting us along as she finds out how she came to be who she was. She also de...

Since Agatha Christie is so pre-eminently the mistress of the straight detective story, we're apt to forget how good she can be on her occasional ventures into the spysuspense-intrigue novel. And so well has she exploited the English countryside that we may also forget how intimately she knows the Middle East. These two neglected facets of Miss Christie glisten brilliantly in ["They Came to Baghdad"]. This is a story of little detection or mystery, but much intricacy and surprise, revol...

Mrs. Christie is known to all connoisseurs of detective stories as beyond comparison the finest practitioner of this delightful craft. She should long ago have received the Order of Merit, as having given more and richer pleasure to the English-speaking race than all other living persons, except perhaps Mr. [Charlie] Chaplin, Mr. [George Bernard] Shaw and Mr. [P. G.] Wodehouse. It is marvellous that anyone should invent a new method of putting experienced readers off the scent, but almost beyond belief that...

Ingenious to the last, Agatha Christie kept back one Poirot and one Miss Marple story, each written some 30 years ago, for publication after her death. The date of its vintage, of course, doesn't matter in the least, since Christieland is as socially frozen and lacking in specifically dating detail as the world of [P. G.] Wodehouse or [Ivy] Compton-Burnett. It's all as ordered, stiff and unlikely as an everlasting flower: from gay, happy young couples and solid professional oldsters to servant...

Of course nobody is expected to care in any humanist sense: it is, quite simply, that one has to know. Agatha Christie at her best writes animated algebra. She dares us to solve a basic equation buried beneath a proliferation of irrelevancies. By the last page, everything should have been eliminated except for the motive and identity of the murderer; the elaborate working-out, apparently too complicated to grasp, is suddenly reduced to satisfactory simplicity. The effect is one of comfortable catharsis. Dur...

["Murder in the Calais Coach" is] your best mystery bet of the moment by quite some distance—a thoroughly up-to-snuff Christie that ought to go down in history as one of the author's slickest. Or should we say one of Hercule Poirot's slickest since that famous sleuth is again on the trail, his egg-shaped head and amusing locutions working overtime? Before we forget it, "Murder in the Calais Coach" seems to us just as good as "The Murder of Roger Ackroy...

I strongly suspect that future scholars of the simon-pure detective novel will hold that its greatest practitioner, out-ranking even Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr in their best periods, has been Agatha Christie—not only for her incomparable plot construction, but for her extraordinary ability to limn character and era with so few (and such skilled) strokes. And while Queen and Carr have offered recent books well below their highest standards, Christie … is virtually as good as ever—...

"If you'd nothing to think about but yourself for days on end I wonder what you'd find out about yourself." This is the keynote of Mary Westmacott's fine novel, "Absent in the Spring."… Joan Scudamore, on her way back to England from Baghdad, had the opportunity to do a thorough job of soul-searching and self-evaluation. With admirable skill, sensitive and subtle, Miss Westmacott portrays the woman, first, as model wife and mother, second, in the more ...

Agatha Christie's success has not been checked by death…. What is it that has made the books live? Certainly not the quality of the writing, which is at best no more than lively….