SPOILER WARNING: This essay contains minor plot details for some Agatha Christie novels.

It’s a glorious summer’s day at the Essex country house of Styles Court. The manor’s proud owners, the Cavendish family, spend the day much like any other: horse riding, games of tennis, tea on the lawn. But that afternoon, two furious arguments are overheard, and in the early hours of the morning, the family matriarch suffers an agonising death from strychnine poisoning. This is the basic plot of Agatha Christie’s debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and it is a quintessential example of what became her modus operandi; an isolated setting, a contained list of suspects, and a vast catalogue of plausible motives for dispatching the unfortunate victim. These elements would remain consistent throughout her sixty-year writing career, helping define a formula which made her the best-selling author since William Shakespeare. Perhaps because of this consistency, she seems to have developed an unfair reputation as an author of twee, “cosy” crime fiction, in which every plot is a variation on Colonel Mustard in the library with the lead piping, and nothing happens to seriously challenge the established order of country houses and chocolate box villages. Nothing could be further from the truth; her writing is often subversive and unsettling, a window to a world in which nothing is as it seems and no one can really be trusted.

In Agatha Christie’s world, everyone is a potential murderer. Her most famous detective, Hercule Poirot, believes that “it is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violence.” Christie’s writing is full of seemingly ordinary, upstanding members of society who turn, for a multitude of reasons, to murder: doctors, actors, archaeologists and police officers have all been unmasked as killers in her 66 novels and dozens of short stories. It is true that the overwhelming majority are upper- or middle-class, but this was the stratum of society in which Christie spent most of her life. By writing about settings and people with which she was familiar, she was able to explore the darkest recesses of human nature, exposing the hypocrisy of a society which wore a mask of respectability to hide the lies, secrets and greed which festered behind closed doors. The middle-class identity of her murderers is part of what made them so disturbing to twentieth-century Britain: this was not a world which people associated with violence and untimely death, and it implied that any community could have a potential killer in its midst. And even those characters innocent of the murder itself are usually hiding secrets of their own, meaning the restoration of normality which accompanies the unmasking of the killer at the end of a Christie novel is an illusion. How can life go on as normal when the characters have had the darkest parts of their natures exposed, and when they all believed each other to be potential murderers?

Perhaps even more unsettling is the unexceptional nature of most of her victims; most of them are not wealthy widows or heiresses. Those murdered in Christie novels include curates, teachers, shopkeepers and a Girl Guide. People are killed for such trivial reasons as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to distract attention from a more significant crime. Far from a settled, orderly representation of middle England, Christie’s world is one in which no one is safe, and violence, hatred and murderous jealousy lurk around every corner. As her other famous creation, the elderly Miss Marple, says, in any of Christie’s beautiful villages or luxurious hotels, “you turn over a stone and have no idea what will crawl out.”

No relationship is sacred to Christie. People in her stories are murdered by their closest friends; by their spouses; even, in the case of one unfortunate man, by his own mother. Contrary to her image as a clinical, detached writer who glossed over the inherent violence of the crimes she wrote about, many of her murders are surprisingly brutal. Victims are strangled, bludgeoned, drowned, and poisoned with hydrochloric acid. Nor does she shy away from disturbing subject matter: in the novel Halloween Party, for example, two young children are drowned, while her play The Mousetrap drew on a real case of horrific child abuse which shocked the nation at the end of the Second World War.

And even apart from the presence of violence and secrets, the world of Agatha Christie is not the serene idyll of the popular imagination. The times in which she lived were often worrying and unstable, and this is reflected in her novels. Take her debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles; life in the peaceful country house takes place against the backdrop of the First World War. Petrol is rationed, the village doctor is unmasked as a German spy, and the narrator, Captain Hastings, is recovering from a wound received on the Western Front. Hercule Poirot, introduced in this novel, is a Belgian refugee, “limping badly” from an injury implied to have been suffered while fleeing his homeland. Christie’s impressive technical knowledge of poisons, frequently used to great effect in her books, had its roots in her WW1 work in a hospital dispensary. Later novels reflect fears of the political extremism which surfaced after the war; both communist and fascist sympathisers, and the occasional spy, were featured in her work during the 1920s and 1930s. The political establishment did not escape criticism either. On being unmasked, one politically influential murderer implies that Poirot should let him go because of his importance to the country’s future. The suggestion is treated with the contempt it deserves.

Christie pushed the rules of detective fiction as far as they could stretch, while sticking scrupulously to the unwritten law that the reader must be given an opportunity to identify the killer before they are unmasked. Novels such as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express and The ABC Murders take advantage of expectations concerning how a detective novel should work, using them to pull the rug from under the reader’s feet. These novels are now so well-known that their solutions might seem cliched, but a century ago they were almost revolutionary. And Then There Were None is a story of psychological torture, in which ten people, trapped on a deserted island, are mocked by an unknown killer as they are picked off one by one. In her later career, much of her work revolved around the theme of memory, leading to a number of novels concerning the investigation of cold cases. Perhaps the best of these is Five Little Pigs, in which five different accounts of the same sixteen-year-old murder are put together to solve the crime.

So why is Agatha Christie often seen as an escapist author of cosy crime, fun to read on a long winter evening but without much literary merit? The lighthearted tone of her writing often serves to dampen the unsettling implications of a world in which everyone is hiding something, and anyone is capable of murder given the right motivation. The comical habits and appearance of Poirot (with his huge moustache and obsession with symmetry and neatness) and the amusing image of the elderly Miss Marple running rings around professional detectives provide Christie’s work with enduring charm and introduce levity into the novels, an essential ingredient in interwar crime fiction. Without it, the dark world of Agatha Christie may have been too dark for a society scarred by the ravages of a global war. And perhaps she has been a victim of her own success: such is her reputation for plot twists and ingenious solutions that this is what reviews of her work have usually focused on, then and now. There is nothing wrong with this – it’s made her the bestselling novelist in history – but it does lead to her being thought of as a clever plotter, and not much else.

I believe it’s time for a reassessment of Agatha Christie. Her novels will always be seen as among the cleverest in the crime fiction genre; but it’s high time they were also recognised as being among the most innovative, and the most disturbing.

Benjamin Salter

our armchair detective