Agatha Christie: what made the world’s bestselling author so successful? Here’s a clue

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Agatha Christie (1890-1976). The event itself, on January 12, was marked by a flurry of media coverage across the world, and academic experts were sought for comment. The chief question being: why is Christie the bestselling author of all time?

Christie’s success is a conundrum, not a self-evident manifestation of incontrovertible genius – and this is what makes it so fascinating. Christie was a talented writer, but the same could easily be said of many 20th-century authors.

Known as the “queen of crime”, she was a prolific bestselling author when she died – but so were her fellow mass-producing crime writers, Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) and John Creasey (1908-1973). They didn’t go on to have phenomenal literary afterlives.

Christie, by contrast, became a synonym for a whole genre of writing, and her characters became some of the most beloved figures in global popular culture. How did this happen? What made Christie transcend her times and her competitors?

Terror, tension, suspense

One of the solutions commonly proposed for the secret of Christie’s success is her plotting. She is the doyenne of the “clue-puzzle” mystery, with an unparalleled ability to generate clever plots that surprise, delight and even shock her readers.

This reputation is in large part the legacy of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), itself celebrating its centenary this year. The book was a career breakthrough, prompting just acknowledgement of a trick well played. I won’t reveal the killer plot twist, but careful readers returning to the book for a second encounter can take pleasure in seeing inside the machine, spotting the omissions and misdirections through which they were so skilfully deceived.

Ackroyd isn’t Christie’s only plotting masterclass, but it – and all it stands for – also isn’t an adequate answer to the mystery of Christie’s global success. For all her ability to mislead readers, she wrote some prosaic, daft and far-from-convincing puzzles over the course of her 55-year publishing career.

So, if it’s not just Christie’s plotting that accounts for her success, what else might it be? An obvious and compelling answer is that she also created two brilliant examples of the underestimated outsider detective: Hercule Poirot, the comical cosmopolitan foreigner, and Miss Jane Marple, the village spinster.

Characters and suspects dismiss them because of prejudice – against age, gender and nationality – and there is huge pleasure in watching these underestimated figures turn the tables on murderers, bullies and abusers.

Yet once again, Christie’s success cannot solely be attributed to the familiar comforts of Poirot and Marple. Some of her finest – and most successful – novels are standalone fictions that mobilise terror, psychological tension, anxiety, suspense and the brutal manipulation of the reader.

And Then There Were None (1939) – the tale of ten strangers invited to an island to be murdered – is the bestseller among her bestsellers, while the late thriller Endless Night (1967) astonished reviewers with its capacity to capture psychopathy.

Also, those books which do feature the familiar detectives do not necessarily rely upon them. The Poirot novels increasingly come to be fronted by other characters – detective surrogates like Mrs Ariadne Oliver, or figures who are themselves implicated in the crime.

Taken at the Flood (1948) is typical here. It is technically a Poirot novel, in that he appears at the beginning and the end. But the reader follows the concerns of the village community under investigation through a series of effectively realised post-wartime characters.

The reader might come for Poirot but they stay for something else: a nuanced examination of the resentments, anxieties and tensions that distorted British society in the aftermath of war.

It seems then, that solving the Christie conundrum requires the embracing of more unexpected possibilities: her style, wit and psychological insight. Her books are easy and pleasurable to read (which contributes to their success in translation), and they are also often funny.

Sharp, witty, observant

Alongside the serious business of murder, Christie writes sharply observed social comedy, much of the impact of which comes from her characters. Early commentators on the genre dismissed Christie’s characterisation as two-dimensional, but there is consummate skill in her ability to deftly sketch recognisable figures.

It doesn’t matter whether her books are set in the 1920s or the 1950s, we all know what a pompous self-made man is like, or a religious hypocrite, or a put-upon housewife. It reminds us that people are most commonly killed by those closest to them, and the reasons for those murders have changed little in the past half-century.

Be it jealousy, greed, ambition, hatred, resentment or desire, Christie was good at judging just how much it would take to push a character over the edge of reason.

The puzzle of “why Christie?”, then, demands recognition of a range of less familiar Christies. There was noir Christie, a writer of disturbing, manipulative psychological fiction; comic Christie, a sharp and witty deconstructor of social mores; and uncanny Christie – a crime writer whose familiar voice has a curious knack of making the reader feel at home, while pulling the rug from under them.

This final Christie has in part been recognised, most notably by crime writer Robert Barnard – one of the first critics to attempt to solve the Christie conundrum. He writes of her capacity to generate a mood of “trustful mistrust”. Readers have confidence in Christie to deceive them in an appropriate and respectful fashion.

This can be supplemented, I would argue, with something more disturbing. In Christie’s fiction, time and again, nice Dr Jekyll turns into murderous Mr Hyde, and no one – as Christie’s characters are fond of saying – is safe.

Perhaps, then, Christie’s longevity and success might perversely be attributable to her capacity, repeatedly, to rewrite Robert Louis Stevenson as light comedy. In an astonishing high-wire act of authorship, she exposes the profound darkness of human nature through the prism of the prosaic and the comforts of the mundane.

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Gill Plain does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.