In June 1926, Agatha Christie published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and something changed forever in the history of literature. It was her sixth novel, the third in the series about Hercule Poirot, a character both irritating and brilliant in equal measure, with whom she had launched her literary career six years earlier. The success was immediate. The novel’s ending — unprecedented and controversial — propelled Christie’s popularity, and the book paved the way for a career with almost unimaginable figures: more than a billion copies sold in English of her more than 100 books, and as many again in other languages; only Shakespeare and the Bible surpass her.
Paradoxically, this global success and her extraordinary productivity have blurred the edges of a far darker, deeper, and more unsettling author than she might seem — a writer so thoroughly embedded in the DNA of crime fiction that her influence often goes unnoticed, a master plotter who, a century ago, was responsible for some of the greatest endings in literary history.
“She’s an intergenerational author; her novels are very well crafted and have a brilliant edge,” says editor Miriam Vall, who oversees the Spanish publication of the British writer’s complete works at Espasa. “She is trivialized for being prolific and for being a woman, but she does not write littleweight novels at all: these are major novels. And she has not gone out of fashion — quite the opposite.”
Espasa has published nearly a hundred titles and aims to publish all of them in Spanish by 2028. Readers — including younger ones — have responded enthusiastically. “With Agatha, you see but you don’t; you don’t want to go back, you get pulled into the story,” says Vall. “And young readers love that. The novel turns them into detectives, asks for a bit of help, and they end up completely hooked.”
Although not always fully recognized, Christie’s influence on contemporary authors is immense. In Juan Gómez-Jurado’s latest novel (Mentira), the influence of the author of Death on the Nile can be traced, especially in the unreliable narrator she introduced in the aforementioned The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Unsurprisingly, Gómez-Jurado is one of her staunchest defenders:
“She taught me that the reader deserves respect,” he says. “You can surprise them, you can manipulate them, but you cannot lie to them. All the information has to be there. Christie appears simple. That transparency is the result of intense work, not its absence. The fact that she sells hundreds of millions of books and critics still raise an eyebrow says more about the eyebrow-raiser.”
This Stakhanovite method was fueled by tireless activity (she took notes on everything, scattered fragments that only later took shape), discipline, and a remarkable ability to draw from reality: her novels are anchored in the kind of society she inhabited — comfortable, with large houses and servants, yet marked by a certain moral and economic decline.
Despite finally achieving success, 1926 was a turbulent year for her. In December, she disappeared for 11 days, and the case gripped British society. She left her home in Berkshire without telling anyone. Her car was later found abandoned near King’s Cross station, from where it was eventually discovered she had taken a train to Harrogate — now home to one of the world’s leading crime fiction festivals — and checked into a hotel. Some staff recognized her and raised the alarm. She had registered under the name Nancy Neele, a golfer who was both a family acquaintance and her husband’s lover, whom she did not recognize when they were reunited. She never spoke about the episode with anyone. They divorced two years later.
In the midst of the storm, in 1927, she created the astute Miss Marple, who first appeared in The Tuesday Night Club, a story published in Royal Magazine. María G. S., a 14-year-old from Madrid, champions the often underrated detective through her enthusiasm for Christie’s books: “Although it may seem she reserved the best cases for Poirot, I love that Agatha Christie included a character like Miss Marple at a time when female protagonists were barely present in literature.”
Short stories would become another major outlet: more than 160 of them, collected in 14 anthologies. Her output did not slow, and she soon reached an average of two novels a year, supported by her popular success and the emotional and personal stability she found with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. His work on excavations around the world became Christie’s other great passion.
During this period, she adopted the pseudonym Mary Westmacott — under which she wrote six romantic novels — and produced some of her greatest works featuring the distinctive Poirot: Murder on the Orient Express, Evil Under the Sun, and Appointment with Death, to name just three of her most famous books.
Alice Hallett, dubbed the “Agatha Christie of the 21st century” for her bold reworking of the master’s techniques in novels such as The Appeal and The Killer Question, highlights a striking aspect of Christie’s success: “She wrote close to 70 novels, but only five or six are truly well-known today. The earlier author seems to be the more popular one — the era of surprising puzzles, stories with playful twists — while the later, darker Christie has been left mainly to specialized fans.”
If readers want to move beyond the Christie books that have become part of the Western canon, they might delve into Taken at the Flood, one of Poirot’s darkest cases, The Secret Adversary (Nazis, spies and lost documents in the first case of the Tommy and Tuppence duo); or The Hollow, recommended by Hallett herself.
Originally trained as a screenwriter, Hallett came to Christie through television and film adaptations — a genre almost impossible to exhaust — which began as early as the 1940s.
“Her structure is perfect. She creates a group of characters who mesh perfectly and integrate into the mystery and only then rips everything apart and moves the characters so you come to believe it could have been any one of them. Manipulating the reader like that is not easy,” Hallett says to explain why Christie has been adapted so often.
A perfect business model
With two siblings 10 and 11 years older than her, Christie spent much of her childhood alone, sustained only by her imagination. From this came those plots that fold and unfold with unexpected solutions — a unique skill that enriches the experience of rereading them. Take, for example, the celebrated The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Crooked House or Murder on the Orient Express: once those groundbreaking endings are known, returning to them and tracing every clue that leads to the resolution becomes an experience in itself.
Marina Sanmartín, a writer and bookseller at Cervantes y Cía in Madrid, offers another insight: “I think what makes her unbeatable is everything you don’t see — Christie’s texts are themselves a great trap. They seem simple, they are short, and their structure can be traced easily once you finish them. However, they are very complex sleight-of-hand games, pure magic.”
Sanmartín’s latest novel, La doble desaparición de Abril del Pino (The Double Disappearance of Abril del Pino), pays tribute to the master: “As a novelist, I try to have my texts mirror hers for three reasons: their timelessness — she still sells steadily today to all kinds of readers; her ability to play with the reader and keep them in suspense until the last page; and her skill at sketching settings and characters in a few, yet razor-sharp, words.”
The British writer achieved success in almost every field, though toward the end of her life she devoted more energy to theater, producing 25 plays. The most famous is The Mousetrap, which holds the record for the longest-running play in history, performed continuously since 1952 in three different theaters. These staggering figures reflect a vast enterprise managed since the mid-20th century by Agatha Christie Limited, now led by her great-grandson James Prichard. Under British law, the estate retains exclusive rights for 75 years after her death, which occurred in January 1976, at the age of 85 — meaning about a quarter of a century remains.
Among current projects — beyond the constant reissues of her novels — are the recent release of the series The Seven Dials Mystery on Netflix, Sophie Hannah’s ongoing authorized continuations of the Poirot novels (she has written six so far, a testament to readers’ enduring appetite), and, in September, the publication of the first Miss Marple novel officially licensed by Christie’s heirs: Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, written by Lucy Foley.
The custodians of this narrative treasure are keen to find new markets and draw in younger generations. One such reader is María G. S., who has noticed Christie’s influence on other contemporary authors: “Nowadays, for example, I see Agatha Christie in the endings of books by the British writer Holly Jackson and in the way mysteries are resolved. That satisfying yet frustrating feeling when you finish a story — you think everything fits, but then you wonder: why didn’t I see it?”
A meticulously planned ending
In the final stage of her life, Christie slowed to one novel a year — each of them runaway bestsellers during the Christmas season — and in the early 1970s, she began bringing her series to a close. The final chapter of her two most famous ones, however, had already been written and locked away in a safe during the Second World War, a sign of the extraordinary control she exerted over her career and her characters. The plan was for them to be published after her death, but in the end, Poirot took his leave in Curtain, which appeared a year earlier. Sleeping Murder, Miss Marple’s final case, was published posthumously in 1976.
“I am now ready to accept death,” she wrote at the end of her autobiography, written 11 years before her final farewell. We cannot know whether by then she already sensed that her work would continue to feed the curiosity, hunger for adventure, and capacity for enjoyment of hundreds of millions of readers around the world — but the grande dame of crime fiction seemed to have an inkling.
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