Understanding Agatha Christie

"According to various sources, Agatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time, and in terms of total sales in all genres, she comes behind only the Christian Bible and Shakespeare. Because her novels are continuously adapted into new television series and films, including Kenneth Branagh's recent revivals of the star-studded affairs of the 1970s with Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022), interest in her publications has not noticeably waned. In Understanding Agatha Christie, Tison Pugh demonstrates both the pleasures of her fiction in terms of their play with the conventions of genre fiction and the ways in which she elevates her novels further through her use of various literary devices. He structures the manuscript around seven paradoxes of Christie's lasting success: her refusal to publicize herself while encoding personal experiences into her novels; resistance to the rules of mystery fiction; complex relationship with "cozies"; writing outside of the mystery genre; sardonic humor; critique of Englishness; and ambivalent relationship to film adaptation"--