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Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot

Agatha Christie is an English writer who is famous for her murder mysteries. Dubbed as the ‘Queen of crime’, she is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 19 plays and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott. Her play ‘Mousetrap’ is considered to be the longest running play. She has sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign countries. Her first novel ‘The Mysterious Affairs at Styles’, was written towards the end of First World War. In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian detective who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since then, a number of books have been published posthumously.

Here are the top 3 Hercule Poirot Books and their blurbs:

3. Death on the Nile

“It often seems to me that’s all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again.”

“Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.”

Agatha Christie’s most daring travel mystery. The tranquillity of a cruise along the Nile is shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway has been shot through the head. She was young, stylish and beautiful, a girl who had everything – until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalls an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: ‘I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.’ Yet in this exotic setting’ nothing is ever quite what it seems…

2. Murder on the Orient Express

“The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.”

Murder on the Orient Express is undoubtedly one of Agatha Christie’s greatest mystery novels. Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train is surprisingly full for the time of the year, but by the morning it is one passenger fewer. An American tycoon lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. Isolated and with a killer in their midst, detective Hercule Poirot must identify the murderer – in case he or she decides to strike again.

1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

“The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.”

Known for its startling reveal, this is the book that changed Agatha Christie’s career. Roger Ackroyd was a man who knew too much. He knew the woman he loved had poisoned her first husband. He knew someone was blackmailing her – and now he knew she had taken her own life with a drug overdose. Soon the evening post would let him know who the mystery blackmailer was. But Ackroyd was dead before he’d finished reading it – stabbed through the neck where he sat in the study.

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Categories: Book Review, Literature