The British Library is set to open its exhibition of Agatha Christie’s works and ephemera at the end of this month, and though the Queen of Crime may now be a household name, her reputation was built over a number of decades. During her long career Christie wrote sixty-six novels and fifteen short story collections, as well as more than twenty plays and a number of non-fiction works.

Christie was embroiled in her own mystery in 1926 when she disappeared from her home after her husband informed her that he wanted a divorce. She was later found at a hotel in Harrogate eleven days later, likely having suffered a nervous breakdown, though public opinion at the time largely saw it as a publicity stunt. Perhaps this was due to Christie’s being so adept at weaving tales of secrecy and deception in her writing – a critic once joking that one can always work out who the perpetrator may be by deciding upon the most unlikely person. Yet throughout Christie’s stories there is always a firm hand holding the loose threads: the hand of one of her richly drawn detectives. Of these, Hercule Poirot is undoubtedly the most well-known, yet Christie created many other sleuths in her novels.

Hercule Poirot is the sleuth in Lord Edgware Dies (1933), investigating the murder of an English aristocrat.  It is the seventh work by Christie to feature the Belgian detective, and the story was originally printed in serial form under the title 13 For Dinner, harking back to the superstition that when thirteen guests are seated for a meal, the first one to leave the table will die. The copy currently on our shelves at 94 New Bond Street was a colonial edition, which did not feature the red 7/6 stamp which was found on the UK version, meaning it was made to be exported to India. Poirot featured in a further thirty-two novels by Christie, and so everlasting was his legacy that he became the only fictional character to receive an obituary in the New York Times, following his exit from Christie’s works in 1975. 

Christie grew tired of Hercule Poirot, beginning to find her character ‘insufferable’ and an ‘egocentric creep’ (Gross, 2006) but she had a good many other protagonists to work with. Among these were the married duo, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford who appeared in five of Christie’s works, spread out over long intervals across her career. One of their most famous stories is N or M, published in 1941 and shows the couple at a more mature stage of their life after a hiatus of twelve years from their last sleuthing cameo. As is fitting for the time of its publication, the tale centres on the Second World War and their attempt to uncover a pair of top-secret German spies.

In 1944, Christie wrote Towards Zero, her fifth and final book featuring Superintendent Battle a friend of Hercule Poirot. Battle is a stern man of good sense who – unusually for Christie – is a police officer rather than a private detective. Two murders take place in an elderly widow’s seaside home after she invites her former ward (a tennis star) to vacation at the house with his current and previous wife. A difficult book to find with the dust-jacket still in such bright condition, this copy is the best example we have seen. 

Another of Poirot’s friends is Colonel Race, the ex-leader of MI5 who features as a secondary investigator in Death on the Nile. His last mystery is Sparkling Cyanide (1945) where he works alone to uncover the secrets of a married couple who died precisely one year apart. Due to paper shortages in the Second World War, this copy, like many others of its time, was printed on wartime stock paper, which makes the boldly coloured dust-jacket an extremely rare survival in such condition.

The final detective to feature on the shelves of Shapero Rare Books is Miss Marple, who is undoubtedly Christie’s second most well-known, and perhaps best-loved, character and the only woman to work alone. A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) was Miss Marple’s sixth appearance and although now we likely see Christie herself reflected in this character, the writer was only thirty-seven when Miss Marple was first introduced. Growing tired of the egocentric Poirot, Christie turned her pen to an atypical character in crime fiction, allowing the story to be driven by the older woman who was supposedly based on her step-grandmother – her unassuming appearance allowing her to observe clues that often went unnoticed. Christie was determined to give spinsters a voice, and so the shrewd, ever-observant character of Miss Marple was born, standing quite apart from the other detectives. 

By Millie Oliver