The Body in the Library

Agatha Christie (1890-1976), a pillar of the “Golden Age” of detective fiction, is not only the most successful mystery writer of all time, but also the best-selling author of any fiction, period. Over her 50-year career, Christie published 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, which have collectively sold over 2 billion copies. Her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduced one of her two best-known detectives, the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, and helped to popularize a new, genteel style of murder mystery that, in the decades after World War I, became a worldwide phenomenon. These puzzle-like mysteries, most of which were whodunnits, eschewed the explicit violence and psychological realism of earlier mystery writing, instead treating murder as an intricate, almost antiseptic “game” to test the wits of both detective and reader. This genre, now identified with the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s, only waning in popularity in the 1940s with the advent of World War II, though some writers still work variations on the genre to this day. Agatha Christie, who published whodunnits well into the 1970s, never altered her style significantly, and the enduring popularity of her books has helped keep the “Golden Age” mystery vibrantly alive into the 21st century, notably with the subgenre of the “cozy mystery.