I read a lot of detective fiction. It's armchair traveling and so the setting matters as much as the characters and the plot. These are my favorite 8 writers: Georges Simenon - prolific Belgian writer famous for his Paris Commissaire Jules Maigret. I was first drawn in by

The heyday of Agatha Christie occurred at the same time as the triumph of Modernism, which is surely no coincidence. Do they in fact have an affinity with each other or are they opposites? It's a trite question but often asked. Christie was as comfortable blowing up pre-

Christie’s writings are very cinematic and Murder in Mesopotamia, it should be noted, precedes Welles’ onion layers in Citizen Kane, which carries this style to its logical conclusion, where exploration of character is the plot, or vice versa, if you prefer... Christie is better at it because her writing

Agatha Christie and her husband are buried at St. Mary's Church, Cholsey, Oxfordshire. In a sense, Christie is buried in deepest Miss Marple territory. Even the church name evokes St. Mary Mead, the town associated with Miss Marple. It is where she attended church. A mile or two

An Autobiography was published posthumously in the U.K. and the U.S. in November 1977, almost two years after her death in January 1976. Below are some of her classic lines: “You’ve got to hand it to Victorian women, they got their menfolk where they wanted them. They

After the film ends, there will be a duel, and both the main characters will be dead. But we don't see the duel. The film's fatalism reminds me of the enigmatic painting The Duel After the Masquerade by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1857-59), shown above, one of several

Some writers permit publication of their private letters only after their own death, sensitive perhaps to public scandal. Prosper Mérimée’s “Lettres à une inconnue” was published in 1874, four years after his death. It reveals he had a lifelong correspondence with a much younger woman, who turned out to

When I first read Agatha Christie's mysteries, I most enjoyed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express and Ten Little Niggers (And Then There Were None), which are without doubt her masterpieces, but I think you can only read them once. I was never a

* 1914 Agatha marries Archibald Christie (she is 24) * 1919 Daughter Rosalind is born * 1922 Stefan Zweig story Letter From an Unknown Woman published; Joyce’s Ulysses first published * 1926 Christie’s breakthrough novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is published in May, her disappearance is in December * 1928 Christie divorce

The worst poison pen letter of them all? Ten Little Niggers (1939) is regarded by many as her finest mystery and it is said to be the best-selling of her novels. But it also revealed Agatha Christie as hopelessly insensitive on racial matters (see the original book cover below). American

It is curious to think that in 1926, only 7 months before Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days, the famous evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappeared in Los Angeles for 35 days. Was it a trend? Born in Canada, McPherson based herself in Los Angeles from 1918. Her fame spread rapidly,

American Anthropologist Margaret Mead went through a similar evolution to Christie but there’s more sex, more anthropology and less mystery. Born in 1901 she married her first husband (there were three) in 1923 after a lengthy engagement. It was all over by 1927 and the divorce was finalized in

The IMDB one-liner for Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes is "While traveling in continental Europe, a rich young playgirl realizes that an elderly lady seems to have disappeared from the train." Echoes of Agatha Christie's disappearance? Vanishing women is a fascinating metaphor in itself,

This bestseller of 1926 ensured that mystery writing and detective fiction would never be the same again. Christie broke the traditional barrier between writer and reader, the “fourth wall,” completely baffling the reader until near the end when Hercule Poirot indicts the storyteller himself. The shock waves were felt far