Clues to Christie Read Free

sleuth is of her alive and well, sitting on the terrace of Torquay’s Imperial Hotel at the conclusion of Sleeping Murder , explaining, for the last time, the intricacies of murder.
    Tommy and Tuppence
    Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are the only Christie characters to age gradually, as they did between their first appearance in 1922, in Christie’s second published novel, to their last adventure in 1973. Beginning as bright young things in the aftermath of World War I, they track down The Secret Adversary (1922) before marrying and opening a detective agency in the short story collection Partners in Crime (1929), in which they investigate crimes in the manner of famous detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown. Their final investigation, “The Man Who Was No. 16,” is, in a nice example of self-parody, solved in the style of that famous Belgian sleuth, Monsieur Hercule Poirot!
    By the time of the WWII thriller, N or M? (1941), Tommy and Tuppence are the parents of twins (and also adopt a baby at the end of that novel), and as By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) opens they are a middle-aged couple reminiscing about their adventurous youth and investigating a sinister retirement home. Finally, we meet them as a retired couple moving into a new house with a mysterious past in Postern of Fate (1973), the last novel Christie wrote.
    Stand-alone titles
    Although she achieved her greatest fame as the creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, some of Agatha Christie’s best books are to be found among her stand-alone titles. These included traditional whodunits, domestic and international thrillers, and a few unclassifiable items. Through her life she experimented with the crime novel and, as Ellery Queen once wrote of her, “the only thing you can expect from Agatha Christie is the unexpected.”
    Without doubt her most famous title, and the bestselling crime novel of all time, is And Then There Were None (1939). Part detective story and part thriller, this novel first appeared in print in the Saturday Evening Post beginning at the end of May 1939. It received rapturous reviews on both sides of the Atlantic when it was published in book form at the end of that year. The much-copied plot concerns the fate of ten characters invited to an island off the coast of southern England, where, over the course of a weekend, they are all systematically killed in line with the macabre nursery rhyme that hangs in each of their bedrooms. The Christie twist is that the killer is one of the ten. It has been brought to the screen countless times, the best version being the famous 1945 Rene Clair film.
    Years before the historical murder mystery became popular, Christie published Death Comes as the End (1945), a domestic murder mystery set in Egypt in 2000 B.C. This fascinating novel of mass murder in a family consumed with greed and jealousy, living on the banks of the Nile, was written at the suggestion of an archaeologist friend of her husband Max Mallowan. In 1949, she published Crooked House , very much a typical Christie—large family living in a rambling house with a poisoner at work—until the last chapter, which propounded such a shocking solution that her publishers asked her to change it; she refused and it remains one the Christie classics. Two of her strongest and most unexpected titles appeared in the last chapter of her writing life: The Pale Horse (1961) concerns a murder-to-order venture with suggestions of black magic, while Endless Night (1967), with its stunning surprise in the last chapter, is often considered her last great novel.
    Thrillers, both international— The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), They Came to Baghdad (1951), Destination Unknown (1954), Passenger to Frankfurt (1970)—and domestic— The Secret of Chimneys (1925) , The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), The Boomerang Clue (1934)—appeared periodically throughout her writing life and Christie considered these a holiday from the clues-and-alibis plotting