New Books In Literary Studies

Agatha Christie is a global bestseller. Her work has been translated into over 100 languages and adapted for stage and screen. Christie's writing life ran from 1920 to the 1970s, and she didn't just write puzzles, she wrote plays, supernatural stories, thrillers, satires, and domestic noir. She also commented obliquely but perceptively on the social and cultural changes of a troubled century. Christie's work tells the story of a changing Britain, but perhaps her greatest achievement is not to be limited by that national context. Her stories achieve the rare feat of appearing both universal and specific and can seemingly be adapted for almost any context. Agatha Christie: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 2025) investigates why the novels of a middle-class, middlebrow Englishwoman were so successful, and why they continue to appeal to such a broad range of readers. Chapters explore the context of Christie's writing, and the clue-puzzle detective fiction structure at which she excelled, but they also quest