June was dying among the roses, the hedges were darkening to a duller green the blatancy of red brick sprawled along the highway was a reminder that the present builds inexorably over the empty fields of the past. The hot road spun away behind her towns rose from the green landscape, crowded close about her with their inn-signs and petrol-pumps, their shops and police and perambulators, then reeled back and were forgotten. For a few hours longer she could ignore the whimpering ghost of her dead youth and tell herself that she was a stranger and a sojourner, a well-to-do woman with a position in the world. Her entry into Oxford would bear no resemblance to those earlier arrivals by train. Harriet was glad that in these days she could afford her own little car. Even before one heard the words one realised, albeit with surprise, that she was both honest and not very old. She had a husky voice, also fashionable, but her intonation was alive and ingenuous. She had a short fine nose and a wide softly painted mouth, quite unreal, one might have thought, until she spoke. Exquisite bone hid under delicate faintly painted flesh, each tone subtly emphasising and leading up to the wide eyes, lighter than Scandinavian blue and deeper than Saxon grey.
A swathe of flax-white hair protruded from a twist of felt, and underneath was something not quite true. Since it was fashionable to do so, she looked bendable, bone and muscle fluid like a cat’s.
Her plum-coloured redingote with its absurd collar arched like a sail emphasised her slenderness. She did not reply at once and he glanced at her sharply, accepting the pain it gave him. A paragraph of Allingham, from her masterpiece, The Tiger in the Smoke: We can get part of the way to an answer by looking at the example of two writers who were seen as direct rivals to Christie, two of the scions of detective fiction’s ‘golden age’, Margery Allingham and Dorothy Sayers. Her prose is flat and functional, her characters on a spectrum between types, stereotypes and caricatures so, you might well ask, what’s to like? It’s not as if anyone, even her hardest-core fans, ever makes any claims for Christie as a writer per se. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may. In this new novel, she has to provide herself with puppets who will be good for three stages of suspense: you must first wonder who is going to be murdered, you must then wonder who is committing the murders, and you must finally be unable to foresee which of two men the heroine will marry. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out and you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister, depending on which quarter, at the moment, is to be baited for the reader’s suspicion … Mrs Christie, in proportion as she is more expert and concentrates more narrowly on the puzzle, has to eliminate human interest completely, or, rather, fill in the picture with what seems to me a distasteful parody of it. Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. The case against Christie was well put by one of the first grown-up critics to write about detective fiction, Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay-review, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’
She is the only writer by whom I’ve read more than fifty books. Sceptics would be well advised to admit defeat on the issue of whether or not she sold more books than any other novelist ever has, and instead pivot to a more interesting question: why? I’m not claiming that this is an original inquiry, but I started to take an interest in it during a period when I was writing mainly about economically inflected subjects, and found that almost the only non-worky thing I could bear to read was Agatha Christie. Oh, and the longest-running play in the history of the world. That is a difficult claim to prove, and the official site makes no attempt to do so, but when you think that she wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections, all of them still in print in multiple formats in dozens of languages, you can begin to see how she got to a total of one billion copies sold in English and another billion-odd in translation.
A gatha Christie is, according to her website, ‘the world’s bestselling novelist’.