I have always been an enormous Agatha Christie nerd, so I finally decided to do something about it, and created a podcast with a friend of mine, the inimitable Catherine Brobeck.
In the beginning, the general purpose of All About Agatha was to geek out over Christie and the detective/mystery genre overall. Catherine and I applied a rigorous literary analysis to Christie’s work—one that it tends not to receive, despite (or more likely because of) its overwhelming popularity…. Our more specific purpose was to read/analyze/critique/adore all 66 of Christie’s mystery novels, and to rank them according to certain pre-set criteria. Not because our opinion is in any way controlling, but because imposing objective standards on a subjective experience like reading a novel is the kind of flawed/maddening exercise that leads to further, more fruitful evaluation and discussion. Together, Catherine and I created not just a fully-ranked master list of Christie’s books–check it out directly below!–but managed to provide a robust and convincing answer to the age-old question of why Agatha Christie is as enduringly popular as she is.
Tragically, Catherine passed away at the end of 2021, so I am now hosting the podcast on my own. There is always something new to celebrate about Christie, and mysteries in general, so I have every intention of continuing on with this endeavor, which I also like to think of as a way to continue honoring Catherine, and what we built together. Please click on the link below to have a listen. And if you do, let me know what you think by rating and/or reviewing the show. I’d love to hear from you.
(The scores for each category below were assigned from 1 to 10, 1 being the worst and 10 the best, with the exception of the final category. “Deductions” are for what we came to call “depictions stuck in their time,” which is to say, those elements of a novel pertaining to various aspects of identity (race, creed, gender, sexual orientation, perceived disabilities, etc.) that struck us, from our humble and extremely subjective vantage point nearly 100 years after the initial publication of these books, as being outdated and unintentionally jarring, and in this way, detracting from the read. For clarity, it should be noted that our deductions are a judgment of the text–never of Agatha Christie herself–and that they too will age. They are but a snapshot in time from two devoted readers of Christie.)
