The Guessing Game by Mathew

I thought you might be entertained by this little bit of family history.

I remember the year when Nima read us a chapter or two of A Pocket Full of Rye after dinner each night.  It must have been 1953 and I can remember the scene as if it were yesterday.  All the family sitting round the drawing-room at Greenway, coffee cups empty, a little cigar smoke rising from my grandfather's cigar, mauve chintzy covers on the chairs and a piano in the corner of the room.  Nima sat in a deep chair with a light directly above her ...

• Posted 28 September 2009 at 7:32a.m. GMT
• 2 comments

Adapting Christie, or, How I Learned to Start Complaining and Hate the Changes by Chris_Chan

Fandom is a strange yet wonderful phenomenon.  Some professed “fans” of Agatha Christie are content to read the occasional Christie novel once in a while, when they have the time.  Other fans feel compelled to read every book that Christie ever wrote.  Still other fans seek out every movie and television adaptation of Christie novels ever filmed.  Some fans with the time and money to travel actually visits locations from Christie’s life and novels.  Then, there are fans like me, who want to help preserve, perpetuate, and polish Christie’s legacy.

Ever since the first film adaptations of Christie ...

• Posted 2 September 2009 at 1:45p.m. GMT
• 12 comments

Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks - Part 3 by John_Curran

Those who have been following my account of Agatha Christie’s Notebooks have been asking me what I think is the most interesting element of this treasure trove, and what will I be revealing in my new book?

Amongst the most fascinating entries in the Notebooks are, without doubt, those that contain what I have called the ‘Unused Ideas’. These can be as little as a sentence (Stored blood idea, wrong blood or something added to it [35]) or as much as a dozen pages. There are different murderers from those we know sketched in for many novels, and many ...

• Posted 20 August 2009 at 9:38a.m. GMT
• 11 comments

Another World Record? by David_Brawn

‘Wouldn’t it be good if Agatha Christie could break another world record?’ It was one of those mornings. Our monthly meeting to discuss sales figures and forward plans with Agatha Christie Limited is usually eventful enough, as there’s always something interesting going on, but today Mathew Prichard was in attendance and there was an air of excitement in the room.

Agatha Christie has held two world records for many years now. As the best-selling novelist of all time, having sold two billion books worldwide in over 45 languages, and as the author of the longest-running play, The Mousetrap ...

• Posted 19 May 2009 at 10:29a.m. GMT
• 7 comments

Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks by John_Curran

As some of you may already know, my silence of late on the Website is due to my commitments to things Christiean elsewhere. In short, I am writing a book about Agatha Christie, specifically Agatha Christie and her plotting Notebooks. This is probably the last aspect of Agatha Christie that has not already been discussed in a book. We have had books on her life, her literary output, her husband, her disappearance; we have bought quiz books, travel books, film books, Mousetrap books; books about her poisons, her characters, her cover designs, her garden; biographies of Poirot and Miss Marple ...

• Posted 3 April 2009 at 11:41a.m. GMT
• 5 comments

What are the true circumstances of the death of Claudia Hardcastle by Chris_Chan

SPOILER WARNING!  THIS ESSAY CONTAINS SPOILERS TO THE SOLUTION OF ENDLESS NIGHT.  DO NOT READ THIS ESSAY IF YOU HAVE NOT READ ENDLESS NIGHT!!!

Endless Night is widely considered to be one of the best novels from the later years of Christie’s career.  Christie and her husband, Max Mallowan, both ranked Endless Night as one of their favorite books, and many critics share this sentiment.  There are many reasons to support this assessment.  Both plotwise and thematically, Endless Night is very different from most of Christie’s other mysteries, and it also contains well-developed central characters and particularly intriguing ...

• Posted 8 March 2009 at 7:46a.m. GMT
• 3 comments

Playing the Game by Chris_Chan

First of all, I want to welcome all of the Agatha Christie fans who are visiting this blog.  I hope that you enjoy my essays, and that what I write helps to enhance your appreciation for the works of Agatha Christie.

I intend to produce several different styles of essays.  Some of what I write will be critical essays, evaluating some of Christie’s work or certain adaptations of her stories.  Others may be factual essays about real-life crimes that may have affected Christie’s work, or true anecdotes about Christie’s impact on fans.

Other essays that I write ...

• Posted 18 November 2008 at 9:36a.m. GMT
• 4 comments