by Prof. George Monaco

Created on: June 02, 2008

Agatha Christie's mystery novels are incredibly popular. In fact, she's the best-selling fiction writer of all time! About a billion copies of her books have been sold in English, with another billion sold in all other sorts of languages.

She also wrote a bunch of award-winning plays, and her books have been adapted to movie, TV Series and even video games. Her novels are popular not just because they're fun to read, but because they also tackle important questions about justice and law.

Agatha Christie was born Torquay, England in 1890. In 1920, she published her first novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles". This book introduced the detective Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer with a cool mustache. He shows up in over 30 of her novels, short stories, several movies, and a TV program.

Another of her famous characters is Miss Marple, and elderly English woman with a talent for detection. She shows up in over a dozen novels, and also has her own TV series. Christie wrote a lot of mystery books, 80 in all including short story collections.

One of her most famous is "Murder on the Orient Express", published in 1934. The entire thing takes place on a train called the Orient Express, a real train that ran through Europe for most of the twentieth century.

Hercule Poirot is travelling on this train until it gets stuck in a snow bank. When a murder takes place, Poirot solves it through observation and detection. He gathers everyone on the train in one car and explains who committed the murder, and then lets the criminals go!

One of the reasons Christie's novels are so popular is that she really thinks about the themes of law, justice, and punishment. "Murder on the Orient Express" suggests that sometimes, the law wasn't quite good enough. And that maybe morality isn't always black and white. It's a lot to think about.

"And Then There Were None", published in 1939, deals with similar issues. This book breaks a lot of the conventions of the mystery genre. There are some things that you just expect when you read a murder mystery.

Like, there's usually a detective and the author usually puts in clues that a good reader can use to figure out who the killer is. Neither of those is true for "And Then There Were None".

In the book ten people are lured into a house on an island. When they get there they are all accused of murdering someone in the past. One by one they start to die. The solution to the story comes in the form of a letter from the murderer that's found at the very end of the book.
"And Then There Were None" asks questions like, "Is it ok to murder a murderer?", "What is injustice, and how can you restore justice?", and "Where do you draw the line between the people who commit crimes, and the people that punish them?"

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