Queen of the Crime Genre

Griffin Ziemba.

What intrigues people most about crime novels? The thrill of fear. Mysteries give us a sense of why murderers kill, while providing richness to ease our curiosity. Whether it’s fiction or based on true events, the sense of stimulating our imaginations keeps us trying to find an explanation for mysterious events.

In the early 1920s, author Agatha Christie became known as one of the most renowned mystery writers of the 20th century. Born in Torquay, United Kingdom in 1890, her family received a humble amount of money from her father’s inheritance. Agatha was a very shy girl growing up; even as an adult, with no friends mentioned. Agatha also didn’t have schoolmates because she did not attend school, but she taught herself how to read from books. At the age of five years old, her father informed the family that they had little to no money left as the outcome from mismanagement.

Becoming a young woman, Agatha Christie had no intention of a career. What she wanted was a husband. She eventually married Colonel Archibald Christie during the beginning of World War 1. The time period between the two world wars has been coined as the golden age for detective novels. Various people who had an itch for writing gave it a shot. At the start of her writing, Agatha was very tentative yet she delivered novels that the audience craved with the genre of puzzle mystery. In this genre, she created mystery detective stories, allowing readers to be able to guess who the culprit may have been at the end of her books.

In 1926, the celebrated author became a real life envisionment of her stories. Agatha Christie had disappeared. Some speculate that this was due to a nervous breakdown caused by the death of her mother. Others suggest that it had to do with her husband’s affairs or that it was a publicity stunt. No matter the circumstance, Christie was missing for almost two weeks. By this time, she had already published many detective novels. The author was found at Yorkshire spa under the name of her husband’s mistress, with no recollection of the past days of her disappearance. About 15 months after her disappearance, Christie divorced her husband. She continued her life as an author for another 40 years. Even with her autobiography she doesn’t dive into this incident and says we shouldn’t dwell on it. It’s still a mystery of what happened to Agatha Christie during the time of her disappearance.

Agatha Christie, to this day, is continuously known as one of the most acclaimed novelists. Many of her books have been expanded into motion pictures, such as Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, with several more to occur. Selling more than 100 million copies, her publisher declared that she was only outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible, many of which have been translated to over 100 different languages.

Citations

Acocella, Joan. “How Agatha Christie Created the Modern Murder Mystery.” The New Yorker, 9 Aug. 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/16/queen-of-crime.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Agatha Christie". Encyclopedia Britannica, 8 Jan. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Agatha-Christie. Accessed 24 March 2022.

Ewers, Chris. “Genre in Transit: Agatha Christie, Trains, and the Whodunit.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 46, no. 1, Eastern Michigan University, 2016, pp. 97–120, https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2016.0009.

Jordan, Tina. “When the World's Most Famous Mystery Writer Vanished.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 11 June 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/books/agatha-christie-vanished-11-days-1926.html.