She did write an awful lot of those books, after all, and we tend to regard a few long books as more worthy of respect than many short ones. ( John Lancaster’s 2018 London Review of Books essay is the exception to the rule, and he focuses more on her body of work as a whole than on any individual book, as he would later do with Georges Simenon.) This has held true even after it became passé to automatically classify a writer as unimportant for being female and writing in an identifiable genre.
The first, of And Then There Were None, featured a no-holds-barred cast including Miranda Richardson, Sam Neill, Aidan Turner (with Irish accent in place, no less), and Charles “Tywin Lannister” Dance.īut generally Christie’s books are not regarded as important.
Agatha christie and then there were none book series#
And the BBC spent 2015 to 2020 broadcasting a series of Christie adaptations by screenwriter Sarah Phelps.
There’s a new biography, and new filmed takes on Murder on the Orient Express in 2017 and Death on the Nile earlier this year. Her best-known detective, Hercule Poirot, is still so popular that the Christie estate authorized contemporary writer Sophie Hannah to revive him in a new series of novels. And Then There Were None is an enjoyable book that turns out to be important.Ĭhristie has been getting her due of late as an enjoyable writer. When an important book turns out to also be enjoyable, it’s a pleasant surprise. No, I mean that it is great beyond merely being enjoyable it is great in a way worth contemplating.īecause: decades after the rise of postmodernism and its influence on literary criticism, and the rise of cultural studies, and the denouncing of elitism, and many many attempts to bury the idea of an agreed-upon canon, a good number of us readers still classify books as “enjoyable” or “important” - good to read versus good-for-you, the beach read versus the commitment, the kind of book you buy for yourself versus the kind of book you were required to read. Or that it’s a cracking good mystery it is, but the actual mystery will turn out to not be the book’s strongest feature. I don’t mean simply that it’s fun to read, although I’ve reread it more times than I can remember. And Then There Was Evil: Morality and Identification in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were NoneĪnd Then There Were None, the twenty-fifth of Agatha Christie’s 66 mystery novels, is a great book.
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