Just a brief annotated bibliography of three novels written by Agatha Christie. If the "Doctor Who" episode makes you very curious about her and her writings--and if it's written well, it should!--check your library for this book:

Sanders, Dennis, and Len Lovallo. The Agatha Christie Companion: The Complete Guide to Agatha Christie's Life and Work. New York: Delacorte Press, 1984.

Agatha Christie

Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. New York & London: John Lane, 1920.

This was the first novel for the celebrated and prolific mystery author, and it introduced M. Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian police detective of short stature but excellent professional reputation, who would become one of Christie’s most popular characters. Poirot’s inaugural outing revolved around a family intrigue in which the mistress of an estate, a widowed stepmother to the main heirs who has recently remarried a man twenty years her junior, abruptly dies in the middle of the night after suffering severe convulsions. A physician houseguest who is convinced that the fatal convulsions came not from a bad heart, as her doctor concludes, but from her having been poisoned, calls upon his old friend Poirot to investigate.


---. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1926.

Christie’s seventh novel is the one that catapulted her to great fame, fueled by the story’s controversial ending. Poirot is enlisted by his next-door neighbor, a physician, to look into the not-all-that-convincing suicide death of a patient, whom, it turns out, was the target of blackmailers as well as the architect of other troublesome situations.


---. Murder in the Calais Coach, later known as Murder on the Orient Express. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1934.

Under the name Murder on the Orient Express did this novel receive a star-studded film adaptation in 1974. The story drew inspiration from two actual events, both the early 1930s kidnapping of the son of famed aviator, Charles Lindbergh, and the six-day ordeal of passengers on the famous European luxury rail line, the Orient Express (1883-1977), when it was briefly trapped in a snowdrift in 1929. Poirot, an impromptu passenger on a suddenly snowbound Orient Express, is pressed into service by an executive of the train line, an old friend who himself is an impromptu passenger, when one of the train’s passengers turns up dead.

Valsadie 2008.2.6 20:51
Dearest Russell:

We have been much in sync with music and Doctor Who -- "Tainted Love" and "Toxic" are indeed classics! And I love the Scissor Sisters! I'm expecting Mika for DW Series Four--please do not disappoint!

Val !