A century after her first novel, The Mysterious Affair of Fashion, appeared in print, Agatha Christie’s industry is still going strong.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie remains the best-selling fiction writer of all time, with total global sales exceeding 2 billion books in more than 100 languages. Her murder mystery play “The Mousetrap” holds the record for the longest-running stage production in the world, and film and television adaptations of her work continue to multiply. all this from the pen of a writer whose style is dismissed by some literary critics as “wooden” and “formulaic,” and whose enduring appeal is disparaged by some as “truly mysterious.”
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Agatha Christie fans shrug off such criticism. Apart from buying her books — and they bought more than 2 million of them in the English-speaking world last year — the most devoted fans pay homage to their heroine by making the trek to the southwestern county of Devon to visit what was the writer’s rural retreat for the last 38 years of her life. Greenway House, a sprawling Georgian mansion on a steep, wooded hillside overlooking the River Dart, is now owned and run by the National Trust, a charity that looks after places of natural beauty and of historic and cultural interest.
“agatha didn’t actually write at greenway, but it was the inspiration and setting for some of her most famous books, like ‘the abc murders’ and ‘five little pigs,'” said belinda smith, visitor experience manager on the property.
“The crime scene in ‘Dead Man’s Insanity’ is the boathouse on the Greenway, which people have a chance to visit today,” Smith said. “it is on the banks of the dart; It is part of the farm of the greenway. so you can wander the grounds and go down to the boathouse and see where the body was found.”
Last year, more than 115,000 people from around the world came to Greenway on a kind of literary pilgrimage.
“We have real agatha christie fans who are thrilled to go to her vacation home, sit where she sat and imagine themselves dining with agatha, having a picnic on the lawn with agatha or walking the dog with agatha,” said smith .
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if she were alive today, agatha would probably be horrified. The writer herself hated being the center of attention, as she demonstrated in a sound recording of a dinner held in her honor in 1962 to celebrate the tenth anniversary of “The Mousetrap.”
“this is horrible!” Christie declared, clearly squirming in embarrassment. “I’ve never been good at giving speeches.”
The queen of crime who shot, stabbed, poisoned, strangled, and electrocuted her fictional victims was shy, modest, and sweet, and apparently taken aback by her theatrical success.
“sometimes I can hardly believe it’s me,” he stuttered. “It’s not the kind of thing that would happen to me. If I were writing a book, it wouldn’t be a person like me who would have written a play that lasted 10 years.”
She would be even more bewildered today. “the mousetrap” operated in london for 67 years until covid-19 cut it short earlier this year. she is due to reopen next month. Her novels, most of which feature the eccentric detective Hercule Poirot or the buff old Miss Marple, have done even better with total sales in the billions and more than 7,000 translations of her work. Tony Medawar, organizer of the annual Agatha Christie International Festival (online this year due to the pandemic), said Christie’s enduring appeal isn’t hard to understand.
“people still enjoy the way christie weaves in and out of narrative cues and plays tricks on the reader, which works on screen and on paper,” medawar said. “Plus, she writes in an incredibly accessible way. I have met people from all over the world who were taught English and learned English by reading Agatha Christie.” Medawar has little time for critics who disparage her prose.
“i think the only response one can give to criticism of a great writer, whether it be enid blyton, j.k. rowling, agatha christie or dan brown is to aim for sales figures,” he said. you could also point to the movies and other adaptations.
A new version of “death on the nile”, the last of more than 50 films by agatha christie, will be released in december. It follows the 2017 remake of “Murder on the Orient Express,” which grossed more than $350 million.
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and there has been more activity on the book front.
Agatha Christie Ltd., which owns the copyright to much of the Christie canon and carefully protects the author’s image, commissioned British author Sophie Hannah to write more Poirot novels. Hannah seems well qualified for the task: she was already a best-selling crime writer; Course Director of the Masters Program in Crime and Thriller Writing at the University of Cambridge; and founder of the dream author training program for writers.
but he got the position of poirot by correctly answering this question: “would you want to change something about poirot and bring it into the 21st century?”.
“I said, ‘Oh my god, no!'” hannah protested. “I hated the idea of bringing him into the 21st century, where he could google all the suspects and see his twitter profiles. I thought it would be terrible.
Hannah Poirot’s fourth novel, “The Killings at Kingfisher Hill,” was published in the USA. uu. in September. Publisher Harper Collins doesn’t say how well her other three forays into Christie-land have fared, but Sophie says that while her own crime fiction has made her a rich woman, Poirot’s books have made her rich. “richer”. And commissioning these so-called “sequel novels” seems to have been good for Agatha Christie’s company too.
“Sales of her novels have increased dramatically since new poirot novels started coming out because people are just being reminded that this is still a going concern and not something from the past,” hannah said.
Like the Queen of Crime herself, the Agatha Christie company prefers to keep a low profile, refusing to answer Marketplace’s questions about revenues. But a swift bit of sleuthing reveals that the company earned $33 million in royalties in the latest year it reported.
what a slaughter! who knows? agatha that’s who.
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