A mysterious affair: the phenomenon of Agatha Christie

IT sounds as if it couldn’t possibly be true, but it is: the only books to outsell Agatha Christie’s are Shakespeare’s plays and the Bible. The woman labelled the queen of ‘cosy crime’ (quite wrongly; more on that later) is the world’s most translated author, has history’s longest continually running play to her name in The Mousetrap and has sold well over four billion books.

Greenways, her Devon holiday home on the Dart estuary, now in the care of the National Trust, attracts pilgrims in their thousands and she will feature on the new £2 coin released later this year. The Golden Age of detective fiction produced dozens of distinguished alumni, but only Christie remains a household name. What’s her secret?

‘People have her down as a Miss Marple, but Christie was an intrepid, pioneering, passionate woman’

Part of the answer can be found on Amazon. Her contemporaries seem frozen in aspic,.