The Best-Selling Novelist in History
Agatha Christie has sold around two billion books. Only the Bible and Shakespeare have done better. One woman, writing murder puzzles, outsold nearly every author who ever lived.Share on X
Agatha Christie was born on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, England, and the numbers on her career are almost hard to believe. She’s the best-selling novelist of all time. Her books have sold somewhere around two billion copies, putting her behind only the Bible and the works of Shakespeare among the most published books in history. They call her the Queen of Crime, and she earned it.
She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, and she created two of the most famous detectives ever put on a page. Hercule Poirot, the fussy, brilliant Belgian with his little gray cells, debuted in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920. Miss Jane Marple, the sharp old woman who solves murders everyone underestimates her enough to commit in front of, came a decade later.
Christie also wrote The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of the world, still going after more than seventy years. And she gave us Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, and Death on the Nile, titles that became permanent fixtures of the culture.
Watch: Inside The Mind Of Agatha Christie (2019) | Documentary, All Cozy
Mysteries Were Fun, Even If They Weren’t My Core
Science fiction was always my first love. But I read mysteries too, subscribed to the magazine, and enjoyed the puzzle of it. A good whodunit is a game you play against the author.Share on X
I read Christie, and I enjoyed her. Murder on the Orient Express, of course, the one almost everyone meets first, with its trainful of suspects stuck in the snow and Poirot working out the impossible. I remember the movies too, and there were several over the years, all of them pretty good. I’ve always liked mysteries.
Back in the day I subscribed to a monthly mystery magazine, the kind packed with short crime stories, and I read it regularly, the same way I worked through everything else I could get my hands on. If my memory is right, that sort of magazine might even still be going. So mysteries were a real part of my reading life.
Science fiction was always my core, my first love, the genre I went back to again and again.
Mysteries never displaced that. But they were fun. Christie in particular created good stuff, clever and interesting, with that pure mystery touch, the sense that all the pieces are in front of you if you’re sharp enough to assemble them. A Christie novel is a game, and she almost always won.
Why I’m About to Write Some Myself
Here’s something I don’t say often, so pay attention. One of these days, pretty soon, I’m going to write a couple of mysteries myself, and we’ll see how it goes. That’s not a small thing to take on. I’ve spent my career in other genres, and the mystery is its own beast with its own rules. But that’s exactly why it appeals to me. After enough years writing, you want to test yourself against a form you haven’t conquered, and the mystery is among the most demanding forms there is.
You can’t fake a good one. The plot has to work backward and forward at once. Christie is the model I’ll be studying when I sit down to do it, because nobody built these machines better.
What makes a mystery so hard to write?
People underrate how difficult a good mystery is, because the good ones make it look easy. They don’t see what the author is doing. A mystery has to be fair and surprising at the same time. They’re almost opposite demands.
Every clue has to be on the page, in plain sight, so that when the solution comes the reader slaps their forehead and realizes they had everything they needed. But those same clues have to be hidden well enough that the reader doesn’t see the answer coming. You’re at the same time showing and concealing the exact same information.
Christie was a genius at this. She’d put the key fact right in front of you, dressed up as something trivial, and you’d walk right past it. Then in the final chapter she’d point at it, and you’d feel both fooled and fairly beaten.
That’s the same fair-play contract that makes a detective story work at all, the one Edgar Allan Poe invented and Arthur Conan Doyle perfected with Sherlock Holmes. Christie took that contract and ran it through more variations than anyone before or since. She’s the reason the modern whodunit exists in the polished form we know.
The Mystery Writer Who Became a Mystery
Here’s a piece of Christie that reads like one of her own plots. In December 1926, after a fight with her first husband, who wanted a divorce, Agatha Christie vanished. Her car was found abandoned, and for eleven days the most famous mystery writer in England was simply gone.
A huge public search went out. Newspapers ran wild. People wondered if she was dead, or hiding, or the victim of a crime. Then she turned up at a hotel, checked in under another name, and to this day no one fully knows what happened during those eleven days.
The Queen of Crime had become a real-life mystery, and an unsolved one. It’s the kind of detail that makes me like her more. A writer who built her whole career on disappearances and hidden motives stepped straight into one herself, and even she never explained it. There’s something fitting about that, and a little eerie, and that’s the tone she wrote in.
What can writers learn from Agatha Christie?
Whether or not you write mysteries, Christie teaches lessons every storyteller needs. The first is structure, ruthless and total. Christie engineered her novels to the bolt. Every scene plants something, pays something off, or misdirects on purpose. She wastes nothing.
That kind of tight construction, where every element serves the whole, is worth studying in any genre. Most writing is too loose. Christie is a cure for that.
The second is the art of misdirection. Christie controls exactly what the reader notices and what they overlook, steering attention like a stage magician. That skill, deciding what to emphasize and what to slip past, is useful far beyond mysteries. It’s how you build a twist, set up a reveal, or land an ending the reader didn’t see coming but should have.
The third is that plot can be a pleasure in itself. In an age that often prizes mood and character over story, Christie shows that a tightly built plot, a real puzzle that pays off, is one of the great pleasures of reading. People have bought two billion of her books for exactly that reason. Never apologize for a story that’s fun to figure out.
So on September 15, raise a glass to the Queen of Crime. Read a Poirot or a Marple, or watch one of those Orient Express films. And if you see a couple of mysteries show up under my name before too long, you’ll know where the lessons came from.