As every regular reader of detective novels knows, there are certain “rules” of the genre that no good detective novelist breaks. In addition, Christie’s play The Mousetrap holds the world record for longest initial theatrical run-it premiered in 1952 and is still running as of 2017, 25,000 performances later.īreaking the rules. To date, her books have sold some two billion copies, and she’s probably the most translated novelist of all time (103 languages to date).

Agatha Christie is one of the most popular, widely-read novelists in history: for most of the 20th century, it was estimated that only the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare were more commonly read. Good examples of suspenseful novels in which the narrator is revealed to be the “bad guy” include London Fields (1989) by Martin Amis and Gone Girl (2012) by Gillian Flynn, an avowed Agatha Christie fan! However, this kind of “twist ending” is now fairly common in literature, even mystery novels.

Christie infamously violated the first of Knox’s commandments-that the murderer shouldn’t be the narrator of the book. Perhaps the most influential work in the detective genre is A Study in Scarlet (1886) by Arthur Conan Doyle, which introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world, while Edgar Allan Poe arguably invented the genre with his stories about the detective Auguste Dupin, starting with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Readers who are interested in the theory and literary structure of detective novels should consult “Knox’s Ten Commandment of Detective Fiction,” a short, somewhat tongue-in-cheek list of rules for detective fiction that was considered the gospel for early 20th-century mystery writers.

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