Agatha Christie

Short Biography

AGATHA CHRISTIE (1890-1976)(née Miller, other married name Mallowan, aka Mary Westmacott)In her book Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, scholar Alison Light identified Agatha Christie as a key figure in what she called "popular modernism." Nicola Humble, too, in her work on The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, discusses the middlebrow concerns and anxieties revealed in Christie's work. And as both scholars were primarily discussing Christie's enormously popular and influential mystery novels, rather than her pseudonymous Mary Westmacott novels, which are more straightforward domestic dramas, I couldn't imagine not including Christie on any list of key middlebrow authors. In fact, in some ways, mystery novels, with their necessarily meticulous attention to domestic details and personal behavior, might be as crucial for understanding the culture of a time period as the more literary novels that sit next to them on bookstore shelves. (At any rate, that's my excuse for also including some of Christie's "mysterious" contemporaries—writers like Gladys Mitchell and Dorothy Sayers, whose books tend to transcend their genre.) Christie's most famous mysteries include The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), and And Then There Were None (1939), and her memoir, An Autobiography (1977), was a major bestseller.