The Underrated Christies Transcript

Caroline: Is it possible for the word "underrated" to be applied to the work of Agatha Christie? Prolific and popular, even fifty years on from her death, her work continues to be ubiquitous and beloved. New screen and stage adaptations appear all the time and it often feels like critical interest in her has never been higher.

And yet, and yet. Over the past couple of years, I've had this growing sense that all of the publicity that Christie gets might actually be narrowing, rather than broadening, the awareness of her writing. That the stories and character which are already popular become more so, while the one-offs, the experiments, and the stories that simply don't fit into an easy sequence become ever more obscure.

Join me, won't you, as I take a look at the underrated Christies.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Agatha Christie herself definitely isn't underrated. Of course she isn't: she's the queen of crime, the ur-detective novelist, the name everyone knows even if they know nothing else about this genre. But she wrote a lot of books and stories in a publishing career that spanned over fifty years. It's not surprising that some of them are better known than others.

With Christie, too, we have to consider the impact that adaptations have on the awareness of her books. That is how a lot of more casual Christie consumers come to her work. Ever since the 1974 Sidney Lumet film version of Murder on the Orient Express, the name "Christie" in the film sphere has been more or less synonymous with big-budget, high star power ensemble blockbuster mysteries. And more recently, there have been lavish TV treatments, too. Whenever one of these comes out, regardless of the quality of the show, that book gets a new edition and a big marketing push. Books that have had this treatment, therefore, don't end to be underrated. An underrated title might have received a lower-key screen adaptation or two, but hasn't had the big Hollywood spotlight, for sure.

As you'll see, Christie's underrated titles are often, although not exclusively, the ones that don't feature her most famous characters, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. Both of those detectives have series that are easy to collect and follow; you can read all of those books and have no idea that Parker Pyne exists, say. The same goes for her one-off characters. They're just a bit harder to discover, in a culture that loves repetition and continuation.

Two things to remember as I go through these titles. First, this is my opinion, not a scientific ranking, so feel free to disagree and/or compile your own list. And secondly, I'm doing this in chronological order, from earliest title published to latest, simply because I couldn't decide what the "most" underrated Christie book was. I think highly of all of them and think they fly under the radar for different reasons that it's hard to untangle. Answers on a postcard if you think you know which one should top the list.

Up first is The Sittaford Mystery, first published in 1931 and also sometimes found under the title The Murder at Hazelmoor. Christie wrote this book at the beginning of a decade that was going to be extremely consequential for her, both professionally and personally. She did some of her best writing in the 1930s — Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None all appeared before 1940 — and she established her life living between Devon, London and various archaeological sites in the Middle East with her second husband, Max Mallowan.

The Sittaford Mystery has a lot of good points to it. There is its young, enthusiastic heroine, Emily Trefusis, a one off character who most definitely belongs to the category I've previously called Christie's "Competent Women". The clear homage to Arthur Conan Doyle in the Dartmoor setting and supernatural touches is well done. The mystery itself is well clued and has a solution that is brilliantly surprising the first time you read it, and then obvious in hindsight once you realise how well Christie seeded it throughout. And the spooky touches added by the opening seance are both atmospheric and a clever addition to the story. For me, this book ranks very highly among Christie's one-off mysteries.

So why is it underrated? The lack of a series detective character has an impact for sure, as indicated by the fact that when they adapted this story for the Agatha Christie's Marple television series, they added Miss Marple in to it. I also think being published in close proximity to three of the most famous Christie novels leads to it being overlooked as well. Being set in England, in winter, rather than one of the hot, glamorous overseas locations that some of the more famous Christies use perhaps leads to The Sittaford Mystery fading into the background too. None of that speaks to the quality of the book, though. This is a delightful mystery that ought to get more attention than it does.

Next, we have Three Act Tragedy from 1935. This is a Poirot mystery, although he isn't the sole detecting protagonist. Rather, he acts as a consultant to a trio of amateur sleuths: recurring Christie character Mr Satterthwaite, actor Charles Cartwright, and a young woman with the improbable name of Egg Lytton Gore. A harmless vicar has died suddenly of nicotine poisoning at a cocktail party held by Cartwright, at which Poirot was also present, and initially that is the crime upon which the quartet is focused. Later, there are more deaths, and the plot thickens substantially.

I like the two settings in this book: the action begins in Cornwall and later moves to Yorkshire. I really enjoy the character of Mr Satterthwaite and find the slightly more snarky version of Poirot we get with him very refreshing. But most of my feelings about this book are bound up in the character of Charles Cartwright and how Christie handles him. The fact that he is an actor is not just an incidental detail but rather core to the entire book. It's a story about performance and deception, with someone who has been doing both as their living for so long that it's hard to tell what is acting and what isn't anymore. And yet, because it's Christie, this psychological element isn't heavy or dark, or even especially noticeable if you aren't looking closely. It's all handled with a deftness that speaks to how far Christie had come as a writer over the past 15 years. In fact, I think the lack of a dramatic setpiece might be what has kept this one flying under the radar — there's no snowed in intercontinental train or island marooning, just the quiet horror of a bad person almost getting away with bad deeds.

Now, we come to a personal favourite Christie of mine, Murder in Mesopotamia from 1936. I first read this book when I was a teenager and have thought it was magnificent ever since. Because I was reading her books completely out of order, as I could get them from the library or charity shops, I read this one before I read more famous "Poirot overseas" novels like Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express. While I do appreciate those as classics, it has always been baffling to me that Murder in Mesopotamia isn't as prominent. It has many of the same ingredients, like Poirot on his travels and a small group of mostly strangers as suspects thrown together by circumstance, but with the added interest of Christie's personal experience of living and working on an archaeological dig.

Murder in Mesopotamia is also one of the very rare examples where Christie wrote a genuine impossible crime — in this case, a locked room murder. Most of the time, she wasn't so interested in the pure physical technicalities of crime, preferring to leave that sort of thing to John Dickson Carr. On rare occasions, though, she was moved to try her hand at it, and that makes this book all the more special to me. It also contains, to me, one of the most chilling death scenes in all of detective fiction, and while it still haunts me if I think about it for too long, I appreciate the expertise that went into creating it.

And yet, Murder in Mesopotamia isn't a Christie novel that you see in people's top ten lists very often, and it has never had a film adaptation of its own. It was made as part of the David Suchet Agatha Christie's Poirot series, of course, but with some modifications, such as the introduction of Captain Hastings, that I didn't think added much. With all of the archaeological details and the parallels to Christie's own experiences, I definitely feel like this one deserves more attention.

Now, Murder is Easy from 1939, which is also sometimes found under the title Easy to Kill. Most likely overlooked because of the lack of a primary detective; instead, the mystery is investigated by a retired colonial police officer called Luke Fitzwilliam, who is drawn into the case by chance when he strikes up a conversation with an old woman in a train. It takes him to the village of Wychwood, where Luke suspects that an undetected serial killer is taking people out one by one and making it look like a series of unfortunate accidents.

Luke isn't a particularly exciting or charismatic detective. The charm of this book resides in the way that Christie builds up the supporting cast in the village — it's one of her best-realised versions of the classic "Mayhem Parva" setting. Then there's the undercurrent of supernatural witchiness, which she would bring out more heavily in later books like The Pale Horse. It's subtle here, and you're never sure if it's a red herring or not, and all the more effective for that ambiguity. In Murder Is Easy, I think you can see Christie beginning to experiment with some ideas that would come more fully into focus in her books of the late 1950s and 1960s. It's valuable both as an entertaining, eerie novel in itself, and for what it shows us about a writer's shifting skills and priorities.

There are adaptations of Murder Is Easy, including a relatively recent TV version and an older one that incorporates Miss Marple again, for no good reason. In my opinion, no screen version has yet captured the full weirdness of this book, and has thus not given the story its full impact.

Then we come to Sad Cypress from 1940. This is an inheritance mystery that turns on skilful character study, with the addition of a rare-for-Christie courtroom drama sequence. There's something melancholy about this book, perhaps in part because of the way the point of view shifts from a woman accused of murder to that of Poirot as he takes on her case. We don't always get to see multiple perspectives in Christie's mysteries, which makes this one stand out to me. I think having to compete for attention with some of the other books Christie published in the early 1940s, like The Body in the Library or Evil Under the Sun, has kept Sad Cypress out of the limelight — unjustly so, in my opinion. There's an elegiac quality to it that is quite moving.

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Agatha Christie spent several years of the Second World War living alone in London while her husband was serving overseas, working in a hospital dispensary and carrying on with writing as best as she could. The relative isolation and strangeness of this life turned out to be rather a good thing for her creativity: not only did she begin work on the "final" Marple and Poirot novels during this time, Sleeping Murder and Curtain, to be put away until required, she wrote her best Mary Westmacott novel Absent in the Spring in a manic three-day burst of inspiration.

One of her other experiments during this time was the novel Death Comes As The End, which was published in 1945. This book is unlike anything else in Christie's bibliography: it's a historical whodunnit, set in Ancient Egypt around 2000BC. It came about partly through Christie's friendship with the Egyptologist Stephen Glanville, and partly through her reading of a set of real Egyptian letters about a discordant household. She didn't set out to create an entirely new crime fiction subgenre, but that is what happened. The work of Ellis Peters, for instance, owes a lot to Death Comes As The End.

Beyond its interest to historians of crime fiction, though, this book makes for fascinating reading in its own right. You don't need to know anything about Ancient Egypt in order to follow the mystery — I certainly don't — because the people are still just people, with their jealousies and their hopes and their dreams. Perhaps if Christie had shifted permanently into writing historical mysteries, Death Comes as the End would get more attention, but as an outlier, it tends to get passed over. There has still never been a screen version of this book, either. A TV adaptation was announced in 2016, but the project seems to have been abandoned.

Now, let's look at Mrs McGinty's Dead from 1952. This book is significant for the return of Ariadne Oliver, last seen in 1936's Cards on the Table, and set to become a regular companion for Hercule Poirot over the next couple of decades. It's also interesting as a relatively rare instance of Christie looking at the murder of someone from the working class — Mrs McGinty is an elderly landlady who died a violent death through no fault of her own. It's another village mystery, too, although one that shows how much village life has changed since Murder Is Easy. A Murder Is Announced tends to receive more attention for this documentation of social change, but it's very much there in Mrs McGinty's Dead too. I don't want to give the impression that this book is all heavy stuff, though, far from it. There's plenty of light relief provided by the character of Mrs Oliver and Poirot's adventures staying in a disorganised guest house. The theatrical world gets a look in as well, reflecting Christie's own increasing involvement in that world at the time. I find this book a wonderful mixture of sad, serious and silly, and I think it should be talked about more.

Destination Unknown from 1954 is a very obviously underrated Christie. It's one of the very small handful of her novels that has never received a screen adaptation of any kind, and it's also a one-off thriller, rather than a detective novel with a recurring sleuth. It's far more topical than much of her other fiction, dealing with the nuclear age, espionage, and defection from communism. It's pacy, breezy and full of action, rollicking along at great speed towards the inevitable happy ending. A review at the time of publication said that "She probably had a delicious busman's holiday writing it", and that's part of the book's appeal to me — Christie's prose in this book does sound like she's having a lot of fun, and that makes it fun to read too. I suspect it is both the topicality of this book and its lack of any familiar character that has led it to languish unappreciated compared with some of Christie's other work.

Endless Night from 1967 is a tough one: this is a Marmite book, I've found. People either love it or hate it. Like Destination Unknown, it was a creative departure for Christie, written entirely from the point of view of a young working class man named Michael Rogers who is determined to secure a better, wealthier life for himself. He meets and marries an heiress and they settle down together in a brand new avant garde house they have built at a place named Gipsy's Acre. But all is not well: they are harassed at home and, eventually, Michael's wife dies in a riding accident. Or is it? As a suspenseful thriller, Endless Night is magnificent. Michael's voice is deeply unpleasant, which I think might be why some people don't like reading this book, but it's a virtuoso piece of writing. Christie was reportedly very pleased when it garnered good reviews, all the more so because it was felt to be so improbable that a successful female author in her seventies could so perfectly embody the character of a young man in his twenties. There is supposed to be both a new television and a new film adaptation in the works of this book, so perhaps it will not remain underrated for that much longer.

Finishing my list of underrated Christies is the last Miss Marple book, Sleeping Murder, published after Christie's death in 1976. The odd timelessness of this story gives it a slightly otherworldly atmosphere, which I think might put some people off, or at least stop it from ascending into "favourite Christie" territory. She began work on it in the 1940s and pre-emptively gifted the proceeds from the book to her husband Max before it was put away to be held for publication as required. The chronology is odd, therefore — it seems to take place in around 1944, but after the events of later Marple novels, in which she is older. For me, this all adds to the effect, though. Sleeping Murder is about a young woman trying to piece together hazy childhood memories of something awful happening in a house where she lived as a girl, and the book's overall sense of happening outside of time just enhances this. It's creepy and unsettling in the best way possible, and then the day is saved by Miss Marple and all is right with the world again. I'd take it over other late Marples like A Caribbean Mystery or Nemesis any day.

So, in chronological order, those are my selections for the ten most underrated Agatha Christie novels. I hope this at least inspires you to pick up a lesser-known title, or to undertake this exercise for yourself — which of Christie's books do you think are unfairly overlooked? I suspect there might be as many answers to that question as there are Agatha Christie fans, which is in itself a kind of achievement. Such is the depth and breadth of her work that we can all find something in it to love.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and narrated by me, Caroline Crampton. You can find out more about the books mentioned in this episode by looking in the description or visiting shedunnitshow.com/theunderratedchristies. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to hear me speaking at greater length about Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie, come along to my event at the International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay on Saturday 19th September at 3pm. Tickets are available from the festival website, iacf-uk.org.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.