Agatha Christie – Interesting Literature

10 of the Best Classic Detective Novels Everyone Should Read

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

It’s impossible to boil down such a rich and fertile genre as detective fiction to just ten definitive classic novels, so the following list should not be viewed as the ten best detective novels ever written so much as ten classic detective novels to act as great ‘ways in’ to this popular genre of fiction. We’ve tried to allow due coverage to the golden age of detective fiction in the early- to mid-twentieth century, but have also thrown in some earlier, formative classics as well. We’ve avoided spoilers in the summaries of the novels we’ve provided, and have instead chosen to focus on the most curious or interesting aspects of those novels.

November 25 in Literary History: The Mousetrap Opens in London

The most significant events in the history of books on the 25th of November

1562: Lope de Vega is born. A towering figure of Spanish Renaissance literature, he was a hugely prolific poet and playwright. Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, called Vega, his contemporary, a ‘monster of nature’, which sounds much like the seventeenth-century view of William Shakespeare as a writer endowed with natural gifts rather than one whose craft had been studiously learned. But Vega outdid even Shakespeare for his sheer volume of work. Shakespeare left behind 154 sonnets; Vega wrote over 3,000. Shakespeare wrote, or collaborated on, around forty plays. But around 1,800 plays have been attributed to Lope de Vega (of which 426 survive).

Five Fascinating Facts about Agatha Christie

Interesting facts from the life of Agatha Christie (1890-1976), prolific author of detective novels

As it’s Agatha Christie’s birthday today – she was born 15 September 1890 – we felt it was time we honoured one of the most popular novelists who has ever lived. So here are five great facts about the life and work of Agatha Christie.

1. Agatha Christie is the bestselling writer of all time, with over 2 billion novels sold. The history of detective fiction is a history of bestselling writers – Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and more recently, crime writers like James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell – but Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (to give her her full name and title) is the most successful of them all.

Guest Blog: Unreliable Narrators in Literature

By Ariell Cacciola Unreliable narrators run rampant throughout literature, compelling us toward them and their often-twisted tales even as we question every word and action. To me, they are the most fascinating of narrators. Note that their unreliability might not be obvious at first, like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Sometimes their reliability … Read more