Agatha Christie Audiobooks

Agatha Christie (1890 to 1976) remains the best-selling novelist of all time, with more than two billion copies sold, and the most-translated individual author on record. Born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and largely schooled at home, she collected six consecutive rejections before The Mysterious Affair at Styles – the 1920 debut of Hercule Poirot – changed everything.

Across 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections she gave crime fiction three immortal detectives: Poirot, Miss Marple and the husband-and-wife pairing of Tommy and Tuppence. Writing at the heart of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, she earned the title Queen of Crime, wrote the world’s longest-running play in The Mousetrap – performed in the West End since 1952 – and was made a Dame in 1971 for her contribution to literature.

Her life fed the work. Dispensary service in both world wars gave her a specialist’s knowledge of poisons; marriage to the archaeologist Max Mallowan took her on annual digs in the Middle East that surfaced in the fiction; and in 1926, after the collapse of her first marriage, she made headlines of her own by disappearing for eleven days.

Christie in audio is as close to a guaranteed pleasure as crime fiction offers. The plotting is famously precise, the dialogue does the heavy lifting, and every planted clue lands in real time when read aloud. Our catalogue includes The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the novel that introduced Poirot in 1920, and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, a festive case for the darker evenings.

For UK listeners there is the added comfort of home ground: Golden Age England is her natural territory, and nobody has ever made it more quietly lethal. Start with The Mysterious Affair at Styles to hear where the whole phenomenon began.