crime and mystery fiction

March’s Read Christie 2026 theme has been to choose and read one of Agatha Christie’s books which made the biggest impact on me as a young reader. With a prompt such as this, choices for every single reader are going to be intensely personal and individualised ones. I smiled when I saw the remit for this month because I was able to go straight to my bookcase and pick up a novel without hesitation. My choice for March is The ABC Murders. Let me explain why this has been, and will no doubt be, the easiest reading decision I make for this challenge and probably for the entire year.

So, what is The ABC Murders about? Before I go any further, I’ll give a brief explanation. Hercule Poirot receives a letter, telling him a murder has been committed in Andover – but this is a strange missive, as it comes directly from the murderer, typed, mocking Poirot and daring him to do something about it, and about the murders which threaten to follow. Indeed, the next one will be in Bexhill. The letter is signed ‘A.B.C.’. Poor Mrs Asher who runs a sweet shop in Andover is the first unfortunate corpse. So begins a series of deaths, always with a copy of the ABC railway guide left behind. Poirot, assisted by Hastings, and with Inspector Japp also joining them on the trail, need to capture this murderer as every part of the country begins to wait for it to be its turn and the victims use up all the letters of the alphabet. Meanwhile, the mentally fragile Alexander Bonaparte Cust has just been given a job selling stockings. He has all his equipment for finding his customers all across England: the stockings in a case, a typewriter, and copies of the ABC railway guide…

I was fascinated by this story, the way it built upon itself piece by piece, by the investigation and the clues until they converged in an ingenious solution right at the end, and, of course, by the distinctive characters on both sides of the moral and legal fence. If you’ve read any number of my blog posts and articles, or you follow me on social media (@claireladdsauthor, if you’d like to), you might know that I have an enduring love affair with all things Agatha Christie. This certainly isn’t because I write mysteries myself, or not in the way readers interpret conventional ‘mystery fiction’, certainly. Writers don’t write in every genre that they read. I have an immense respect for mystery fiction authors; the plotting of the crime or mystery has to be intricate and finely woven with breadcrumbs of detection and clues interspersed with red herrings, all while ensuring the characters are wonderfully developed and function as they need to. This respect I have was planted the day my dad came home from town with a copy of The ABC Murders.

I remember vividly Dad presenting it to me, as a ten-year-old. He already knew I was the kind of reader who devoured The Secret Seven (I wanted to be one of them. I’d have volunteered to be Scamper the dog’s next biscuit if it meant I could get in that shed and listen in on the secret conversations). Dad had also bought me some of the Famous Five and Nancy Drew books and had watched me devour them. But this present, on this evening, felt like something else, something special. He told me he had seen it and thought I would like reading it. Why this particular Christie book, I have no idea, but I did know that he’d bought it from our local bookshop, and I also knew that the entire middle section of the shop had multiple bookcases which only housed Agatha Christie books, with roughly ten copies of each one on the shelves. It was a sight to behold, and I used to spend ages staring at it when I went into the shop, no doubt much to the secret irritation of the man who ran the fountain pen section directly opposite. Having me propped incessantly against his glass counter I imagine did his pen sales no good at all. To his absolute credit, he was a very lovely elderly gentleman who never once asked me to move, even a little bit.

As a young reader, this was a pivotal moment in my reading. It was an indelible mark in my mind that I’d gone ‘up in the world’, had become an adult reader. This change in mindset paved the way for, not only my devoted and voracious devouring of Christie books, but also many others. My bookshelves have filled non-stop ever since, not only with Agatha Christie, but with so many kinds of books which have interested me over the years. I did move to either side of the Christie shelves in the shop (eventually, and every so often as curiosity and the need to regain bloodflow in my bookcase-rooted body drove me), to the works of the Bronte sisters, and of Thomas Hardy, and Keats and Daphne du Maurier, and Jean Rhys and Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Aeschylus and so many Ancient Greek and Roman writers, and … the list was endless, because I felt I was allowed to read beyond children’s books. That one igniting incident of being given The ABC Murders had fuelled my fire as a lifelong reader and had given me permission to explore the worlds between the pages, and to expand. It was as if my imagination had been given wings and it flew and flew, never running out of energy because it was constantly being fed.

My imagination had, of course, also been given Hercule Poirot. Dad could not have picked a protagonist more perfect for me. From the moment I began reading about him, I adored him. It led me to spend an inordinate amount of time preventing customers from seeing the full range of fountain pens available in my local bookshop’s beautiful pen section because I spent every spare minute gazing upon the Christie bookshelves, with a voracious need to hunt down every Poirot story I could lay my hands on. To aid me in my Poirot hunt and beyond, I typed up an alphabetical list on my clunky, manual typewriter, so I could tick off every Christie book I bought and read. I still have that original list somewhere. My utter adoration of Poirot from the outset has also led to many hundreds (or likely thousands) of hours watching film and TV adaptations of the Poirot books, too. This has been my solace and comfort blanket on many, many occasions, and my obsession. Even my Masters dissertation was written on Agatha Christie’s books and adaptation! This is the wonderful thing about reading. It can lead you down so many rabbit holes of complete joy and fulfilment, specific to you.

Ultimately, what I can wholeheartedly say is that, while I love the book itself, it has always been much less about the story within The ABC Murders than receiving the novel as a representation of adult fiction which has caused it to be the Agatha Christie book which has made the biggest impact on me as a young reader. I doubt my dad could have guessed at the impact giving me that one Agatha Christie book would have on the rest of my life. But I’m unendingly grateful for it. I often hear people telling me that it was ‘X’ book which hooked them on reading. I’ve been hooked all my life. It’s why, as a young reader, I always hoped for a book as a present, and as an adult I have no hesitation in giving them as gifts. I would urge anyone to give a book to someone; you never know – it could be you who begins their love for literature, and a gift that will last a lifetime.

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The Sittaford Mystery (Read Christie 2026: Best beginning)

Death on the Nile (Read Christie 2026: Beloved characters)

February’s task for the Read Christie 2026 challenge, as set by the Agatha Christie team, has been to read a book containing ‘beloved characters’. The team chose Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and it’s a great choice, featuring as it does both Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver. As with January’s read, I have chosen to deviate from the suggested novel to reflect on my own choice for a book with characters beloved to me: Death on the Nile.

As with the Christie team’s choice, mine also contains Hercule Poirot, who happens to be my absolute favourite Christie detective, and possibly my favourite detective of all time. He was the first detective I encountered in adult crime novels, when my dad bought me a copy of The ABC Murders. I devoured it at the age of ten and became completely devoted to all of the Poirot stories. Without really realising it, I had also encountered Poirot much earlier, growing up as I did on Sunday afternoon cinematic films on the TV, several of which were the Peter Ustinov versions of Poirot, glamorous films, with Death on the Nile being one I saw multiple times, and also featuring the wonderful David Niven as Colonel Race. Moving on several decades, the David Suchet version of Death on the Nile is one of my favourite films in which he played Poirot. With all that in mind, I was always likely to be drawn to this novel like a moth to a flame. And it is the characters in the novel that I will discuss here.

Hercule Poirot

Out of all of Christie’s novels which involve recurring characters, it is Poirot who is my enduring love. I’m not even sure I can fully explain, even to myself, why he intrinsically appeals to me. What I do know is that I love his quirky dress and mannerisms, and the way he goes about picking at the carcass of a crime, piece by piece, until all the scraps of clues have been used up and explained. I also find it very endearing that he has such a humble backstory, one of being a child of a large family who had to make a success of himself to support them. A man who was injured during the First World War and was taken care of by a woman in England (and if you read The Mysterious Affair at Styles you will get a fuller flavour of this), and has a strong appreciation of poverty and desperation, and of skills of workers, which makes him an empathetic detective who treats a Duchess in the same way as he treats her maid (or, indeed, in Death on the Nile, the downtrodden, poor relation in the same way as the high-born, wealthy one).

Most of all, I love his approach to the human side of crime. He knows that, somewhere at the heart of the motive, is something intensely personal which reflects the way the victim lived their life and how it impacted the people around them. And he also shows himself to be, not just a problem-solving machine, but a human, too, considering the feelings of other people in the case, showing empathy, sympathy and, indeed, humanity. There are several cases he solves whereby he allows justice to take its course in an unconventional way. This is one of those cases, and highlights Poirot’s knowledge and acceptance that, sometimes, there are morally grey areas to consider, along with intertwined compassion for the perpetrator as well as the victim. This is, of course, Poirot’s subjective view, but it leaves the reader with plenty to consider: how would we have handled the final dishing out of justice?

The underrated sidekick

Now we turn to the sidekick. Ex-MI5 agent, Colonel Race is deployed by Christie in this role here. He appears part-way through, and is there to do some investigating of his own (the sub-plot of which I won’t spoil here). I always enjoy an appearance by Colonel Race; I find him a truly likeable man and a consummate professional, therefore a great extension of Poirot’s own impeccably performed investigations. It is interesting to watch these two professionals work through their findings. An appearance by Colonel Race always means that something much wider-reaching than a crime motivated by the private and personal is lurking in the background, which gives an extra edge of danger to the atmosphere, and therefore joining his investigations with Poirot’s reminds us that the world can be a dangerous place, both without and within our own lives. For me, Colonel Race is one of Christie’s underrated characters.

Impassioned suspect

I’ve alluded to the crimes I feel Christie is particularly expert at creating: those seeded in the intensely personal. These frequently interweave with the emotional, and are character-driven. And, as we know, getting inside the head of the people close to a crime is Poirot’s forte! There are few characters in any of Christie’s novels in which the emotional comes into play as much as in the initial prime suspect here, the impassioned Jacqueline de Bellefort. She is immediately suspected of the killing of Linnet Doyle, her former best friend who stole her ex-fiancée, Simon Doyle, and married him within weeks. After this devastation to her life, we next meet her as she follows the newly-weds to all the locations of their exotic honeymoon and confesses to Poirot that she has strong desire to shoot Linnet. Poirot both sympathises with her desperate emotions and is extremely fearful that such strength of feeling leaves Jacqueline herself in danger from her own passions.

Jacqueline frequently lingers in my mind when I think of Christie novels. Her emotional intensity has stayed with me from the very first time I read about her, decades ago. She is one of those stand-out characters who make me consider whether my actions would have matched hers, should I have been placed in her situation (which contains such huge spoilers that I cannot detail them here), and has gone a long way to inform me, as a writer, how someone could be driven almost entirely by the emotions burning within them. I believe that Death on the Nile is worth reading to follow Jacqueline’s story alone.

Other enduring characters to give us pause for thought

There are other truly enduring characters for me in this book. Once again, my choices revolve around the human qualities with which Christie has endowed them. I want to focus, in this section, then, on the mothers, and their younger female counterparts. Two mother stand out: the tormented Mrs Otterbourne, writer of romance which has been shunned by the libraries and increasingly her readership, and has turned to drink, and Mrs Allerton, possibly the most kind and caring mother that Christie ever wrote about in her fiction. The absolute pain of Mrs Otterbourne, which plays out in the tempestuous relationship she has with her long-suffering daughter, Rosalie, is placed into opposition with the almost idealised mothering of Mrs Allerton. She is an extremely endearing person, whom Poirot likes immensely, and who is ultimately able to provide comfort and love to Rosalie in a very humble, selfless manner. As a reader, I can’t help but feel desperately sorry for one, and admire the way the other is prepared to take on a ‘found family’ mother-daughter dynamic, based purely on her innate kindness of soul. Combined, they leave us with a lingering unease around the concept of motherhood, and the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship.

There are two other characters I would like to make mention of here, too: Rosalie Otterbourne, long-suffering daughter of the aforementioned Mrs Otterbourne, and Cornelia, poor and downtrodden relation of the high-born Mrs Van Schyler who has a secret. I have immense sympathy for Rosalie, dealing as she does with the difficulties of her mother’s professional and personal downfall, and struggling with her own entanglements of resentment of her mother and her undeniable love for her. Cornelia, by contrast, is blissfully unaware that she is being treated abominably by her rich relation and is grateful for the opportunities afforded her in being allowed to come on the excursion down the Nile. This unawareness and her accompanying obliging behaviour, led by the controlling Mrs Van Schyler, is what makes me have huge sympathy for Cornelia. However, what I love about both Rosalie and Cornelia is their strength of character, Rosalie’s which has had to be of a sustained nature to protect her mother, and Cornelia’s, ultimately, in choosing to follow her own path of love, unrelated to social position or money, both of which she could have and which would give her a ‘better’ life.

So then, for me, Death on the Nile contains very particular kinds of ‘beloved characters’: the repeat characters who are respectful and consummate professionals, and the women who fill this entire novel with everything it is to be human: the passion, suffering, resilience and, yes, love. In saying this, I am, of course, very aware of the discrepancy between gender roles and that males are given that of logical fact-finder and puzzle-solver whereas women are given the roles of the impassioned, the reactive, driven by a need of some kind. Yet, heading towards a hundred years after the book was written, this is what makes the women in particular stand out as sympathetic, real people, of their era and beyond, and I love that. There are other men in this novel whose actions provide the plot points for the story, such as the thief, or the fraudulent professional, yet continually it is the women who provide the heart of the story so that it is not merely a two-dimensional puzzle (and Christie’s books never are! If you don’t believe me, then I urge you to read Endless Night or And Then There Were None). This gender separation throughout may even be why the book ends with the promise of marriage between a man and woman who find a tempered middle ground between hard, factual logic and passionate interiority, thus drawing together facets of both. Could it even be Christie suggesting that extremes of either are unhelpful to us if we want to live a happy life? I’ll let you decide.

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The Sittaford Mystery (Read Christie 2026: Best Beginning)