Agatha Christie is currently the record holder for the best-selling fiction author of all time, with an estimated ~2 billion copies sold across her 130 publications. Her titles include 74 novels (66 of which were detective mysteries), 28 short story collections (164 short stories in all), 16 stage plays, seven TV/audio dramas for BBC broadcast, a few poems, and two autobiographies.
Not every story could possibly be a winner with that kind of prolific output. For example, A Haunting in Venice, which stars Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot, is based on one of Christie’s worst-reviewed books, Hallowe’en Party. Written in 1969, and one of the last she ever completed, today, it’s been reassessed as more of an interesting oddity and one of the few times Christie genuinely crossed into the horror genre.
However, many of Christie’s novels are so famous you don’t have to have read the author to know their names: Evil Under The Sun, Death on the Nile, The Murder at the Vicarage. These are considered some of the best stuff of the 20th-century mystery genre, and several are accepted as classics that (so far) have stood the test of time and adaptation across different mediums.
But which Agatha Christie books are the absolute pinnacle of her work? As someone who has read every single one of her mysteries, completionist style, here is my own personal ranking of her eleven best.
11. Crooked House (1949)
Agatha Christie is probably most famous for her detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, but some of her best mysteries are the ones in which they don’t appear. For example, there’s Crooked House, which is a stand-alone story. In it, Charles Hayward, son of a Scotland Yard detective, falls in love with a daughter of upper-class privilege.
When her father, entrepreneur Aristide Leonides, is murdered with his own eye medicine, she postpones their wedding, leading Charles to agree to help his father solve the case. It seems open and shut—the second wife was having an affair with the kid’s tutor, and none of the family likes her anyway. However, the real culprit is a genuine surprise you won’t see coming.
10. A Murder Is Announced (1950)
Always polite when the murderer announces their plans beforehand. In the case of the 1950 novel A Murder Is Announced, it allows Miss Marple and half the village to be present for the crime, thinking themselves attending a murder mystery parlor game until it is too late.
Though the plot is about as Christie cliche as it gets, this is one of those novels where Dame Agatha reaches nearly the same heights as Jane Austen in terms of sparkling wit and laugh-out-loud social parody. For those who merely think of Christie as the Queen of Crime, this is a must-read to see how good a writer she really was.
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9. Five Little Pigs (1943)
Originally titled Murder in Retrospect, Five Little Pigs is the rare Poirot cold case, where he takes on a murder that occurred sixteen years previous at the request of the deceased’s daughter. Amyas Crale was poisoned to death, and his wife, Caroline, was convicted but maintained her innocence until she herself passed away behind bars.
However, what makes this novel stand out is that the actual heart of the story—the day of Amyas’ murder—is retold five separate times, as Poirot goes through and reads back the contemporaneous witness statements from each of the five witnesses to the crime, one of whom is the actual murderer. That each time through is a total revelation and never feels repetitive is masterful.
8. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
Which of the early Poirot is the best of Christie’s lot is a matter of taste. Some argue it’s her first ever novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, others the super romantic Murder on the Links. But for my money, the best of the early Poirots is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, told from the perspective of Dr. James Sheppard.
The novel’s first section doesn’t even involve Poirot, instead setting up the titular murder of Ackroyd, all via Sheppard’s perspective. But when the little Belgian arrives to investigate, with Sheppard as his right-hand man, the twists and turns in the story start to add up until Poirot determines there’s only one possible suspect.
7. Endless Night (1967)
Endless Night is a bit of a cheat for this list, as it’s technically considered one of the eight novels Christie wrote, which was not a work of detective fiction. Like Hallowe’en Party, it’s one of the last full-length novels she ever wrote and, according to her own accounting, one of her favorite things she published. However, there is a death and a mystery; it’s just not until nearly the end of the story.
Instead, Endless Night is an exploration of Gothic horror. There’s an ill-set marriage between wealthy heiress Ellie and ne’er-do-well Michael, a gorgeous house with a curse, secret identities, puzzling deathbed statements, ghosts that haunt the guilty, and a twist ending of surprising justice.
6. The Secret of Chimneys (1925)
Published just before Ackroyd, The Secret of Chimneys is the first book in one of Christie’s lesser-known detective series, the Superintendant Battle books. Battle appears as the detective in five of Christie’s stories and his assistant in this one, Lady Bundle Brent, in the first two. A cross between a murder mystery and a treasure hunt, the death of Prince Michael, presumed heir to the long-empty throne of Herzoslovakia, occurs at the beginning of a weekend house party and is conveniently solved before the guests depart.
Like A Murder Is Announced, The Secret of Chimneys is Christie at her witty best, skewering the upper social classes and the late-stage aristocracy. Bundle, the eldest daughter of a Marquess, is hilarious when she isn’t being atrociously clever and solving mysteries while leaving men dazzled. As her law enforcement partner, Battle deserves to be better known in the canon than he is.
5. Curtain (1975)
Agatha Christie recognized sometime around her second decade of fame that Hercule Poirot would be with her until she died. Unlike Conan Doyle, she never foolishly tried to kill him off; instead, she wrote his final mystery story slowly, over several years in the 1940s, and then put the manuscript away for when it was time. (She also did the same for Marple with the posthumously published Sleeping Murder).
Curtain was the last novel published in Christie’s lifetime, and it brings everything full circle, taking Poirot and his original sidekick hastings back to Styles Court, of The Mysterious Affair fame. The mystery isn’t all that important; what is essential is Poirot doesn’t solve it, dying of a heart attack partway through the novel and leaving all the clues for Hastings to put together for one last time.
4. The Secret Adversary (1922)
The Secret Adversary, which introduced Tommy & Tuppence Beresford (a.k.a. Partners In Crime), was Christie’s second novel ever. Like the Battle books, there are only a few Tommy & Tuppence adventures (four novels and a set of short stories). However, the couple grows and ages with Christie over her career in a way that none of her other Bright Young Thing detectives did.
While there’s a lot to be said for the older and wiser Berefords of 1968’s By The Pricking of My Thumbs, The Secret Adversary stands out because it acknowledges just how screwed Christie’s generation was in those very first post-Great War years when there was no work and less money. Tuppence’s quick thinking and Tommy’s quick reflexes build them a private detective agency while impressing each other, making this Christie’s best adventure romance mystery hybrid.
3. The Body in the Library (1942)
The secret to Agatha Christie’s detectives is that they are the people no one respects or gives much notice to, which is part of their secret power in solving crimes. When Christie was young, her stories starred young women whose skills were underestimated (Tuppence Beresford, Bundle Brent, etc.) But after her famous disappearance and divorce, she realized there was another group society overlooked: Old ladies like Miss Jane Marple.
The Body in the Library is the second Marple novel after Christie put her aside for 12 years. (The first was 1930’s Murder at the Vicarage.) By this time, Christie was in her fifties and close enough to Marple’s age that her stories starring the spinster take on a real edge of lived experience. It should be considered the first actual Marple novel, where friends call her to solve why the titular body is in their library.
2. Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
It was really hard to choose between these last two, but my editor refused to let me call it a tie. Suffice it to say, Murder on the Orient Express and the next entry are Christie’s two greatest masterworks, and while the rest of the novels on this list are fantastic reads, nothing she wrote before or after was ever as good. They say there is no such thing as the perfect crime, and yet here, Christie wrote two of them in seven years.
Murder on the Orient Express came first, and it ranks second only because it is not quite as full of sob-inducing terror as what followed. However, credit where it is due; the puzzle is so clever, and the answer is so intricate (not to mention the mystery based on a real-life never-solved crime!) that it deserves to be called one of the greatest of all time.
1. And Then There Were None (1941)
And Then There Were None, which came out only seven short years after Murder on the Orient Express, gets the edge here at the top of this list because it is genuinely scary. The story of ten people brought to an island and left to be killed one by one, it is a murder mystery, but the growing dread that accompanies the crimes is like a slowly turning piano wire, just waiting to snap. However, we cannot speak of it without acknowledging the matter of the original title, which alone should have disqualified it from any list, and it would have if this story were any less of a perfect mystery.
While both this and Orient Express are impossible novels, And Then There Were None is doubly impossible: A crime is committed, and no one did it. And then another, and another. Nothing matters. No one is coming to save anyone. It is nihilism in book form. Every single person on the island dies, leaving no perpetrator at all.
One day, Christie’s title of the best-selling writer of all time will fall, but these two stories will never be topped.
Ani Bundel is an Associate Editor at PBS/WETA’s Telly Visions, where she co-hosts a weekly podcast by Anglophiles for Anglophiles. A self-taught journalist from the school of hard knocks, Ani came up blogging in the fast-turn-around era. Ani’s other regular bylines can be found on CNN, NBC News, and more.