You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. For the second of our summer readings from the archive,

it's John Lancaster reading his piece on Agatha Christie from 2018. The Case of Agatha Christie.

Agatha Christie is, according to her website, the world's best-selling novelist. That is a difficult

claim to prove, and the official site makes no attempt

to do so. But when you think that she wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections, all of them

still in print, in multiple formats, in dozens of languages, you can begin to see how she got to a total of one billion

copies sold in English, and another billion odd in translation. Oh, and the longest-running play

in the history of the world. Skeptics would be well advised to admit defeat on the issue

of whether or not she sold more books than any other novelist ever has, and instead pivot to a more interesting question.

Why?

I'm not claiming that this is an original inquiry, but I started to take an interest in it during a period when I was writing mainly about

economically inflected subjects and found that almost the only non-worky thing I could bear

to read was Agatha Christie. She's the only writer by whom I've read more than 50 books.

So, why? The case against Christie was well put by one of the first

grown-up critics to write about detective fiction, Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay review,

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.

Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seemed to me literally impossible to read.

You cannot read such a book,

you run through it to see the problem worked out,

and you cannot become interested in the characters

because they can never be allowed an existence of their own,

even in a flat two dimensions,

...