The Christie Completists

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Arts, Books

4.9 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I’ve read a lot of Agatha Christie, but I’ve never read all of her books in order. What insights are there to be had by doing so? Christie completists Catherine Brobeck and Kemper Donovan of the All About Agatha podcast join me to talk about the Queen of Crime’s clever way with characters, the “stuck in its time” elements of some of her plots, and how they rank her novels from best to worst. This festive season if you’d like to support the podcast and buy a gift for a murder mystery loving friend at the same time, you can purchase a discounted gift subscription for the Shedunnit Book Club at shedunnitshow.com/giftoffer or (if you’re fast!) shop the restocked merchandise collection at shedunnitshow.com/shop. No major spoilers in this episode. However, there is some mention or discussion of the books listed below. Books and sources: —Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie —Halloween Party by Agatha Christie —An Autobiography by Agatha Christie —The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie —A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie —Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie —Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie —Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie —Lord Edgware Dies by Agatha Christie —Peril at End House by Agatha Christie —Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie —Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie —And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie —The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie —The Hollow by Agatha Christie —Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie —Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie —The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie —The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie —Endless Night by Agatha Christie —They Came To Baghdad by Agatha Christie —Destination Unknown by Agatha Christie —The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie Please note that some of the links here are affiliate links — if you buy from an independent bookshop via bookshop.org or secondhand through AbeBooks the sale price remains the same but the podcast receives a small commission. To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/christiecompletiststranscript. Music by Audioblocks and Blue Dot Sessions. See shedunnitshow.com/musiccredits for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to She Dunnet. I'm Caroline Crampton. I talk a lot on this show about the work of Agtha Christie. I mean how could I not?
0:15.0	She's the best-known writer of Houdonets and published her first book in 1920,
0:21.0	right around the beginning of the period known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction that I cover on this podcast.
0:27.0	Over the course of her long life, she published 66 Detective novels and numerous short story collections, many of which will be well known to listeners, I'm sure.
0:37.0	But, although I think I've read all of her works now, I've done so haphazardly over the 20 years or so that I've been engaged with her writing.
0:46.1	My first Christie was one that I found on a shelf at a bed and breakfast while on holiday,
0:50.9	and I picked up others at random, as I came across them in charity shops or in libraries
0:55.4	before I eventually started collecting them for myself. What I've never done is
0:59.9	read them all in order. I've never had the experience of observing how her work matured and
1:05.2	changed over all the decades that she was publishing, nor seen how her whodunits gradually
1:10.0	documented the changes in life and attitudes from the 1920s to the 1970s.
1:15.6	But as it happens, I know two people who have done this.
1:19.4	Catherine Brobeck and Kemper Donovan hosts the All About Agtha podcast, and since 2016 they've been reading their way through Agathor Christie's
1:27.4	bibliography in order episode by episode I'm delighted to welcome them to
1:32.3	she done it today to share some of what they've learned
1:34.8	about the Queen of Crime on the way. The good and the bad. What drew you to Agatha Christie in the first place?
1:49.4	I was always an avid reader when I was younger and we've actually joked about this
1:56.2	quite a bit on the podcast that Ag of the Christie is an author that a lot of
2:01.9	avid readers find quite early on, almost using as a bridge from children's
2:08.7	literature, so to speak, to more adult things, becauserithe Christie is very much not children's literature.
2:15.5	She was actually very adamant about that.
2:17.0	She did not like when people called her books, you know,
	...

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