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Posted on October 8, 2026

Agatha Christie Reconsidered Podcast: Endless Night

In our second episode, we take up one of Christie’s stand-alone novels, Endless Night (1967), and its literary and cinematic roots and tentacles. Endless Night is a compelling story – the story of a working-class English man (Mike Rogers) who marries a rich American heiress (Ellie Guteman). The story is told from Mike’s perspective – and you’d be forgiven for believing he loves his new (and rich) wife. However, once Mike has had his beautiful house built on a patch of land (Gypsy’s Acre), Ellie dies, thrown from her horse, and the novel becomes an unraveling of exactly how she died. As a fascinating example of story evolution, Endless Night’s origins and adaptations give insight into Christie’s creative process, with each iteration worthy of consideration. It’s a story that clearly fascinated Christie, as she wrote versions of it across fifty years.

We’ve mapped out the story evolution as we discuss it below. As always, please note that this episode will include spoilers.

Short Stories:

Philomel Cottage (1924)
The Case of the Caretaker (1941)

Full Novel:

Endless Night (1967)

Cinematic Adaptations:

Love from a Stranger (1937) – film based on the 1936 stage adaptation of “Philomel Cottage”
Love from a Stranger (1947) – film based on the 1936 stage adaptation of “Philomel Cottage”
Endless Night (1972) – film based on 1967 novel
“Endless Night”- Agatha Christie’s Marple (2013) – TV series episode

If this sparks your interest, check out our deeper dive into the 1972 film adaptation – Endless Night for horror fans!

Works Cited:

Aldridge, Mark. Agatha Christie on Screen. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016, pp. 329-220.

Ascari, Maurizio. “Poetry into Fiction, Fiction into Poetry: Intertextual Connections in Agatha Christie’s Endless Night.” Crime Fiction Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2026, pp. 1-15.

Christie, Agatha. Endless Night. Collins Crime Club, 1967.

Christie, Agatha. “Philomel Cottage.” The Listerdale Mystery, William Collins and Sons, 1934, pp. 27-51.

Christie, Agatha. “The Case of the Caretaker.” Three Blind Mice and Other Stories, Dell Publishing Company, 1948, pp. 129-144.

Endless Night. Directed by Sidney Gilliat, performances by Hayley Mills and Hywel Bennett, British Lion Films, 1972.

“Endless Night.” Agatha Christie’s Marple, season 6, episode 3, ITV, 29 Dec. 2013

Jordison, Sam. “Endless Night: Agatha Christie’s favourite still has shock factor.” The Guardian, 13 Nov. 2018.

Love from a Stranger. Directed by Rowland V. Lee, performances by Ann Harding and Basil Rathbone, Trafalgar Films, 1937.

Love from a Stranger. Directed by Richard Whorf, performances by John Hodiak and Sylvia Sidney, Bryan Foy Productions / Eagle-Lion Films, 1947.

Two rooms are depicted in a dollhouse. In the first room, a doll plays the piano and stares at a flower under glass. In the other room, a dolls sits in a bed while a child peers at it through a window in the dollhouse.

Posted on September 21, 2026

Dolls and Their Houses

Special Issue #10

On this last official day of summer, we come bearing a special issue that was months in the making and – we hope you’ll agree – worth the wait. With truly stunning and thought-provoking cover art by Andrew Foley, Dolls and Their Houses features seventeen original essays exploring the varied ways dollhouses and miniatures pervade horror.

We are deeply indebted to the wonderful writers whose work makes up this issue: Jeff Ambrose, Rebecca Booth, Gabrielle Sinclair Compton, Elizabeth Erwin, Tess Ezzy, Sarah Fevri, Linda Ganus, Dawn Keetley, Paul A J Lewis, Emily Naser-Hall, Catherine Pugh, Alice Sage, Lindsey Scott, Raquel Souza, NelRae Toler, Laura Wright, and Charlotte Yule.

As always, this issue is free to read and can be enjoyed on the website, through digital download or via flipbook. You can access all of these options by visiting the Dolls and Their Houses publication landing page.

We hope you enjoy!

Posted on September 17, 2026

10 Best Agatha Christie Stories for Horror Fans

Dawn Keetley

Agatha Christie was famously a founding member of The Detection Club, a group of mystery writers formed in 1930. They crafted ten commandments about writing detective fiction, composed by member Ronald Knox, of which the second very clearly stated: “All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.” Sometimes, though, Christie did dabble in that other world, where there supernatural possibilities weren’t left out but were left lingering at the end – in which everything wasn’t explained, in which the rational didn’t quite prevail.

That said, many of Christie’s short stories – even those that seem expressly to be categorized as “supernatural” – are actually only superficially “supernatural,” often in the end resolving quite starkly into mysteries that are fully explained, the apparently supernatural events merely tricks and deception employed by real-life characters who are driven by the usual motives (mostly financial necessity or greed). Some dwell in horror for a significant part of their length but then resolve into an explained mystery so abruptly that the story strains under it. But, in some of her fiction, Christie didn’t employ the supernatural merely as misdirection, didn’t venture into horror terrain and then turn back at the last minute. Sometimes, she stayed there, lingering in the realm of a more ambiguous horror.

Here are Agatha Christie’s best horror stories – all of them in the collection The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural (HarperCollins, 2019). This list isn’t exhaustive (Christie wrote over 150 short stories) – so I’d love to hear what your favorites are.

Posted on September 15, 2026

Agatha Christie Reconsidered Podcast: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Dawn Keetley/ Elizabeth Erwin/ Podcast

From a highly anticipated exhibition at the British Museum debuting in October to a new BBC series centering Hercule Poirot to the imminent debut of a modern Miss Marple mystery novel, Agatha Christie and her characters remain firmly in the popular culture zeitgeist an astounding fifty years after her death. In some ways, this is not unexpected of an author who has sold over a billion books. And yet, the modern agility and resonance of her stories when compared against her writing contemporaries is worth thinking about – and that is exactly what we hope to do in this seven-part podcast examining the enduring legacy of Christie’s works. We will also consider how Christie’s position as “Queen of Mysteries” has potentially erased her contributions to horror and gothic storytelling by offering an assessment of both her most famous and less so storytelling devices.

In our first episode, we take up The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a story that will reach its 100th year milestone this year and whose unexpected twist continues to divide readers.

Please be mindful that this podcast series will contain spoilers.

Works Cited:

Allmendinger, Blake. “Death by Hari-Kari in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, vol. 36, no. 3, Apr. 2023, pp. 398–99.

Bayard, Pierre. Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery. The New Press, 2001.

Berlatsky, Noah. “Getting Fooled Again: Rereading Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” in the Age of Trump.” The Los Angeles Review of Books, 25 May 2022.

Dey, Anindita. “The Politics of Watching in the Narratives of Detection and Crime: A Study of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Erasers.” IUP Journal of English Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, Dec. 2013, pp. 7–20.

Gutkowski, Emanuela. “An ‘Investigation in Pragmatics’: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.” Clues: A Journal of Detection, vol. 29, no. 1, Apr. 2011, pp. 51–60.

Lanchester, John. “The Case of Agatha Christie.” London Review of Books, 20 December 2018.

Posted on September 3, 2026

Endless Night: Agatha Christie for Horror Fans

Dawn Keetley

Agatha Christie published Endless Night late in her career, in 1967. It’s a stand-alone novel, without the stabilizing center provided by either of her famous detectives, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. It is, perhaps because of that, a good place to start for horror fans interested in how Christie’s work as mystery writer frequently veers into horror. While the novel itself contains many horror elements, I’m focusing here on the (quite faithful) 1972 film adaptation, which brilliantly amplifies those elements.