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Posted on October 8, 2026

Agatha Christie Reconsidered Podcast: Endless Night

Podcast

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.

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 July 11, 2016

And Then There Were None: The Agatha Christie Revival

Dawn Keetley

We live in an era in which it seems every horror is caught on video tape. Presumably that renders those horrors clear and unambiguous. Pictures don’t lie, right? Except it seems that every picture, every scene of footage that makes its way onto a news broadcast or social media, has a thousand interpretations. On the night of July 7, when five police officers were fatally shot in Dallas during a night of peaceful protest, Fox News was showing live feed of the demonstrations and happened to catch bodies clad in uniform lying on the ground, before anyone knew what was going on. The anchor, Megyn Kelly, clearly not sure what to make of the footage, said uncertainly, “We don’t know what we’re seeing here.” And, in truth, it seems we never know what we’re seeing when some newly videotaped horror makes it into the public domain. Or, we do (think we) know what we’re seeing but our neighbor sees something entirely different. The hope of transparency, of the unmediated “real” –especially the truth of a sin or a crime—always eludes us. In fact, now everything is caught on tape, it seems especially to elude us. And that’s where Agatha Christie comes in. In every detective novel she ever wrote, all of which begin with a crime (usually murder), Christie offers us “the truth.” We know exactly what happened, we know how, and we know why—usually laid out for us by the incomparable Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. The new BBC adaptation of And Then There Were None is no exception. Read more