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.
