If you ever lost an entire Saturday afternoon to an Agatha Christie mystery, you know exactly what made her special. She wrote 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, and the longest-running play in history. More than two billion copies of her books have sold worldwide.
But here is something most fans never knew. Christie had strong opinions about her own work: books she loved, and a couple she deeply wished she had never written.
Her Top 10, Straight from the Source
In 1972, Christie received a letter from a Japanese fan who shared their favorite titles. She wrote back with her own official personal ranking, all ten of them.
Her number one was And Then There Were None. She loved it for the sheer puzzle of it: ten people stranded on a closed island, killed one by one, with the survivors left to figure out who is responsible. “I think I dealt with it satisfactorily,” she wrote, which, from Christie, was high praise.
Second on her list was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which she called “a general favourite.” Third was A Murder Is Announced, chosen because she felt so close to its characters, especially the clever Letitia Blacklock and her loyal companion Dora Bunner, by the time she finished writing it.
She was honest that the list could shift. “My own ten would certainly vary from time to time,” she explained, “because every now and then I re-read an early book… and then I alter my opinion — sometimes thinking it is much better than I thought it was — or not so good as I had thought.”
Here is her complete top 10 from that 1972 letter:
- And Then There Were None
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
- A Murder Is Announced
- Murder on the Orient Express
- The Thirteen Problems
- Towards Zero
- Endless Night
- Crooked House
- Ordeal By Innocence
- The Moving Finger
The Books She Wished She Could Take Back
Not every Christie novel came from a place of inspiration. Two of them came from a place of real pain.
In 1927, Christie was going through one of the hardest stretches of her life. Her mother had died. Her first husband, Archie, had left. She forced herself to write The Mystery of the Blue Train that year simply to earn income. In her autobiography (published after her death in 1977), she admitted she “always hated it.”
That same difficult year produced The Big Four, a novel she later called “that rotten book.” Published under financial pressure, it was stitched together from earlier short stories and showed the seams.
It is a very human thing, really. Even the Queen of Crime, over a career of more than five decades, turned out work she was not proud of. The best she ever wrote came from joy. The worst came from necessity.
Which one on her top 10 list do you remember most fondly? Chances are, one of them is still sitting on a shelf somewhere in your home.
