The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: Agatha Christie

  • Nancy Drew Enters the Public Domain

    Ninety-five years after their original publication, the first four Nancy Drew novels (all published in 1930) have just entered the public domain in the United States. Without having glanced at them in more than four decades, I can still picture all of the covers and conjure up some plot details from The Secret of the…

  • “A Christie for Christmas”: Why Murder under the Mistletoe Appeals to Readers

    Since not a creature is stirring in my household this early morning, I have time for a holiday post, and Agatha Christie is on my mind. During the early part of her publishing career, Christie not infrequently published more than one novel (or a novel and volume of short stories) each year. Once it was…

  • Ariadne Oliver and Harriet Vane on the Work of Writing

    I’ve come around to appreciating Agatha Christie’s fictional crime novelist, Ariadne Oliver. She’s written broadly, as a caricature of Christie herself–a substantial woman in midlife, trailing apple cores. Like Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane, a writer of detective novels, Ariadne is a well-regarded author of mysteries who can’t resist dabbling in a few herself. Also…