The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: Agatha Christie

  • 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…

  • When the Author Expires but the Series Continues

    Lucy Foley, the British crime writer, recently announced that she has been selected to write new Miss Marple novels. The first in a planned series will be out in Fall 2026, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Sleeping Murder, the final Agatha Christie Marple novel. As it happens, I’m finishing up the BBC adaptation…

  • Agatha Christie in Canada

    I didn’t recall that Agatha Christie had visited Canada, including Victoria, in 1922. She was travelling in the company of her faithless first husband, Archie. The second spouse, Max Mallowan, sounds much nicer though his archaeological expeditions were expensive to finance. At the time of her Canadian tour, Christie had produced only two novels: The…