My two favorites are:
**Ten Little Indians ** (Also known as And Then There Were None)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
I literally read dozens of her books when I was in high school, and these two have stuck with me over the many subsequent years.
Oh, and pick Hercule Poirot over Miss Marple.
I personally like the Poirot novels better, but not by much. The only downside to Poirot is that you have to occasionally deal with Christie’s own personal Mary Sue, Ariadne Oliver.
Adding my nod to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and adding Crooked House to the mix. Crooked House isn’t a Poirot or Marple mystery, but it’s still a good one. (Not Tommy and Tuppence either.)
I am not very well read in Christie, but I’ve been picking them up here and there somewhat recently, and this is what I’ve determined:
As others have pointed out, the trickiness of the plots and clues is better in the Poirots. This is a good thing, except that I’ve noticed that because they are so very analytical and logical, that it bugs the pants off me when Poirot comes to an airtight conclusion that is based on somewhat forced logic. As in, if a person did X, they would then naturally do Y, so if you find out who did X, you know who did Y. But in real life, people do crazy things all the time. It’s a lot of “A ha! Only a person who was familiar with the house would go to the side door first, knowing that the front door creaks.” I cannot seem to stop myself from thinking of all the other reasons a person might go to the side door.
On the other hand, Miss Marple tends to resolve things mostly on the basis of being an intuitive and kooky old bird, which doesn’t make as much sense, but does make it much easier for me to suspend my disbelief and chalk everything up to “oh, that kooky Miss Marple!” and I’m able to enjoy the story more because I’m not trying to second guess it all the time.
You should be warned that the question of whether or not Christie “cheated” in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a relatively huge battle, along the lines of the LOTR “Did Balrogs have wings?” question. And that’s all I’m going to say about that subject, because any actual detail will spoil the book for you.
I definitely like Poirot better than Marple. If you’re going to watch them, as I have been lately (borrowing the A&E series from the library), David Suchet is a much better Poirot than anyone that plays Miss Marple.
kaylasdad99, is that Ngaio Marsh? I’ve seen quite a few of those on the library shelf and available for audio. I’ve even picked up a few but couldn’t get through them, but I didn’t try very hard. Is Marsh male or female? Are the mysteries done in the cozy style? Because I like that. I definitely don’t like reading about the violence and the gore. I like just knowing enough that someone died and not much more than that unless it’s required for clues to the mystery. Does Marsh do that?
As sattua said,
I bought Murder on the Calais Coach at an English language bookstore in Athens only to discover that it was actually Murder on the Orient Express which I’d read more than once.
As a slight hijack to my own thread, has anyone seen the British films of Miss Marple stories which star the wonderful Margaret Rutherford? I love that actress, and have seen her in all too few movies. I only saw a fragment of a Miss Marple movie once, and she was an unabashed scene-stealer.
This is the best advice. It is easy to remember at the library and it is spot-on.
Also, avoid the ‘spy/intrigue’ novels; even if they have Poirot (e.g. The Big Four). I found them to be dated and melodramatic. The short-story mysteries are ok, but not a got indicator – I wouldn’t start with those.
My favorites have been mentioned The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder at the Vicarage. I’d like to add another favorite that doesn’t have any regular characters, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?. It is a great title that works until the end.
As for Poirot vs. Marple – I like them both for different reasons. But remember the copyright date trick. Here’s the list of novels by date.
I went through a Christie phase in high school. I preferred Poirot over Marple. Some of my favorites (e.g., Ten Little Indians) have already been mentioned. I also liked **A Holiday for Murder ** (aka Murder for Christmas) – one of my faves.
N or M was a good Tommy and Tuppence mystery adventure.
**Elephants Can Remember ** was the first one I read where I felt really let down. It wasn’t very good, and I had it totally figured about halfway in. That’s sloppy.
Agreed, I started on Christie’s but soon tired of the formulaic plots and cardboard characters and moved on to other writers. For straight whodunnits I’d go for Marsh, for a proper novel based round a mystery I prefer Sayers. Of course with Sayers there is always the “leave them wanting more” factor - she stopped writing them before she ran out of ideas.
I really enjoyed Roger Ackroyd until the end, whereupon I became extremely furious and consigned the book to damnation. I’ve been leery of Christie’s books since then, although I did enjoy And Then There Were None and A Holiday for Murder.
And Then There Were None (Ten Little Indians)
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Can’t recommend it enough; it blew me away when I read it, because I had never read something like that before.
Oh, really…? ::pushes spectacles up nose a bit:: … on what charges, inspector?
Having read some Christie for the first time last week I’ll say that you should not read what I did. I had a collection of the Miss Marple short stories did not enjoy them at all.
The first thing that kept getting in my way was that a lot of the solutions in the end seemed forced and arbitrary. Miss Marple would come up with some outrageous solution that would never be able to be proven but the criminal would break down and confess to demonstrate that she was correct.
Another problem for me is that many of the stories were dependent on knowing and understanding a culture that is far more alien to me than I would have expected. I won’t spoil any stories, but the UK in the 1920’s is pretty distant culturally from the US in the 21st century.
I’m not going to say that I’ll never read another Christie book again but I doubt I’ll bother with any other Miss Marple book.
It is Ngaio Marsh (IIRC, she was also Dame by the time of her death). I won’t argue that she wasn’t formulaic, but she did a much better job of making me give a damn about her characters than Dame Agatha ever did. And I found myself liking Inspector Alleyn better than Poirot, Marple, or any other Christie detective.
I understand that Ms. Marsh did have great respect for Christie (to the point that Inspector Alleyn’s wife’s Christian name is Agatha, although she usually just goes by Troy – a professional artist who held onto her maiden name before it was common for anyone not in the entertainment industry to do so, at least in detective literature). In my view, it is the brand of respect that Tiger Woods might be said to owe to Ben Hogan, one of those “standing on the shoulders of giants things.”
And to continue in answering the questions, I find the Alleyn mysteries to be engaging and quite “cozy”. The discovery of the body can be a bit horrible (people have found severed heads in odd places, and once the carcass of a six-month-missing MP turned up rotting in a bale of wool), but she doesn’t go on a tear with actually showing the deaths occurring.
As far as any cultural divides that need to be bridged, I found that most of the rules for behavior and protocol at the big houses were covered quite nicely by P. G. Wodehouse in Something Fresh, his first Blanding’s castle novel (one of the characters needed to be trained to impersonate a valet).
I disagree slightly with the notion that the earliest ones are the best. I agree that the stories written in the late 1960s and early 1970s are often the weakest: rambling and unfocused. And most of the ones written in the 1920s and 1930s are certainly very good, but I find the books and short stories of the 1940s and 1950s to be lots of fun, too.
Thank you. I’m giving them another try. I just downloaded “Death on the Air” in audiobook format from my library. They also have “Death of a Fool”, so if this one is good, I’ll try that one as well.
No one else enjoyed Crooked House? 
Wow!