FIFTY years after her death, Agatha Christie (1890-1975) remains the world’s most commercially successful novelist. The “Queen of Crime” boasts sales of two billion volumes worldwide, with translations in more than 100 languages. Christie was prolific, writing more than 80 books, not to mention short stories and plays.

In just under 120 pages, Gill Plain attempts a Herculean task. She brings together a narration of Christie’s life story; articulation of themes running through her œuvre, and reflection on the afterlives of Christie’s books in screen adaptations, “continuation” volumes produced by other authors, and even computer games.

Plain astutely contextualises Christie’s work within the development of crime fiction, changes in British society, and the end of empire. Commendably, she doesn’t shy away from sometimes difficult areas, including Christie’s presentation of race, sexual violence, and gender norms.

The sweep is impressive, but some judgements seem dubious, especially the assertion that “Whatever crimes her racial, sexual or class outsiders commit, they are never guilty of murder.”

The plot twist at the heart of Murder on the Orient Express (1934) depends on a talented Jewish actress mother and her daughter disguising their identities in order to commit a revenge killing. Although presented sympathetically, the device rests on a persistent, negative, identification across Christie’s work of Jews with the theatre and thus, allegedly, with insincerity, emotional spectacle, and shapeshifting.

This book’s most significant flaw, however, is its complete neglect of the centrality of Christie’s Christian faith to her life and work. She was a devout (if not entirely orthodox) low-church Anglican who loved the Prayer Book. Jane Marple’s bedtime reading of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ is only one (of many) clues to the Christian underpinning of the moral vision expressed in Christie’s novels.

Plain foregrounds the influence of Freudian ideas about the subconscious in Christie, seeing him as the source of her insight that darkness lurks within even the most innocuous-looking characters. The idea that none of us can escape moral corruption, however, also has another name: Original Sin. That Christie so often associates the universality of such corruption with apples and gardens is no “red herring”.

The Revd Alexander Faludy is a freelance journalist based in Budapest.

Agatha Christie: A very short introduction
Gill Plain
OUP £ 9.99
(978-0-19-886374-8)
Church Times Bookshop £8.99