Contents introduction chapter detective creating features

Chapter 2. Features of the author's style and character creation in the works of Agatha Christie
When in 1977, a year after the death of Lady Agatha Christie, one of her best books, Autobiography, was released, the secret of that inexhaustible charm that helped Mrs. Christie win to this day retain the title of “Queen of Detective” was revealed to millions of fans. Despite the criticism that periodically accused the writer of stereotyping the characters, of far-fetched plots and violation of the canons of the classic detective story, and many other deadly literary sins. Despite strong competition in the face of Margery Ellingham, Dorothy Sayers and Nayo Marsh, and later Ruth Rendell and Phyllis Dorothy James. Her popularity continues to grow, annually hundreds of millions of copies of her books are sold all over the world, and even for people who are far from literature and have not read any of her books, her very name personifies a certain phenomenon and is perceived as a synonym for a high detective. Agatha Christie not only achieved world fame, but became a phenomenon in world culture and took a strong place in our minds.
What is the secret of her popularity? Let's try to briefly characterize the work of Lady Agatha and highlight the characteristic features.
First, we quote from Agatha Christie's Autobiography: “Detectives are good because they have a wide choice when working on them: you can write a thriller, which is pretty easy and nice, you can use a detective novel with a sophisticated plot. It’s more complicated, such a novel requires careful study of the smallest details, but completely redeems the efforts expended. And you can choose what I used to call a detective novel with a dramatic background, where, as a rule, your task is to protect the innocent. ”
Lady Agatha’s creative path can be conditionally divided into three periods. For the first, covering the 20th and part of the 30s, novels with an extremely complex plot are characteristic, in which, as a rule, the traditions of the “Golden Age” established by Conan Doyle, Van Dyne, Philippe MacDonald, Panshon and others are observed.