Agatha Christie

The numbers do a lot of the work here: 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections, built around a small set of recurring detectives, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. She was born in Torquay in 1890, taught at home by a mother who pushed her to write early, and sent to a Paris finishing school at sixteen to study singing and piano. In 1914 she married Archibald Christie of the Royal Flying Corps; while he was at the war she nursed, and wrote a first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which reached print in 1920 and brought Poirot with it.

What she is exceptionally good at is not atmosphere and not character, both of which she keeps deliberately thin. It is structure. A Christie novel is a machine for making the reader look at the wrong person: the information is all there, distributed evenly and fairly, and the misdirection works because she trusts your own assumptions to do the concealing for her. The detectives are built to exploit exactly that. Poirot talks too much and lets people correct him. Miss Marple gets dismissed as a village busybody and uses the dismissal.

The career runs from 1920 into the 1970s and it does not stay level. The twenties and thirties are the great stretch, from Styles through Roger Ackroyd, Orient Express, the alphabet book and Death on the Nile. The forties and fifties stay strong and go quieter. The last novels, Passenger to Frankfurt and Postern of Fate, are late work and read like it.

Her second marriage, to the archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, put her on digs in the Middle East, and several books went there with her. She died in 1976. The adaptations have never paused since: the mid-eighties Miss Marple films are on this page, and new versions are still arriving.