Agatha Christie Research Paper

Outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible, Agatha Christie has sold the third-most books at four billion worldwide (Facts about her life, n.d.). Many people ask how she was able to achieve this profound achievement. Clearly, her writing style and process are pivotal facets of this success. Agatha Christie crafted such famous mystery novels through her extensive planning, detailed and recognizable characters, and unexpected twists.
Agatha’s extensive planning of her books led to the making of complex stories. One way she planned was by using notebooks to keep track of ideas and plots. She had over one hundred of these notebooks, of which seventy-three survived, and would write down an idea as soon as she thought of it (AgathaChristie.com, n.d.). The notebooks were a decisive part of her writing process and “show that stories didn’t spring forth … her famously writerly voice was entirely constructed” (Kenneally C., 2010, para. 12). She also slowly developed her plots over long periods of time to be able to work on them extensively. One reason for her slow development was that her writing style was very random, although it was how she worked best. For example, Agatha would not even start with who the murderer

One way she did this was by making all of her plots different (Barnett D., 2017) with surprise endings that could still make sense of everything in the end (Kenneally C., 2010). Consequently, in almost every single one of her book endings, it is impossible to guess who the murderer is. Her stories make people ask important questions such as who did it and why they did it (Barnett D., 2017) as Christie’s characters were unpredictable and impossible to guess for the murderer. For instance, one of the narrators of her books is actually the murderer (Kenneally C., 2010). Her twist endings make all of her stories so much fun to read and hold one’s attention to the very