The year I read twenty Hercule Poirot mysteries and fell in love with Agatha Christie

For years I enjoyed one-shot murder mysteries that friends recommended to me, but the genre hadn't really appealed to me. I've simply never been the kind of reader to actively try to solve the case. My friends who favor these books are often very interested in spotting red herrings and trying to outsmart the author. I'm just as content knowing whodunnit from the very beginning, as long as the novel itself has an enjoyable pace and character writing.

All this is to say that I have gone thirty years without reading anything by the 'queen of mystery' Agatha Christie, despite her being one of the best-selling authors of all time. But after skimming through a ton of romances this year and looking for other books with a brisk pace and a consistent ending, I gave in. Eventually, I got so sucked in that I started a passion project by reading all of Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries in order. of publication. It helped me find similarities in some of my favorite books, shows, and movies, and ultimately led me down a wormhole of so many others. I like to collect hobbies. In 2023, murder mysteries became my last.

I started with the books that friends recommended most passionately: And then there were none And Murder on the Orient Express. They both thrilled me – the first with its macabre and perfectly calibrated deaths, with a theme for each of the guests, building and breaking the tension. I immediately understood why And then there were none is considered one of her best. But Murder on the Orient Express lingered in my mind even longer, mainly because of the bombastic reveal of the murder at the end – and also because of the detective at the heart of the story, whose illustrious mustaches stole the show. This is of course the beloved Belgian mastermind Hercule Poirot.

In Orient Express, I immediately got a sense of his memorably peculiar habits: his need for order, his taste in clothes, and his sense of splendor (which he never possesses). But I was particularly struck by Poirot's morals; his decision not to hand these people over to the police after they solved the crime, because the victim himself was a heinous murderer. Here was literally a train full of murderers, confronted by a master detective, and yet they all walked away unscathed. Poirot, I immediately understood, did this because he wanted to use his little gray cells to solve the case. Does he appear in more of her books? I wondered, like a spring chicken. I was immediately rewarded.

Since July, my Libby app has been a long series of Poirot mysteries. I put the books in order so I could cross them off with my handy highlighter. Twenty books later, my hunger for it has only grown. I love Poirot's eccentricities: his constant attempts to retire and grow pumpkins, his tendency to meddle when he can help two people find love, and his insistence on never explaining what he's doing to his lovely, dim-witted friend Hastings (the narrator). of the early books in the series). Even if the murder mystery isn't always solved in my favorite way, I cherish the time I spend with Poirot so much that it hardly matters. Fortunately, Christie was masterful at crafting her mysteries and never seems to run out of inventive setups and solutions.

Reading through Hercule Poirot's foibles was also like opening a skylight in my mind. Very early on, Poirot helped me realize that I liked a locked-room mystery, and so I spent a month looking for other reading lists. Some of my favorites by Edgar Allan Poe belong in this legacy – which colored my memories of the strange child who carried her father's battered Poe omnibus with sticky notes. From there I added countless Dorothy L. Sayers to my library list before landing on a bag of Japanese Honkaku mysteries (Shimada Soji, Seishi Yokomizo). Impulsively, I started looking for contemporary American authors who write locked-room mysteries, but for the Instagram age, and landed on Lucy Foley's The guest list. I don't know that I would have found these authors any different, and would have enjoyed each of their unique approaches to my new favorite tropes.

I've also become distracted by imbibing contemporary films and shows that play with some of Christie's most famous sets. Like a detective with red thread and thumbtacks, I've been taking notes while revisiting much of Rian Johnson's recent work: Knives out And Poker face. I have developed a special love for a pair of conspiring con artists, like the man and woman in Death on the Nile, in which a man marries a woman for her wealth and then teams up with his true lover to kill that woman and share the newly inherited money. In poker face, I was delighted by episode five, which similarly showed a devious couple – but in the form of two former activists in a retirement home who committed murder together.

Ironically, it's the direct adjustments that I haven't deeply dealt with. I haven't seen any of Kenneth Branagh's films, nor the beloved series Poirot by Agatha Christie. Since Orient Express is what brought me to Poirot, the only adaptation I've seen is the 1974 film directed by Sidney Lumet, with an outrageous cast including Sean Connery, Anthony Perkins, Ingrid Bergman and Lauren Bacall. It's beautiful as a historical object, and as a film it has a distinct perspective, with its memorable climactic stabbing scene, well-executed monologues, and beautiful shots of the speeding train. It clearly feels like something that couldn't exist in the streaming age, where IP is increasingly recycled and adapted so faithfully that it seems to undermine a director's attempts at interpretation.

As I read deeper into Christie, I continued to discover that modern stories that pay tribute to her work are more enjoyable than stories that approach it as a straight adaptation. Why reproduce a facsimile of Christie's work when her style and inventiveness leave so much room for play? She wrote in the 1920s to the 1970s: the world is so different now and offers plenty of opportunities for light-hearted detective work. I look forward to the new stories her work will lead me to as I continue to read into the new year. But for now, I can be grateful for all the new beloved stories my journey with Poirot has brought me – from Christie or the stories she directly inspired.