Agatha Christie's success has not been checked by death…. What is it that has made the books live?

Certainly not the quality of the writing, which is at best no more than lively….

Yet if Agatha Christie was an indifferent writer, she was a most intelligent craftsman, who had considerable sensibility about the form in which she worked….

Other bad writers have been skillful craftsmen without lasting like Agatha Christie. Perhaps the nearest one can get to explaining the puzzle of her enduring popularity is to suggest that although the detective story is ephemeral, the riddle's attraction is lasting. There are those who find the detective story's origins in the Apocrypha, the story of Oedipus, or Voltaire's Zadig, but these are scholastic arguments. What is certainly true is that human beings have a passion equally for concealment and revelation. Agatha Christie's stories appeal strongly to very many people...