If there is one writer who should own the patent to the phrase, ‘And the murderer is….’, then it has to be the enthralling Dame Agatha. Born and raised in England, she used her surroundings as backgrounds for many of her novels. She was a keen traveler and took her readers along for the ride whether it was on a boat sailing down the Nile or on a train headed to Istanbul. Her travels to faraway places provided invaluable information on settings she would use for her books. She even gave her fans a little more bang for their buck by creating her own real life mystery by vanishing for eleven days. Even after death she is still one of the bestselling authors of all time with over 4 billion copies of her works sold.
From the novels to short stories to plays, the lady knew how to put the meaning of enigma into all her efforts. She did dabble in drama and romance but it’s in mystery writing that she won the hearts of her followers. Every page in her books was a new adventure waiting to be unraveled. Her characters were timeless and we all wished to have had an uncle Poirot or an aunty Jane if only to have a glimpse at their unworldly powers of deduction.
It’s almost impossible to pick one book that’s an absolute favorite. Her books are like stars in the sky. On different nights some are more visible than others, but they all shine even if it’s behind the clouds. In the end the one book that outshone, or rather outsold, the rest was ‘And then there were none’ set in her home area of Devon. A masterfully written mystery novel that bordered on horror produced the perfect example of a vigilante in Justice Wargrave. The characters’ obsessive compulsion to set right unpunished injustices is a brand of craziness every reader admired even though the motivation behind it was questionable. Every word, page and chapter could create enough tension to pull a whale out of water.
So we salute the grand dame of whodunits, without whom we wouldn’t have had so much fun finding out who did do it.