Agatha Christie and the golden age of detective fiction

When we think of twentieth century literature as a popular cultural form, Agatha Christie (1890–1976), Britain’s pre-eminent crime fiction author after the First World War, is impossible to ignore. In terms of both the volume of sales and translation into other languages (over 100), her work is unparalleled in the history of publishing. As Charles Rzepka puts it, Christie is ‘not only the most prolific and popular author of detective fiction in the twentieth century, but the world’s best-selling writer, ever’ (a record which remains intact at the time of writing). In this free course you’ll examine one of Christie’s most significant works, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), and explore the evolution of British detective fiction in relation to Christie’s background, literary modernism and the development of middlebrow fiction.This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course A893 MA English Literature Part 1.

• Introduction
• Learning outcomes
• 1 Detective fiction and its origins
• 1 Detective fiction and its origins
• 2 The post-war detective fiction boom: historical and social context
• 2 The post-war detective fiction boom: historical and social context
• 2.1 Rethinking detective fiction
• 2.2 The author’s life
• 2.3 Gender and detective fiction
• 2.4 Christie’s political context
• 3 Structures of detective fiction
• 3 Structures of detective fiction
• 3.1 Mahjong: the function of the clue–puzzle narrative
• 4 The Purloined Killer: the role of the reader
• 4 The Purloined Killer: the role of the reader
• 5 Does Christie break ‘the rules’?
• 5 Does Christie break ‘the rules’?
• 5.1 The rules of detective fiction
• 6 Adaptation and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
• 6 Adaptation and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
• Conclusion
• References
• Further reading
• Acknowledgements