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.