The Christian Science Monitor

100 years on, it’s no mystery why Agatha Christie’s stories endure

For years, the English village of St. Mary Mead has been the unlikely murder capital of the world. The literary world, that is. Agatha Christie’s fictional hamlet – the home of amateur sleuth Jane Marple – has seen its unfair share of murders, including at the vicarage. 

Last year, 4 million people purchased books written by Christie, known as the Queen of Mystery, to visit the bucolic worlds within her pages. They came to peer into the parlors of country estates where her beloved detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, solve seemingly impossible cases. 

Yet there’s still one

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