Two podcasters set out to read every Agatha Christie book. It became much more than that
LOS ANGELES — At first glance, Kemper Donovan's backyard bungalow appears perfectly normal for this Santa Monica neighborhood, but a few clues suggest otherwise.
A map of the English county of Devon. A copy of "The Poisoner's Handbook." A professional-looking microphone perched on a wooden desk. And then there's the enormous portrait of Agatha Christie hanging next to the guest bed.
If you use your little gray cells — as Christie's fictional detective Hercule Poirot liked to say — you might deduce that this is where Donovan, 43, records the long-running podcast "All About Agatha." In it, he and co-host Catherine Brobeck set out to read and rank all of Christie's 66 mystery novels, and discuss them in exhaustive detail.
For six years, thousands of Agatha Christie enthusiasts across the globe have downloaded the podcast for what one listener described as a "joyfully geeky" take on the Queen of Crime's expansive canon. In addition to the mystery novels, Christie penned 14 short story collections, two memoirs, more than 20 plays and six non-mystery novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
Donovan and Brobeck discussed all of it with glee. As "Agathologists," they lectured at the University of Cambridge on the collective catharsis of the denouement (when the detective gathers everyone in the drawing room to reveal the killer), gave media interviews on the steady stream of new Christie adaptations, and became
