Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction

This book brings a new lens to the work of Agatha Christie through a series of close readings which challenge the official solutions by Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.

This book''s approach interweaves two core ideas: first, it explores the importance of French critic Pierre Bayard''s self-styled ''detective criticism''; second, it takes detective criticism in a new direction by refocusing on the beginnings of Agatha Christie''s novels. In this way, the book counters the end-orientation that has traditionally dominated the reading experience of, and critical response to, detective fiction by exploring the potential of the beginning to host other interpretations and stories. Offering a new way of reading detective fiction, this book is a mixture of narratology and detective criticism, and deploys it in the form of radical new readings of a number of Christie''s most famous works.

This illuminating text will interest students and scholars of crime and detective fiction,