The Agatha Christie Reading Challenge is run by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise. It’s an open-ended challenge to read all of Agatha Christie’s books. I’m not attempting to read them in order (as Kerrie is doing) but reading them as I find them.

Actually I don’t think of this as a ‘challenge’. To me a challenge should be just that – something that tests my ability to achieve a goal under difficult circumstances, something that needs effort and determination to achieve. Reading Agatha Christie’s books is pleasure, the only effort needed is finding the books and even that isn’t difficult these days. I’ve bought some and borrowed others from the library, although I still haven’t read some of the earlier books, I’m managing to fill in the gaps.

So far I have read her Autobiography, 30 of her full length books and 2 of the collections of her short stories:

Progress in publication date order (the links are to my posts on the books):

1. 1920 The Mysterious Affair At Styles
2. 1922 The Secret Adversary
3. 1924 The Man in the Brown Suit
4. 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
5. 1928 The Mystery of the Blue Train
6. 1929 The Seven Dials Mystery
7. 1932 Peril At End House
8. 1934 Murder on the Orient Express
9. 1934 Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (Aka The Boomerang Clue)
10. 1936 The A.B.C. Murders
11. 1937  Dumb Witness
12. 1937 Death on the Nile
13. 1938 Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
14. 1939 Murder is Easy
15. 1941 Evil Under the Sun
16. 1942 The Body in the Library
17. 1946 The Hollow
18. 1848 Taken at the Flood
19. 1949 Crooked House
20. 1951 They Came to Baghdad
21. 1953 A Pocket Full of Rye
22. 1956 Dead Man’s Folly
23. 1957 4.50 from Paddington
24. 1961 The Pale Horse
25. 1962 The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
26. 1964 A Caribbean Mystery
27. 1968 By the Pricking of My Thumbs
28. 1970 Passenger to Frankfurt
29. 1972 Elephants Can Remember
30. 1975 Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (written in the 1940s)

Short Stories:

1. 1932 The Thirteen Problems
2. 1933 The Hound of Death

Autobiography/Biography

Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

I’ll be reading these books in the coming months (linked to Amazon UK):

• Death in the Clouds – 1935
• They Do It With Mirrors – 1952
• The Moving Finger – 1942
• A Murder is Announced – 1950
• The Clocks – 1963
• Third Girl – 1966
• At Bertram’s Hotel – 1965
• Endless Night – 1967
• Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case – 1976 (probably written between the end of the 1940s and early 1950s), published after Agatha Christie’s death.

Short Stories:

• Complete Parker Pyne, Private Eye – an omnibus edition of Mr Parker Pyne stories
• The Golden Ball and other stories – 1971
• Miss Marple and Mystery: 20 short stories, published over 30 years

Biography:

• Agatha Christie at Home by Hilary Macaskill