Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Secondary/Minor Characters Who Deserve Their Own Book. This is just a quick run through of some of the characters in a few of Agatha Christie’s crime novels as I’m still not feeling up to writing much just yet, although the side effects of the chemotherapy aren’t quite so bad today.

1. Captain Hastings, a close friend, but he only appears in only eight of the thirty-three Poirot novels – he is the narrator in those books. He appears in the first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
2. Ariadne Oliver, a writer of detective fiction who assists Poirot. I think Agatha Christie enjoyed writing about her, using her to express her own thoughts about writing, about Poirot and playwrights adapting her plays. Probably my favourite Ariadne Oliver book is Mrs McGinty’s Dead.
3. Inspector Japp appears in several short stories and novels. Although he is a minor character in most of them, like Hastings he has a big part in three of the novels, including Death in the Clouds.
4. Raymond West, Miss Marple’s nephew in a few books including A Caribbean Mystery, in which she is on holiday that he arranged for her after her doctor had prescribed sunshine. 
5. Lucy Eyelesbarrow appears in just one book, 4.50 to Paddington. Miss Marple enlists her help in investigating a murder that was seen on a train but there was no trace of a body and no one was reported missing.
6. Mr Satterthwaite, an observer rather than an investigator, who was in his sixties, a little man, with an elf-like face, is Mr Quin’s friend. One of my favourite stories he is in is The Man From The Sea in The Mysterious Mr Quin, a collection of short stories.
7. Harley Quin always appears unexpectedly and suddenly, and then just as suddenly disappears. He is, without doubt, the most mysterious and unusual character in all of Agatha Christie’s books. She describes him as a figure invisible except when he chose, not quite human, yet concerned with the affairs of human beings and particularly of lovers. He is also the advocate for the dead.
8. Colonel Race, who appears in four of the books. The first one is The Man in the Brown Suit, one of her earlier books and a thriller rather than a detective story.
9. Luke Fitzwilliam, a policeman who had returned to England from abroad. He investigates the murders in Wychwood-under-Ash, a picturesque village, in Murder is Easy.
10. Victoria Jones in They Came to Baghdad, a story about international espionage and conspiracy. I grew very fond of the amazing Victoria Jones!