The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie Earl F. Bargainnier
This study of the technique of Agatha Christie's detective fiction - sixty-seven novels and more than one hundred short stories - is the first extensive analysis of her accomplishments as a writer. Bargainnier demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her genre and, with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, was able to develop for more than fifty years surprising variations within those conventions.