What are your favourite and least favourite Agatha Christie books?

My fave has always been Crooked House - just love the cast of characters and the plot and I think it's got the best twist.

Second fave is Peril at End House

Least fave the Tommy and Tuppence ones, I can't even get through them.

Just read Appointment With Death and The Hollow and really enjoyed both.

Towards zero is one of my favourite books ever. The ending still gives me the chills (in a good way) whereas the ending of Crooked House, whilst a good read, was really disturbing. The Pale Horse is also a really good stand alone novel.
Favourite Poirot novels would be Death on the Nile, Peril at end house, Three act tragedy, Five little pigs and Cards on the table. Not much of a fan of Poirots short stories but love the Miss Marple Thirteen Problems.

Favourite is Mrs MicGinty’s Dead, absolutely hilarious. Least favourite probably Postern of Fate, I couldn’t get through it.

I do like that one. Very underrated.

And OH the mad push to shoehorn Marple into proper stand-alones like Endless Night, the Pale Horse, Chimneys, Evans...

Not cheap but I love the latest special edition hardback versions of Christie classics. Harper collins seems to be bringing out a few each year around October/ Nov.

Heres Death on the Nile. They are very art deco in style and look lovely on my bookshelves

Love this thread! I have lots of these in a hardback collection. I spent my university years buying lots of second hand AC books. During lockdown I read the surviving ones again and got seriously into the All About Agatha Podcast - it's basically an AC bookclub. It's a read and rank of every book. Highly recommend.

Having read all her books, my favourite was Towards Zero. Just felt it was so clever in its approach.

The television adaptation as a Marple was appalling!

The Mysterious Mr Quinn, Parker Pyne and Tommy and Tuppence are my enduring favourites. I'd love to see a televisation of Mr Quinn stories. I don't know who'd play Satterthwaite or who would play Mr Harley Quinn but I know I'd enjoy them.

I also loved Peril at End House, that was the first Agatha Christie book I ever read.

The TV adaptations with David Suchet as Poirot are superior in every way; Peter Ustinov notwithstanding, he hammed up the part perfectly.

Favourites are probably
Taken at the flood
The Mirror crack'd from side to side
Endless Night
Witness for the Prosecution

I don't like Tommy and Tuppence or Parker Pyne .

Increasingly they are out of copyright

Not in the UK. Copyright lasts for seventy years after the death of the creator.

Absolutely love:

A Pocketful of Rye
The Clocks
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Moving Finger
Hickory Dickory Dock
The ABC Murders

Third Girl, Dead Man's Folly and Five Little Pigs are ok. Don't really like many others.

Me too, but then I quite like most of the early thriller/far fetched ones in a totally different way to the straight detective stories - The Secret Adversary, Why Didn't They Ask Evans, The Secret of Chimneys (which is bonkers but deeply enjoyable) and The Seven Dials Mystery.

Not a huge fan of Partners in Crime but I do like N or M. Though no wonder Tommy is a bit slow, the number of times he's been knocked on the head...

Five Little Pigs, Sad Cypress and Crooked House are all excellent reads. I want to like The Hollow but the Angkatells are all so totally unlikeable.

Good point earlier about the much-used plot point of 'everyone looks different in different clothes' - Lord Edgeware Dies, After The Funeral, Murder in Mesopotamia, Evil Under The Sun, The Secret of Chimneys, The Mystery of the Blue Train...

And then there are the 'nicked the identity of someone the rest had never met' books like Hercule Poirot's Christmas, A Murder Is Announced, Dead Man's Folly, Taken At The Flood, Mrs McGinty's Dead, Cat Among The Pigeons, and a dozen others.

Just remembered that I really, really don't like Taken At The Flood.

No, but I spent several happy years as a teenager tracking down all 108 in second hand book shops 😀

Increasingly they are out of copyright so always worth checking online for a freebie.

My least favourites are The Blue Train, The Man in the Brown Suit and the Harlequin books.

The Blue Train was Agatha's own least favourite. She wrote it after the breakup of her marriage, when she had to write something because she needed the money, but her heart and mind were not really in it.

My favourites are Ackroyd, 10 little Indians, cat among pigeons

On a slightly separate note has anyone found a collection of her books? Like a box set for all of them?

I like the Miss Marple books best and my favourite TV Miss Marple is Joan Hickson. Other favourites are Crooked House, And Then There Were None and Five Little Pigs. My least favourites are The Blue Train, The Man in the Brown Suit and the Harlequin books.

I like the Miss Marple books best and my favourite TV Miss Marple is Joan Hickson. Other favourites are Crooked House, And Then There Were None and Five Little Pigs. My least favourites are The Blue Train, The Man in the Brown Suit and the Harlequin books.

'Oh look! The clues were in the stools were we bequeathed! That we were sitting on the whole time! Maybe now they will ask us to be top secret agents for ever more!'

I really hate those books.

Least favorites - anything with sodding Tommy and bloody Tuppence sodding Beresford.

I didn't like a lot of the Miss Marple books when I was younger - I thought there was too much taking of tea and people wandering round villages with nothing much happening (other than people being murdered of course).

Now I really like them precisely because of the time people spend taking tea and wandering round villages with not much happening. Actually the murder sometimes just gets in the way of the village life descriptions.

My absolute favourite is The Moving Finger. The characters are unusually well developed and the transformation of Megan is lovely! I also really rate Crooked House, The Hollow, Cards on the Table and Death on the Nile. Endless Night is superb.

Having said all that, I still rate her autobiography above her novels. Her life was so interesting and she describes it in fascinating detail.

Thank you to the pp who mentioned that podcast, I have many happy hours of listening ahead.

Entirely agree with you about not being keen on the later books - I want breakfasts being laid out on the sideboards at country house weekends, gas lamps, underhousemaids and 1930's slang!

I'm surprised to hear that people don't like the Tommy and Tuppence books! They're some of my favourites! We're currently listening to N or M on audio book.

I like quite a lot of them but off the top of my head - Nemesis, At Bertram's Hotel, The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Don't like Death in the Clouds - far too obvious and the edition I have actually has the killer on the cover!

Not a fan of the 'woo' Parker Payne/Harlequin books - just too odd.

Not a fan of Crooked House.

The Hollow is my absolute fave! My heart is so in sync with the girl who just wants to be taken away from the strife of working life and have tea brought up in the morning…