Agatha Christie books - Classics?

Five Little Pigs is a good one.

They are classics and they are taught because of her famous unreliable narrator.

Books can be classics for a variety of reasons. Not every book she wrote is a classic but I think and then there were none stands out as a novel.

You can't go wrong with an Agatha Christie. In my view, they are all classics and worthy of a read. There's not just Miss Marple or Hercules Poirot, there's Tommy and Tuppence, Harley Quin, and another host of individual characters who are all involved in their own right and equally as important...

Yes, the Harley Quin stories are so different. Never been televised as far as I know, nor have the Parker Pyne stories.

There are 5 Agatha Christie books on the Big Deal on Amazon kindle today - just in case anyone is interested.

I agree with the pp who said that Agatha Christie novels are well written popular fiction rather than classics.
I'd also put Little Women and Daphne du Maurier in this category.

That doesn't mean that it was ok for your friend to mock you for liking them. She was rude and a book snob. Classic novels aren't somehow morally superior to other books and liking them doesn't make you a better person.

But what is ‘popular fiction’? What is a ‘classic’ ? It goes back to the similar kinds of discussions around ‘literary’ and ‘commercial’ fiction. They’re all just labels mostly used to market books. People then use them to somehow feel more intellectual which is obviously not a sign of real cleverness. There are zero prizes for being more into a narrow range of ‘classics’ than into extremely clever, well-constructed books that play with form and hook us in and hoodwink us.

Agatha Christie is the bestselling author of all time, bar Shakespeare and the bible, beloved by millions if not at this point by billions for over a century, and I think the reason she is critically underrated is in part due to historic sexism.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier is one of the cleverest books ever written, it bears rereading and rereading.

What you like isn’t the point being argued, though. Dubbing something a generally-recognised ‘classic’ is making a claim about both its literary quality and its canocity and likelihood to endure. I’d say AC’s novels, or some of them, would be regarded as classics of Golden Age genre fiction, but not ‘classics’ in general.

im not sure he OP’s friend is necessarily being a snob either. If you could only bring a single book to a desert island, would a novel whose main point is the revelation of the murderer, which loses much of its power on rereads, or a novel which bears more rereading because its insights into character or the quality of the prose are always showing you something new? Even on your hundredth read?

Classics, to me, mean they are read by numerous people, made into films and don't lose their appeal over time. So Agatha Christie is right up there. Only literary snobs will disagree. On the other hand, I've never been able to read a Booker prize book and enjoy it.

There's an old 1980s series, recently shown on Sky Arts, called The Agatha Christie Hour. That features some AC short stories including Parker Pyne.

Lots of books which are popular around the time they are written, get described as classics.

An age of mass access to a large amount of books is relatively new. More have been written and produced in the last 50 years than previously. Things like Agatha Christie have mass appeal and currently have been read by millions. The same can also be said for Enid Blyton and many other popular books which have endured for decades. Publishers label books things like ‘Penguin Classics’ or ‘Penguin 20th century classics’ when they are sometimes 30 years old and just very popular.

We probably can’t tell yet if Agatha Christie will be a classic. To be honest, there is a limit to how many books from each generation can actually be classics….those which endure beyond their period into the distant future. A small number per generation will still be around in 500 years time.

It’s hard for us to imagine that most books we like to read are very much ‘of our time’. They have appeal to us as they reflect our ideas and values. Today, people like the 30s that Agatha Christie writes about and that kind of murder story. Will people like that in 200 years? Quite possibly not and the books might well sink and few people still be reading them or have heard of them. After all, how many writers are we all still reading and can name from 200 years ago? Things become classics when they break the mould into a new literary form, or are the very best of their type.

Without doubt, Agatha Christie has endured in popularity beyond most books written at the time she wrote. She has spurned numerous copy-cats and maybe a genre of writing. Is it great literature? No. Do people love it? Yes.

Adrian Mole was on the GCSE syllabus for a few years. It was hugely popular and reflected the period it was about amazingly well. Some teens continue to read it, but it is largely read by the adults who knew the period it was about, and its peak popularity is long gone. Will it be considered a classic in 200 years?

That’s the thing isn’t it….in the future, people will mostly be reading books produced within the last 50 years, as we do now. There will be some that endure but only a few can make it from each generation.

In my view, it’s not a true classic like Jane Austen or Dickens. However,it has enduring and widespread appeal at the current time.

Most Booker Prize novels won’t become classics either. They might or might not be widely popular. They might endure or not.

This!

Rebecca/Daphne du Maurier books have much more depth in characters and setting surely, more literary talent.

I love Agatha Christie too but I think of her books as more iconic than classic. Her writing isn’t anything spectacular, but it’s the repetitive use of characters (Miss Marple, Poirot) and the clever plots that have become well known and iconic.

To be fair, most of the 'classics' weren't even written in one go - they were churned out in parts for magazines - Dickens, Collins, Conan Doyle, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Verne...

I have a Masters in literature. Of course they are classics.
Your friend is an idiot.

Whatever you do, don't watch the Armie Hammer/Lily James version. It's a travesty.

I’d consider her best books to be classics. Harold Bloom doesn’t include Agatha Christie on his famous list, but then what IS a classic? OK, Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Sons and Lovers, etc. But something doesn’t have to be high-brow and intellectual to be good. P. G. Wodehouse, for example, never wrote a serious word in his life, yet he’s one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language - far superior to Thomas Hardy. When he died, critics even compared him to Shakespeare!

An Agatha Christie novel isn’t a classic in the same way as, say, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, or Walter Pater’s art criticism, or Lawrence’s Women in Love. I mean, she isn’t trying to say something profound about time, or art or sex. But you don’t have to be profound to be great. She is a superb writer. She’s a classic in the same way that Wodehouse or Tolkien or Wind in the Willows or Sherlock Holmes are classics. I love her and value her as much as I love and value Virginia Woolf.

One of the most enjoyable things in my life is listening to Agatha Christie novels on Audible, particularly those narrated by Hugh Fraser.

But what does literary talent mean?? Christie’s ability to capture readers from the very first page and keep them hooked IS a literary talent, one that’s often overlooked and underrated. You speak of Dickens, one of whose greatest skills was deft characterisation- yet Christie in a very few lines created two of the best known characters in the world.

People are so weird about how they perceive books.

This is such an interesting question, and one which I've had many debates with friends about.

When I was doing my MA in writing, one of our tutors was talking about what makes good "literary" writing. I pointed out that Dickens did none of the things he was lauding - and yet Dickens is viewed (rightly, imo) as a master. His answer was basically "but this is how we do things now". My point here is that perceived quality of writing is not necessarily what makes a classic, as this changes with literary fashions. There's something else - maybe popularity, maybe intertextuality, which transcends even the writing.

I do think there can be a lot of snobbery around genre fiction in particular. I love AC (you can probably tell from my username that I'm a big Golden Age fan) and have probably reread her books more than any other author. It's very easy to knock her novels; some aren't great, but then she wrote a lot of them - but some really are masterful in their plotting and use of narrator. I think she probably suffers from the JK Rowling effect - people are disdainful because of her immense popularity.

Is it the Hitchcock version you’ve seen? Be prepared for the fact that the novel differs in one key respect — without spoilering it, the Hays Code meant that Hitchcock had to alter a major plot point. The novel is brilliantly ambiguous.