Peter Ustinov in Evil Under the Sun — Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot in the 1982 film of Evil Under the Sun. Photograph: Rex Features

Agatha Christie: little grey cells and red herrings galore

This article is more than 13 years old

There's much to enjoy in Agatha Christie. Here's a selection of five of her best moments

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Although it's widely viewed as her masterpiece, the critics initially accused Christie of not playing fair. Breaking previous rules of detective fiction, the novel sees Hercule Poirot investigate Ackroyd's murder and slowly and spectacularly unravelling the mystery of the suicide of the woman Ackroyd loved. We won't spoil the twist for you.

The Body in the Library (1942)

"You've been dreaming, Dolly," Colonel Bantry tells his wife. "Bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I've never known a case in real life." Christie wrote in her foreword to this Miss Marple mystery that she wanted to do a variation on a well-known theme, with "a highly orthodox and conventional library" but "a wildly improbable and highly sensational body". She provides the reader with red herrings galore before Marple works out whodunnit.

Murder on the Orient Express (1934)

It wasn't to Raymond Chandler's taste – "only a halfwit could guess it", he said – but thanks partly to the 1974 film adaptation, which won an Oscar for Ingrid Bergman, this could be Christie's best-known mystery. Poirot books passage on the train only for a fellow passenger to be found dead the next day. It's up to the Belgian to work out which of his fellow travellers is a murderer.

The Secret Adversary (1922)

Christie's second novel is the first to star her lesser-known detectives Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley. Desperate for money, they hire themselves out as "young adventurers, willing to do anything, go anywhere", only for their first assignment to turn sour.

Evil Under the Sun (1941)

Poor Poirot: "moustaches magnificently befurled", he is enjoying a well-earned holiday on an island off the Devon coast, and what do you know? One of his fellow guests, the beautiful Arlena Stuart, is murdered. His "little grey cells" are tested to their utmost as he discovers that nearly all his fellow guests have a connection to Arlena. But which of them had the means and the motive to kill her?

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