Agatha Christie Audio Books

Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. Agatha Christie also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections (especially those featuring Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple), and her successful West End plays.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly four billion copies(!), and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the most widely published books.

According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most translated individual author, with only the collective corporate works of Walt Disney Productions surpassing her. Her books have been translated into at least 103 languages.

Agatha Christie published two autobiographies: a posthumous one covering childhood to old age; and another chronicling several seasons of archaeological excavation in Syria and Iraq with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan. The latter was published in 1946 with the title, Come, Tell Me How You Live.

Agatha Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the record for the longest initial run: it opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in London on 25 November 1952 and as of 2012 is still running after more than 24,600 performances.

In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honour, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA for Best Play. Many of her books and short stories have been filmed, some more than once (Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and 4.50 from Paddington for instance), and many have been adapted for television, radio, video games and comics.

In 2004, a 5,000-word story entitled The Incident of the Dog's Ball was found in the attic of the author's daughter. This story was the original version of the novel Dumb Witness. It was published in Britain in September 2009 in John Curran's Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years Of Mysteries, alongside another newly discovered Poirot story called The Capture of Cerberus (a story with the same title, but a different plot, to that published in The Labours Of Hercules).

Read more about Agatha Christie at Wikipedia

This is one of the classics - a murder happens and a helpless witness can do nothing about it: One of my favourite Agatha Christie audiobooks!

For an instant the two trains ran together, side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth witnessed a murder. Helplessly, she stared out of her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman's throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away.

But who, apart from Miss Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there were no suspects, no other witnesses - and no corpse.

... the way Agatha Christie develops this story is brilliant and the many turns and twists are truly surprising!

4.50 From Paddington - Agatha Christie Audio Book Download.
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Jane Marple, usually referred to as Miss Marple, is a fictional character appearing in twelve of Agatha Christie's crime novels and in twenty short stories. Miss Marple is an elderly spinster who lives in the village of St. Mary Mead and acts as an amateur detective. Alongside Hercule Poirot, she is one of the most famous of Christie's characters and has been portrayed numerous times on screen. Her first appearance was in a short story published in The Sketch magazine in 1926, "The Tuesday Night Club", which later became the first chapter of The Thirteen Problems (1932). Her first appearance in a full-length novel was in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.

The character of Miss Marple is based on Agatha Christie's grandmother ], but there is no definitive source for the derivation of the name 'Marple'. The most common explanation suggests that the name was taken from the railway station in Marple, Stockport, through which Christie passed, with the alternative account that Agatha Christie took it from the home of a Marple family who lived at Marple Hall, near her sister Madge's home at Abney Hall.

Agatha Christie attributed the inspiration for the character of Miss Marple to a number of sources: Miss Marple was "the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother's Ealing cronies - old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl". Christie also used material from her fictional creation, spinster Caroline Sheppard, who appeared in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. When Michael Morton adapted Roger Ackroyd for the stage, he removed the character of Caroline replacing her with a young girl. This change saddened Agatha Christie and she determined to give old maids a voice: Miss Marple was born.

The character of Jane Marple in the first Miss Marple book, The Murder at the Vicarage, is markedly different from how she appears in later books. This early version of Miss Marple is a gleeful gossip and not an especially nice woman. The citizens of St. Mary Mead like her but are often tired by her nosy nature and how she seems to expect the worst of everyone. In later books she becomes more modern and a kinder person.

Read more about Miss Marple at Wikipedia.

Hercule Poirot is a fictional character created by Agatha Christie. Along with Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot is one of Agatha Christie's most famous and long-lived characters, appearing in 33 novels and 51 short stories published between 1920 and 1975 and set in the same era.

Hercule Poirot has been portrayed on radio, on screen, for films and television, by various actors, including John Moffatt, Albert Finney, Sir Peter Ustinov, Sir Ian Holm, Tony Randall, Alfred Molina and David Suchet.

Hercule Poirot's name was derived from two other fictional detectives of the time: Marie Belloc Lowndes' Hercule Popeau and Frank Howel Evans' Monsieur Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer living in London. Hercule Poirot's initials replicate that of the sauce which he happens to like, HP Brown Sauce, as he comments in Elephants Can Remember: "Ah yes, that is correct my initials do appear to be the same as such a fine delicacy, a good English creation".

A more obvious influence on the early Poirot stories is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In an autobiography Agatha Christie admits, "I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition - eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp". For his part Conan Doyle acknowledged basing his detective stories on the model of Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, and his anonymous narrator, and basing his character Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, who in his use of "ratiocination" prefigured Poirot's reliance on his "little grey cells".

Hercule Poirot also bears a striking resemblance to A. E. W. Mason's fictional detective-Inspector Hanaud of the French Sûreté-who, first appearing in the 1910 novel At the Villa Rose, predates the writing of the first Poirot novel by six years. In chapter four of the second Inspector Hanaud novel, The House of the Arrow (1924), Hanaud declares sanctimoniously to the heroine, "You are wise, Mademoiselle%u2026For, after all, I am Hanaud. There is only one."

Agatha Christie's Poirot was a francophone Belgian. Unlike the models mentioned above, Christie's Poirot was clearly the result of her early development of the detective in her first book, written in 1916 but not published until 1920. Not only was his Belgian nationality interesting because of Belgium's occupation by Germany (which provided a valid explanation of why such a skilled detective would be out of work and available to solve mysteries at an English country house), but also at the time of Christie's writing, it was considered patriotic to express sympathy with the Belgians, since the invasion of their country had constituted Britain's casus belli for entering World War I, and British wartime propaganda emphasized the "Rape of Belgium".

Read more about Hecule Poirot at Wikipedia

1920 The Mysterious Affair at Styles - Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, Inspector Japp
1922 The Secret Adversary - Tommy and Tuppence, Inspector Japp
1923 The Murder on the Links - Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings
1924 The Man in the Brown Suit - Anne Beddingfeld, Colonel Race
1925 The Secret of Chimneys - Anthony Cade, Superintendent Battle
1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - Hercule Poirot
1927 The Big Four - Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, Chief Inspector Japp
1928 The Mystery of the Blue Train - Hercule Poirot
1929 The Seven Dials Mystery - Eileen "Bundle" Brent, Superintendent Battle
1930 The Murder at the Vicarage - Miss Marple
1931 The Sittaford Mystery ( also Murder at Hazelmoor) - Emily Trefusis, Inspector Narracott
1932 Peril at End House - Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, Chief Inspector Japp
1933 Lord Edgware Dies (also Thirteen at Dinner) - Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, Chief Inspector Japp
1934 Murder on the Orient Express (also Murder in the Calais Coach) - Hercule Poirot
1934 Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (also The Boomerang Clue) - Bobby Jones, Frankie Derwent
1935 Three Act Tragedy (also Murder in Three Acts) - Hercule Poirot, Mr. Satterthwaite
1935 Death in the Clouds (also Death in the Air) - Hercule Poirot, Chief Inspector Japp
1936 The A.B.C. Murders (also The Alphabet Murders) - Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, Chief Inspector Japp
1936 Murder in Mesopotamia - Hercule Poirot
1936 Cards on the Table - Hercule Poirot, Colonel Race, Superintendent Battle, Ariadne Oliver
1937 Dumb Witness (also Poirot Loses a Client) - Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings
1937 Death on the Nile - Hercule Poirot, Colonel Race
1938 Appointment with Death - Hercule Poirot
1938 Hercule Poirot's Christmas (also Murder for Christmas / A Holiday for Murder) - Hercule Poirot
1939 Murder is Easy (also Easy to Kill) - Luke Fitzwilliam, Superintendent Battle
1939 Ten Little Niggers ( also And Then There Were None / Ten Little Indians)
1940 Sad Cypress - Hercule Poirot
1940 One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (also An Overdose of Death / The Patriotic Murders) - Hercule Poirot, Chief Inspector Japp
1941 Evil Under the Sun - Hercule Poirot
1941 N or M? - Tommy and Tuppence
1942 The Body in the Library Miss Marple
1942 Five Little Pigs (also Murder in Retrospect) - Hercule Poirot
1942 The Moving Finger (also The Case of the Moving Finger) - Miss Marple
1944 Towards Zero - Superintendent Battle, Inspector James Leach
1944 Death Comes as the End - Hori
1945 Sparkling Cyanide (also Remembered Death) - Colonel Race
1946 The Hollow (also Murder After Hours) - Hercule Poirot
1948 Taken at the Flood (also There is a Tide...) - Hercule Poirot
1949 Crooked House - Charles Hayward
1950 A Murder is Announced - Miss Marple
1951 They Came to Baghdad - Victoria Jones
1952 Mrs McGinty's Dead (also Blood Will Tell) - Hercule Poirot, Ariadne Oliver
1952 They Do It with Mirrors (also Murder with Mirrors) - Miss Marple
1953 After the Funeral (also Funerals are Fatal / Murder at the Gallop) - Hercule Poirot
1953 A Pocket Full of Rye - Miss Marple
1954 Destination Unknown (also So Many Steps to Death)
1955 Hickory Dickory Dock (also Hickory Dickory Death) - Hercule Poirot,
1956 Dead Man's Folly - Hercule Poirot, Ariadne Oliver
1957 4.50 from Paddington (also What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! / Murder She Said) - Miss Marple
1958 Ordeal by Innocence
1959 Cat Among the Pigeons - Hercule Poirot
1961 The Pale Horse - Inspector Lejeune, Ariadne Oliver
1962 The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (also The Mirror Crack'd) - Miss Marple
1963 The Clocks - Hercule Poirot
1964 A Caribbean Mystery - Miss Marple
1965 At Bertram's Hotel - Miss Marple
1966 Third Girl - Hercule Poirot, Ariadne Oliver
1967 Endless Night
1968 By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Tommy and Tuppence
1969 Hallowe'en Party - Hercule Poirot, Ariadne Oliver
1970 Passenger to Frankfurt
1971 Nemesis - Miss Marple
1972 Elephants Can Remember -Hercule Poirot, Ariadne Oliver
1973 Postern of Fate - Tommy and Tuppence (this was the last novel that Agatha Christie wrote)
1975 Curtain - (Poirot's last case, written four decades earlier) - Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings
1976 Sleeping Murder - (Miss Marple's last case, written four decades earlier) - Miss Marple