The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie

Nominated for the 2023 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical / Biography

The first specifically academic companion to contemporary scholarship on the work of Agatha Christie, this book includes chapters by an international group of scholars writing on topics and fields of study as various as ecocriticism and the anthropocene, popular modernism, middlebrow fiction, queer theory, feminism, crime and the state, and more. It addresses a broad selection of Christie’s crime novels, as well as her short stories, literary novels written pseudonymously, and her own and others’ dramatic adaptations for television, film, and the stage. Featuring unprecedented access to images and content held in Christie’s personal archive, as well as a Foreword from renowned crime fiction writer Val McDermid, this is essential reading for anyone interested in Christie's work and legacy.

Commended for Agatha Awards (Best Nonfiction) 2024

With well-established approaches to Christie alongside hitherto understudied or new(er) approaches, the Handbook can serve as a starting point into Christie Studies, while it also presents innovative interpretations and an impressive amount of thorough research to non-newcomers to Christie. English Studies
A thought provoking and stimulating read. Cross-Examining Crime
‘Long known as crime fiction’s best-seller and finest puzzler, Agatha Christie has recently been also recognized as a real social analyst. In The Bloomsbury Handbook twenty-one experts, including Val McDermid, give intriguingly varied accounts of Christie the world-aware searching novelist.’ Stephen Knight, Honorary Research Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia.

Mary Anna Evans is an Assistant Professor of Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma, USA. Her fourteen crime novels have received recognition including the Benjamin Franklin Award and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals. She holds an MFA in creative writing and is a doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter. Her work has appeared in publications including Feminist Studies, The Atlantic, The Louisville Review, and CrimeReads.

J.C. Bernthal is Visiting Lecturer at Middlesex University, UK. His publications include Queering Agatha Christie, The Ageless Agatha Christie and, with Rebecca Mills, Agatha Christie Goes to War. Bernthal founded the annual international Agatha Christie conferences in 2014 and sits on the editorial boards of Crime Fiction Studies and Clues: A Journal of Detection. Bernthal won the Popular Culture Association’s Dove Award for crime fiction scholarship in 2020.

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