Agatha Christie: Where to Start, and 14 Books in Spoiler Order

Poirot has retired to a village to grow vegetable marrows, which he is bad at, and the doctor next door narrates the whole book. Roger Ackroyd, the richest man for miles, is found stabbed in his study on the night after a woman he was close to kills herself. Everyone around has something small to hide, and the doctor's sister Caroline collects all of it before lunch. It reads like a warm, gossipy village novel for two hundred pages, and then Christie does the thing that made half the crime writers of the 1920s furious with her.

Ten people who have never met are invited to a house on a small island off the Devon coast. Their host never appears. A gramophone recording accuses every one of them of a death they were never punished for, and then, in the order of the rhyme hanging in each bedroom, they start dying. Nobody else is on the island, so one of the ten is doing it, and the pool shrinks every chapter. There is no Poirot, no Marple, nobody whose presence promises that order gets restored. It is the most frightening book she wrote and also the tightest.

Poirot boards the Orient Express at Istanbul on a night when the carriage is inexplicably full. A snowdrift stops the train in the middle of nowhere, and by morning an American travelling under the name Ratchett has been stabbed repeatedly behind a locked door. No footprints outside, no way off the train, and every passenger has a tidy alibi that only holds if you believe them. Christie's real subject is not the killing. It is what a carriage full of respectable strangers will quietly agree to do, and what a detective decides he owes the law once he knows.

Linnet Ridgeway has money, looks and a new husband who used to be engaged to her closest friend. The couple leave for Egypt to get away from the mess, and Jacqueline turns up at every hotel and finally on the same steamer, smiling, doing nothing illegal. Poirot is aboard on holiday and watches the pressure build for a hundred pages before anyone dies. That slow first half is why the book works: by the time a shot is fired you know every passenger's debts, grudges and secrets, and you have already suspected the wrong person twice.

Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband, a painter, and died in prison. Sixteen years later her daughter arrives with a letter in which her mother swore she was innocent. There is nothing left to examine: no body, no scene, no new evidence, only five people who were in that garden on the day. Poirot interviews all five, then asks each of them to write down what they remember. You read the same afternoon five times, and the facts never change while the meaning of them keeps sliding under your feet.

A small ad in the Chipping Cleghorn gazette invites friends to a murder at Little Paddocks at 6.30 that evening. The neighbours assume it is a party game with drinks afterwards, so they arrive early and stand about being English. At half past six the lights go out, a man with a torch and a revolver comes through the door, shots are fired in the dark, and somebody is dead before anyone finds the fuse box. Miss Marple happens to be staying nearby. The village here is postwar, rationed and shabbier than the Christie of the picture postcards.

Poirot receives a typed letter daring him to be in Andover on the twenty-first. A woman named Ascher dies in her shop. The next letter names Bexhill, and a girl called Barnard is found on the beach. An ABC railway guide is left beside every body. This is Christie writing a serial killer decades before the genre had a name for it, with Hastings narrating and cold little chapters following a shabby travelling salesman who may be the man. The tension comes from the calendar: you know roughly when and where the next one falls, and so does everybody else.

Aristide Leonides came to England with nothing, built a fortune and installed his whole family in one large house that keeps sprouting extra wings. When his medicine is switched and he dies, the household closes around itself: two sons and their wives, a young second wife, a tutor, a formidable great-aunt and three children. Charles Hayward, in love with the granddaughter Sophia, tells the story from the inside. There is no Poirot and no Marple. The book is a study of what happens to a family that never has to leave the house or face anyone outside it.

Michael Rogers drifts between jobs and wants one thing: a stretch of ground called Gipsy's Acre with a view he cannot afford. He meets Ellie, who turns out to be very rich, and they buy the land and build a modern house on it against local advice, because an old woman keeps appearing to warn them off. For most of its length this reads like an uneasy romance told by a likeable narrator with time to talk. Christie was in her mid-seventies and writing in a first-person voice that sounds nothing like the rest of her work.

Colonel and Mrs Bantry wake to the news that there is a body in their library: a girl in a cheap spangled evening dress and a great deal of makeup, who has no business being in St Mary Mead at all. Dolly Bantry's first move is to send for her friend Jane Marple, partly to solve it and partly to stop the village deciding that her husband did it. The case travels from the village to a seaside hotel and a family with money. Christie set herself the job of taking the oldest cliche in English crime writing and making it stand up.

A hotel sits on a small island joined to the Devon coast by a causeway. Arlena Marshall, an actress whom everybody either wants or resents, spends her days sunbathing while her husband pretends not to notice the younger man following her about. Poirot is there in a straw hat being disapproving at everyone. When Arlena is found strangled on a cove that can be reached only one way, the timetable becomes the entire case, and half the hotel has an alibi built out of somebody else's wristwatch.

A priest is attacked after visiting a dying woman, and the list of names hidden in his shoe connects people who have all died quietly of ordinary causes. The trail leads to a former pub called The Pale Horse, where three women run something between a seance business and a contract killing service and insist the method is entirely spiritual. Mark Easterbrook, an academic with no business investigating anything, keeps pulling at the thread. Christie worked in a hospital dispensary in both world wars, and the poisons in her books are described by somebody who handled them.

Elspeth McGillicuddy is on the 4.50 out of Paddington when another train draws level with hers, a blind flies up, and she sees a man strangle a woman ten feet away. She reports it. The railway finds nothing, the police find nothing, and everybody is very polite about her age. Miss Marple believes her, works out where a body could have been pushed off the line, and sends the magnificent Lucy Eyelesbarrow into a nearby house as a cook to go looking for it. Lucy is the best character Christie invented and then never used again.

A diplomat waiting out a delay at Frankfurt is approached by a woman who says she will be killed unless he gives her his passport and his identity for a few hours. He agrees, mostly because he is bored, and the book then widens into secret youth movements, an international conspiracy and long drawing-room conversations about the state of the world. Christie was in her late seventies. The plot never settles, the villainy stays abstract, and the thing she was better at than anybody, hiding one specific person in plain sight, is simply not on the menu.