Agatha Christie: The Essential Novels

Ten strangers are lured to Soldier Island off the Devon coast, where a gramophone record accuses each of them of a death the law never reached. Collins Crime Club published it on 6 November 1939 under a rhyme-derived title containing a racial slur; Dodd, Mead's US edition of January 1940 supplied the name used today, and a 1985 reprint was the first British publication to carry it. No detective appears, which is the whole design.

Voted the best ever crime novel by the Crime Writers' Association's members, announced at Foyles in London on 5 November 2013. William Collins published it in 1926. Poirot has retired to the village of King's Abbot to grow vegetable marrows when a wealthy neighbour is killed, and the local doctor, James Sheppard, writes the account you read. Take it second rather than first: it lands hardest on a reader who already knows how a Christie normally behaves.

Snowdrifts strand the Simplon-route train between Vinkovci and Brod, with a dead American shut inside his own compartment and every passenger in the carriage holding a reason to lie. Collins Crime Club published it on 1 January 1934; Dodd, Mead issued it in America on 28 February as Murder in the Calais Coach, dodging a clash with Graham Greene. Poirot's case, and the Daisy Armstrong backstory is the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping barely disguised.

Sixteen years after the painter Amyas Crale was poisoned in his garden studio, his daughter hires Poirot to prove her mother Caroline innocent. Witnesses write out what they remember, so one afternoon comes back five times with the furniture rearranged. Dodd, Mead published it in May 1942 as Murder in Retrospect; Collins Crime Club followed in January 1943. Robert Barnard rated it the best Christie of all, and he has a case.

Chipping Cleghorn's local paper carries a notice giving the place and time of a murder that has not happened yet, and half the village turns up at Little Paddocks to watch. Collins Crime Club and Dodd, Mead both published in June 1950, promoted as Christie's fiftieth book — a count that swept in the story collections. Marple's strongest plot, and the ration-book England around it is observed, not decorated.

Alice Ascher dies in her Andover tobacco shop, Betty Barnard on the beach at Bexhill, and an ABC railway guide lies open beside each body. Collins Crime Club published it on 6 January 1936. Isaac Anderson, in the New York Times Book Review of 16 February 1936, thought it better than Ackroyd. Poirot again, and the alphabet is a smokescreen — working out what it hides is the pleasure.

Linnet Ridgeway marries Simon Doyle, who was engaged to her friend Jacqueline de Bellefort, and Jacqueline follows the honeymoon aboard the Nile steamer Karnak. Collins Crime Club published it on 1 November 1937. E. R. Punshon wrote in the Guardian of 10 December that Christie had never handled minor characters better. Poirot is a passenger, not an investigator, for half of it — everything needed sits in plain sight early.

Aristide Leonides came from Smyrna to London in 1884 at twenty-four, made a fortune, and is poisoned decades later inside a lopsided mansion called Three Gables, three generations of his family under the one roof and every one of them plausible. Dodd, Mead published it in March 1949, Collins Crime Club on 23 May. Christie named this and Ordeal by Innocence her own favourites among her books. No series detective, and the closing pages are the coldest she wrote.

Dolly Bantry wakes her husband to report a dead blonde on the hearthrug at Gossington Hall, and the Colonel's standing in the village starts rotting from that hour. Christie set a rule in her foreword: keep the library entirely conventional, make the corpse wildly improbable. Dodd, Mead published it in February 1942, Collins Crime Club in May. Marple's case, and the best thing Christie wrote about gossip.

Michael Rogers, a chauffeur with no prospects, wants the plot of cursed land called Gipsy's Acre, and gets it, along with a rich wife and a house by the architect Rudolf Santonix. Collins Crime Club published it on 30 October 1967 at eighteen shillings. Christie normally took three or four months over a book and wrote this in six weeks. No detective; the title is Blake.

Leonard Clement, vicar of St Mary Mead, opens by remarking that killing Colonel Protheroe would be a service to the world, and is narrating an inquiry within four chapters. Collins Crime Club published it on 20 October 1930. Marple had appeared in magazine short stories from December 1927, but this is her first novel, and she arrives already sharp, unsentimental and correct.

Mr Shaitana invites eight people to dinner: four detectives, and four he believes have already got away with murder. They divide into two rooms for bridge, and by the end of the rubber the host is dead in his chair. Collins Crime Club published it on 2 November 1936. Christie's foreword says the deduction must be entirely psychological, so Poirot reads the scorecards as character studies.

Jerry Burton, grounded after a flying crash, moves with his sister to Lymstock to convalesce and finds the village drowning in poison-pen letters accusing everyone of something. Dodd, Mead published it in July 1942, Collins Crime Club not until June 1943. Christie wrote in her autobiography that she was really pleased with it. Marple turns up only in the last quarter, after the police have run out of ideas.

Written during the Blitz of 1940-41 in case she was killed in the raids, then kept in a bank vault and issued by Collins Crime Club in September 1975, thirty-four years on. Poirot comes back to Styles Court in Essex, the house of his first English case, in a wheelchair and dyeing his hair. The New York Times gave him a front-page obituary on 6 August 1975. Read it fifteenth, never first.

Nobody dies for a third of the book. Starting months early with a suicide attempt, a shoplifting accusation and a tennis player's two wives, the novel walks its cast forward to the hour when the murder finally happens. Dodd, Mead published it in June 1944, Collins Crime Club in July. Superintendent Battle investigates at Gull's Point, Saltcreek — neither Poirot nor Marple. Her boldest structure.