Christopher Bollen: TOP TEN BOOKS

Jack Pierson_Chris Bollen_B0042928 (1)

Over the course of six novels, the writer Christopher Bollen has demonstrated a knack for writing moody, intelligent mysteries that never sacrifice character development on the altar of thrills (though thrills there are aplenty). “You want life to mean something, and you want it to hurt when someone dies and you want to feel the loss of their life,” he says on our podcast Shelf Life. Hurt it often does. When a major character is killed off in his 2015 novel, Orient, it catches in your throat, feels personal. In his sixth novel, the critical darling Havoc, what initially seems like a twisted version of Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple becomes a study of a deteriorating, dangerous mind as 81-year old Maggie Burkhardt meets her match in an 8-year-old rival, Otto. As the two engage in battle, anyone and everyone around them becomes collateral damage.

A diehard fan of Agatha Christie, one of several touchstones for his own writing career, we invited Bollen to identify ten of his favorite Christie novels for One Grand Books, something of a daunting task given Christie’s output: 66 novels and countless short stories.

Below are Christopher Bollen’s favorite Agatha Christie books, available to purchase individually or as a set.

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1

And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie
Me. Sixth grade. Cincinnati, Ohio. Sitting on a late afternoon in the living room before dinner. Terrified out of my head and unable to stop reading. Desperate to finish. This novel, of Christie at her cleverest, is the first and purest crystalline experience of me obsessing over a novel. Ten Little Indians (or And Then There Were None) is one of those groundbreakers that changes narrative forever. All horror films and reality shows that involve people dropping out one by one owe a debt to this classic.
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2

Death on the Nile

Agatha Christie
Yes, starting from the first page with the “scarlet Rolls Royce” driving through a quaint village, that holds a gorgeous American heiress. Death on the Nile is the ultimate style novel for Christie, where she fuses a genius mystery (I believe she’s mining Wings of a Dove here with the plot) with a decadent foreign location (the Karnak! The Nile!) and the most eccentric characters. An ultimate Agatha, and it was a huge influence on me to travel the world. Plus, it’s pure Poirot.
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3

A Murder is Announced

Agatha Christie
Jane Marple always plays second fiddle to Poirot, and when I was younger, I was fully behind this pecking order. Something has changed in me, and I find as I mature, a deep love for Marple mysteries. This, in my opinion, is the finest, a strange invitation to witness a murder that turns out to be exactly as promised. It’s a very wicked plot, and it shows what Christie can do with a quiet village.
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4

The Man in the Brown Suit

Agatha Christie
I’m a fan of Christie’s one-off adventure novels. You can feel the writer trying to stretch her legs beyond the confines of a closed-circuit who-done-it plot. This novel is packed with travel—subway, boat, train—and jumps continents—Europe, Africa—and Christie even weaves in political and social unrest. But she also is playing with narrative, using two dueling accounts to frame the plot. Finally, there was a 1989 made-for-TV movie of it starring Stephanie Zimbalist and Rue McClanahan that I’m not embarrassed to recommend watching.
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5

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie
Spoiler, don’t read further if you haven’t finished it. Okay, whenever I encounter the term “unreliable narrator” my mind immediately flashes to this novel. Another astonishing magic trick performed by Christie. What other writer has been so endlessly experimental?
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6

Nemesis

Agatha Christie
Many readers think the later Marple novels are wooden and flat. Many don’t like Nemesis. I’m sorry for them, because you put Marple on a bus tour of house and gardens, arranged by her old friend who appeared in A Caribbean Mystery. Soon, she’s hunting for the murderer of a young woman, and, in my mind, it’s a story of youth and age, an obsession with innocence, and innocence lost.
$15.99
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7

The ABC Murders

Agatha Christie
Perhaps no novel is quite as clever in plot as this Poirot classic. Christie loved puzzles, nursery rhymes, and maddeningly childlike patterns—case in point, victims seemingly being selecting according to the first letter of their names. I often wonder what she would have made of the Zodiac killer with all those puzzles and ciphers. The ABC Murders is that kind of novel galore, and we also get a lot of Poirot bon-mots and investigative legwork.
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8

Endless Night

Agatha Christie
Endless Night, about two young lovers of different classes who seem to be cursed, was written in 1967. It’s fascinating to watch Christie in her later years, writing about the young, trying to reckon with the cultural revolution that drastically transformed the social milieu which she chronicled so successfully in earlier eras. Sometimes—and understandably so—her attempts come off a little clunky and tin-eared. But in Endless Night she does achieve a sort of bizarre love triangle that hints at a more permissive age.
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9

Five Little Pigs

Agatha Christie
It surprises me that Hitchcock never felt the itch to tackle a Christie novel. Five Little Pigs would have been ideal, as it deals with so many of the two masters’ shared interests: repetition, family secrets, memories and hauntings. (The Hollow would have been my other Hitchcock suggestion). It’s hard enough for Poirot to solve a murder when the body is right in front of him, but now he has to deal with recollections of a murder from sixteen years ago.
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10

Evil Under the Sun

Agatha Christie
Okay, I love this novel, but I’m including it because I love the 1982 film even more. So this recommendation also serves as a love letter to all of the wildly terrific cinematic takes on Christie over the years that’s been a huge influence on me. The film, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot, alongside Jane Birkin, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Roddy McDowall, James Mason, and Sylvia Miles, wisely moved the action from the British coastline to sunny, glamorous Majorca. It’s a visual treat with costumes, musical numbers, and plenty of campy ripostes. And yet it’s also a devilish mystery.
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