When Agatha Christie featured her ace sleuth Hercule Poirot for the last time in The Curtains, a popular British newspaper ran an obituary on him.

But Poirot was never dead. In fact, he and his female counterpart Miss Marple have attained immortality as the mascots of mystery novels.

Their popularity as crime solvers continues to soar high even in this 120th birth anniversary year of their creator Agatha Christie, who reigns supreme as the  Queen of Crime.

Her contemporary and fellow writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the master who made Sherlock Holmes, apart, few writers of crime fiction in these many years have managed the art of  intrigue that came so easily to her.  
 
Christie’s mystery novels spun with ingenuity and meticulousness only to be unravelled strand by strand with logical reasoning and judicious deductions bracket themselves into the category of ‘unputdownables’.

The bafflement and intrigue of the opening chapters giving way to profound awe and immense gratification at the end, when the mystery would come untangled, are all part of the ‘Agatha Christie’ experience.

No wonder the macabre, tasteless and gory murder mysteries of today fall miserably short of the standards she set. It is a tribute to their timelessness that her fictional crime thrillers written in the early part of the 20th century remain best sellers till date next only to the Bible.

With 80 crime novels and 19 stage plays to her credit, Christie was a statuesque writer. Her crime fiction never resorted to cheap thrills and titillations. The language had a touch of refinement to it and the techniques that never failed her were a strong plot coupled with intricate characterisation, garnished with suspense and thrill in the right ratio.

Her skill lay in deftly weaving the yarn of fictional crime with wefts and warps of intrigue and suspense which left the reader awed and gratified all at once.

And her detectives though not suave and certainly not young are renowned like her. When Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective with an egg shaped head and a waxed moustache or Miss Jane Marple a senior spinster, with her finicky obsession for the queen’s English, set themselves upon some mystery, the readers can rest assured that it will be solved.  

But the mystery queen had some mysteries in her life that remain unsolved till date. For instance, Christie once went missing for nearly two weeks, when her husband announced that he was having an affair. She was later traced to a remote hotel, where she was found under her husband’s lover’s surname.

She said that she remembered nothing, and doctors declared that she had amnesia. But her eleven day hiatus had the King and the Queen call on Doyle and the best of detectives to trace her. Such was the frenzy that the three crime novels she had penned till then, whipped up.  

Like any successful frontrunner, Christie has spawned a number of copycats, who have tried and are repeatedly trying to match her talents in crime story telling. The truth, however is that the paragon is yet to find her match and it is doubtful if she ever would.