Kate Emery’s new book is set at a family beach holiday in Western Australia. My Family and Other Suspects is a mystery where, you know how it happens, there’s a murder and Ruth, the teenage murder mystery fan in the family, decides that she’s the one to investigate. As Kate says, it owes a lot to Agatha Christie.
The first Agatha Christie I ever read came from the bookshelf of my family’s holiday home, where the alternative was some fairly problematic 1990s bodice rippers.
Romance has much to recommend it, but I never regretted my choice of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – a Christie mystery that famously shocked with what has since become a trope of crime fiction: the unreliable narrator.
Christie pioneered or perfected many cliches of the murder mystery genre: red herrings, country houses teeming with suspects and creepy child murderers among them. She knew it wasn’t enough to have a clever puzzle to be solved. Readers then and now want wit, compelling characters and a splash of social commentary on their journey to find out whodunit.
Such was Christie’s contribution to the genre that nobody should be surprised that new adaptations of her work are perpetually in development. As I write, Netflix is working on a three-part series based on The Seven Dials Mystery, Melbourne and Sydney will next year see a stage production of And Then There Were None and new Hercule Poirot novels and films continue to be made by British crime writer Sophie Hannah and British director Kenneth Branagh respectively.
The length and breadth of the Christie empire dwarfs even the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Nor should anyone be shocked that modern crime writers continue to play in Christie’s sandbox.
Her DNA can also be found in a new generation of young adult Australian murder mysteries, from Amy Doak’s Eleanor Jones series to Troy Hunter’s Gus and the Missing Boy and my own YA crime novel, My Family and Other Suspects.
Every writer wants to believe their book is a unique snowflake but all of us stand on the shoulders of giants and Christie’s are more crowded than most.
My Family and Other Suspects checks plenty of the boxes that helped make Christie both so beloved and enduring.
Remote country house? Check.
Eccentric cast of suspects? Check.
Amateur detective sure they know best? Check.
Red herrings designed to throw the reader – and the detective – off track? How could it be otherwise?
My Family and Other Suspects’ teenage detective, Ruth, doesn’t share the luxuriant moustaches of Poirot, Christie’s arrogant Belgian detective, nor the twinkling eyes of Miss Marple, the elderly spinster whose bobbly pink cardigans concealed a cynical heart.
But Ruth shares some of Poirot’s self-confidence and, like Miss Marple, is underestimated because her age.
Young adult crime is having a moment – with Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder and Karen McManus’ One of Us Is Lying series leading the charge – but young readers have always loved reading about murder for the same reason adults do. It’s why Christie is still read by teenagers, despite the old-fashioned settings and the occasional unwelcome intrusion of historic sexism and racism.
The greatest risk of reading Christie in 2024 is that her work may seem familiar, not because you’ve read it before but because every murder mystery writer that followed her has been gently, lovingly, doing their best to replicate what she made look so effortless.
Myself included.