Nominated for the 2023 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Critical / Biography

The first specifically academic companion to contemporary scholarship on the work of Agatha Christie, this book includes chapters by an international group of scholars writing on topics and fields of study as various as ecocriticism and the anthropocene, popular modernism, middlebrow fiction, queer theory, feminism, crime and the state, and more. It addresses a broad selection of Christie's crime novels, as well as her short stories, literary novels written pseudonymously, and her own and others' dramatic adaptations for television, film, and the stage. Featuring unprecedented access to images and content held in Christie's personal archive, as well as a Foreword from renowned crime fiction writer Val McDermid, this is essential reading for anyone interested in Christie's work and legacy.

'Long known as crime fiction's best-seller and finest puzzler, Agatha Christie has recently been also recognized as a real social analyst. In The Bloomsbury Handbook twenty-one experts, including Val McDermid, give intriguingly varied accounts of Christie the world-aware searching novelist.'