History Creator / AgathaChristie

* CanadaEh: Canadians tend to be meek, polite, good subjects of the Empire, and are given little other identity of their own. In general, Canada gets off more lightly than [[{{Eagleland}} America]], [[LandDownUnder Australia]], or other parts of the world, and the country is generally treated as simply a repository for British subjects who needed to be out of the country for one reason or another. Young women from families struck by poverty or tragedy are often sent to Canada to stay with relatives; wealthy executives occasionally go there for business.

** A minor character, Mr. Robinson, appeared briefly with each of Poirot and Miss Marple, as well as in ''Passenger to Frankfurt'', which featured neither of them. He also appears in ''Postern of Fate'', with Tommy and Tuppence.

** The Beresfords have clearly heard of Hercule Poirot enough to make jokes about him and pretend to be him while solving a case in ''Partners in Crime'', and in ''The Secret Adversary'' they meet [[spoiler:someone borrowing the identity of]] Poirot's friend Inspector Japp.

* ''Literature/HerculePoirot'', a retired Belgian police detective turned P.I. Fastidiously neat, he pretended to be a FunnyForeigner in order to put his clients and suspects off their guard. Agatha Christie herself eventually tired of the character, but since fans enjoyed him, she continued to write Poirot stories. He appeared in 33 novels and 51 short stories.

* [[index]]Literature/HerculePoirot series

* AmateurSleuth: It would be quicker to list the Christie protagonists who ''aren't'' amateurs: Literature/HerculePoirot (a former officer of the Belgian police, turned private detective) and Superintendent Battle (a police detective).

* HeroicRussianEmigre: Agatha had quite conservative political views, typical for her epoch: she disliked Bolshevism and tended to portray post-1917 Russian émigrés in a generally sympathetic light, though also recognizing that the chaotic situation often gave life to spurious claims to non-existent nobility status by various impersonators. Examples of the émigrés include "Countess" Vera Rossakoff, Literature/HerculePoirot's only acknowledged love interest, and Princess Natalia Dragomiroff from ''Literature/MurderOnTheOrientExpress'' [[spoiler:who was a {{Vigilante|Man}} seeking to avenge [[WouldHurtAChild the murder of a child]], and was acquitted by Poirot.]]

* LateArrivalSpoiler:Christie's novels occasionally revealed the solutions of previous works, a habit which vexed her publishers. See the Literature/HerculePoirot page for several examples.

** ''Literature/HerculePoirot'':

* CerebusRollercoaster: Christie wrote her most serious and psychological works (like ''Literature/FiveLittlePigs'' or ''Literature/TowardsZero'') and two of the novels with the most alarmingly high body count (''Literature/DeathComesAsTheEnd'' and ''Literature/AndThenThereWereNone'') in the middle of her career, in the 1940s. Perhaps it was no coincidence that UsefulNotes/WorldWarII was going on, and war took a toll on her. Her earlier and later stories, are, in general, more lighthearted. Also she wrote Curtain (Poirot's last novel [[spoiler:ending with his death]]) during that period, as she feared she would not survive the Blitz.

* CanonWelding: Christie's main detectives never crossed over, but several minor characters did, effectively tying the majority of her detective fiction into the same universe.

** As noted under AuthorAppeal above, Christie was also an expert in Mesopotamian and Egyptian artifacts and culture; her second husband was an architect, and she often accompanied him on his trips to those regions of the world, allowing her to do research firsthand and incorporate it into her stories.

* {{Bowdlerise}}: There is a pretty fair amount of racism and anti-Semitism scattered throughout the Christie canon, especially in the early books. Within Christie's lifetime, and indeed within a few years of publication, her masterpiece ''Ten Little N***s'' had the title changed to ''Ten Little Indians''. In later years when that title was recognized as only marginally less bad, the American title, which from the beginning was ''And Then There Were None'', was universally adopted. In the 21st century, new editions of various Christie novels have been controversially [[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/26/agatha-christie-novels-reworked-to-remove-potentially-offensive-language#:~:text=Poirot%20and%20Miss%20Marple%20mysteries%20written%20between%201920%20and%201976,protagonists%20encounter%20outside%20the%20UK. edited]] to remove racist and anti-Semitic bits.

** ''Literature/{{Nemesis}}'' (1971)

* TheEndingChangesEverything: Naturally, it occurs to some extent in quite a few works, but the most prominent examples are probably ''Literature/TheMurderOfRogerAckroyd'', ''Theatre/TheUnexpectedGuest'' and ''Literature/EndlessNight''.

** AuthorAvatar Ariadne Oliver's most popular character, Sven Hjerson, is a thinly-disguised expy of Poirot. He's lanky and Finnish rather than plump and Belgian, and [[PickyEater a vegetarian who grates his vegetables]] rather than being a NeatFreak, but his creator's in-universe complaints mirror Christie's growing dislike of Poirot in real life. In 2021, Sweden's TV4 actually made a Hjerson series with the full blessing of the Christie estate.

** "That's queer," I ejaculated suddenly beneath my breath.

* SheIsAllGrownUp: Between ''Secret of the Chimneys'' and ''Seven Dial Mysteries'', lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent has grown from being "just a kid" to a very eligible young woman pursued by both George Lomax and Bill Eversleigh.

** She also enjoyed the occasional LiteraryAllusionTitle, with several works referencing famous poems and plays. ''Postern of Fate'' and the short story "The Gate of Baghdad" both came from the first quarter of the poem Gates of Damascus by James Elroy Flecker. ''The Mirror Cracked From Side To Side'' is from the [[Creator/AlfredLordTennyson Tennyson]] poem "The Lady of Shalott". ''Sad Cypress'', ''Taken at the Flood'' and ''By the Pricking of my Thumbs'' are all Creator/WilliamShakespeare.

-->-- ''Series/DoctorWho'', [[Recap/DoctorWhoS30E7TheUnicornAndTheWasp "The Unicorn and the Wasp"]]