Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Abstract
In Agatha Christie's literary career, which spanned over more than fifty years, the tally of murdered people in her mystery works approached three hundred. Her job as a nurse during World War I left a lasting mark on her career because during that period she developed a special interest in chemistry, poisons and drugs, which later influenced her writing style, and using poison became her forte. Consequently, many of her literary characters fell victim to some kind of toxin – arsenic, morphine, sleeping pills and even nicotine, to name a few. However, a large part of her books features a wide array of more violent and manual death causes – strangulation, stabbing, coshing, drowning and many more. Most of those crimes are solved by one of Christie's two most prominent detectives, a professional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot or a white-haired old lady Jane Marple. The former is a well-travelled retired Belgian policeman who gained worldwide fame due to his detective skills, and the latter a likeable spinster who spent most of her years living a rural life and only became an active investigator in the later stage of her life. Due to their different lifestyles, both their characters and investigation methods largely differ, but they are both successful when tackling a crime. The aim of this paper is to analyze some of the murders portrayed in Christie's works, describe the methods used by Monsieur Poirot and Miss Marple of solving the crimes, explain the main features of the two investigators, and compare them and their strategies of unravelling the mysteries surrounding the crime
