![]() ![]() ![]() She comes third in the rankings of the world’s most-widely published books, behind only Shakespeare and the Bible. ![]() Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, her novels having sold roughly two billion copies ( York, 2007, 1 Bernthal, 2016, 3). Popular culture hardly comes more popular than Agatha Christie. ![]() Thus Christie’s engagement with private enterprise provides a valuable snapshot of a society more critical of capitalism and, particularly between the wars, more ready to consider alternatives to it, than is the case in contemporary society. In so doing she regarded it as more important to capture the spirit of the times than to propagandise in ways which matched her allegiances. The article explains the gap between Christie’s political views and her portrayal of business by arguing that Christie’s fundamental task was to fashion dystopias. Christie also used the crookedness of business to provide capitalism’s victims with a motive for murder. She repeatedly depicted financiers as criminals, even murderers, during the inter-war years and later, in the post-war period, blurred the line between businesses and criminal conspiracies. Yet despite her leanings she adopted a critical stance on the world of business. There is indeed some evidence in Christie’s prose that she identified with conservatism. To the casual reader, Agatha Christie’s fiction seems to be saturated by a deeply conservative culture and supportive of the capitalist status quo. ![]()
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