Queen of crime

Readers who love Agatha Christie's works attend a seminar to share their love for the writer at Tongji University in Shanghai. [Photo provided to China Daily]

It needs to be remembered, too, that while Christie's popularity has gone off the boil in China in recent years, Ajiasha Kelisidi was once a household name in the country. However, even though far fewer people now read the books that represent classic detective fiction in its halcyon days of the 1920s and 1930s, her devotees never seemed to be able to get enough of the genre and its acute observations of human nature in a world in which neat, predictable order, which now seems to be a thing of the past, is the norm.

Even after the most brutal of murders, in Christie's world, order seems to be restored and readers are made to feel safe again, once the culprit confesses to his or her crime, not in the face of overpowering evidence, but cold, cogently presented logic.

"Detectives like Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple are supremely confident about their intellectual prowess, and faced with that murderers are only too willing to admit their deeds," the writer Wang Jinwen says. "Such an age is gone forever."

The Chinese writer Zha Liangyong (Louis Cha), the contemporary master of martial arts fiction who writes under the name Jin Yong, says Christie is his favorite detective novelist and that he has read almost all her novels. What he finds attractive is her intelligence and logic, he says.

Zha has a knack of creating suspense in his novels, such as the cryptic message that a murder victim leaves about his killer in The Legend of Condor Heroes.

Wang Lin, 31, a public servant, devotes much of his free time to plays and detective stories. He has played a member of the 12-person jury in the Chinese stage adaptation of Christie's Witness for the Prosecution 99 times and says he appreciates her "from a different perspective".

He has read Christie since he was at primary school, he says, and once headed the play section of the Chinese Agatha Christie online forum. In January New Star Press published his translation of her short story collection While the Light Lasts.

"I've read a lot more detective novelists apart from her. I love her because in her novels murders are not that scary, and she sets the stories in exotic countries because she herself visited places in Africa and the Middle East. There are plots involving things like archaeology, and she's really good with poisons, which I find appealing."