Agatha Christie, popularly known as “The Queen of Crime”, is coming back to India in a different form. Had she been alive, she would have been 127 years now. Christie, who first published her crime thriller ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ in 1920 and went on to hog the global literary world as the best-selling novelist and widely read author after Shakespeare is being brought back to India by Harper Collins, one of the leading publishing houses in the world.
The company is celebrating the silver jubilee of its India operation by bringing out the facsimile editions of 25 best-selling works by Agatha Christie, which include Evil Under the Sun, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (Hercule Poirot is the most popular detective in crime fiction after Sherlock Holmes), Five little Pigs, A Murder is Announced and After the Funeral’.
“These limited hardback facsimile editions have been reproduced from the first editions published between the 1920s and 1970s with the jacket and text of each title is presented exactly as they had originally appeared in hardback. The idea is to give the reader and Agatha Christie’s fans the rare experience of encountering these much-loved books in the form in which they were first published,” said Barani Kannan, spokesman, Harper Collins. .
“The vintage Agatha Christie, the celebrated writer, who took three to four generations of book lovers by storm, is staging a come-back through these facsimile editions bringing a kind of nostalgia. It is also an attempt to introduce the author who penned down some of the most exciting thrillers to the new generation which is hooked to e-books and cyberspace,” added Kannan. Each book is priced at Rs 399/-making it a sporty offer and the books are being marketed as a collectors’ series.
Christie’s books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and another billion in 44 foreign languages. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 19 plays, and six novels under the name of Mary Westmacott and saw her work translated into more languages than Shakespeare. Her enduring success, enhanced by many film and TV adaptations, is a tribute to the timeless appeal of her characters and the unequalled ingenuity of the plots.