Queen of crime

The woman who gave us Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple is still going strong 40 years after she died

Like many top criminals, she has a string of aliases. Call her Lady Mallowan, Mary Westmacott, Ajiasha Kelisidi or plain old Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, and in so doing you will have fingered she who done it.

What she has done is gain a legion of loyal readers in China, and as with all good detective novels there is a fiendish twist: she has achieved all of this from beyond the grave.

The first witness for the prosecution is Shen Yijie, 29, from Shanghai, who works in the IT industry and who has lived in Hong Kong for more than 10 years since attending university. She has attended two events at Tongji University in Shanghai in recent months marking Christie's death 40 years ago on Jan 12, 1976.

Shen, the head of an online Chinese forum devoted to Christie, was pleasantly surprised by how many people showed up in Shanghai to talk about the writer, her fiction and her reception in China since the 1940s "because these days Chinese prefer Japanese detective stories to those written half a century ago".

But, these latter-day masters of the genre come nowhere close to Christie in terms of sales. Her devotees say that if you tot up book sales through the centuries, her only competitors are the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, her sales totaling 2 billion copies in various languages. Her fiction has been adapted for the screen 180 times, says the news magazine Sanlian Weekly, and a new movie adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express is said to be in the works and due to be released next year.