Reading Groups

Agatha Christie and the Most Unforgivable Crime with Mary Anna Evans

4 Sessions Mondays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT March 10 to May 12, 2025

Online via Zoom

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The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
3/10, 3/31, 4/21, 5/12
Online via Zoom

Most sources list Agatha Christie as the bestselling novelist of all time, but why has her work struck such a chord in readers from all over the world? At least part of this wide and lasting appeal must be due to her exploration of the darker parts of the human heart. In dozens of books, she returned to the subject of evil and asked what could be done about it—but what was, in Agatha Christie’s opinion, the worst thing a human being could do?

Christie famously kept her thoughts to herself, but one of her most notorious novels, And Then There Were None, gives us a good idea of what “The Queen of Crime” thought was an act of ultimate evil. In Murder on the Orient Express and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, she revisits this theme and reinforces it. And in 2019, a century after Christie wrote her first novel, Rachel Howzell Hall put her own contemporary spin on it in They All Fall Down. Join Dr. Mary Anna Evans for a series of conversations about how crime novelists grapple with questions around society’s ability to address crime. What, if anything, can be done when a coldblooded murder escapes justice?

What to read in advance of the first meeting: And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

What to expect from this reading group: This class will be a guided conversation. Dr. Evans will provide context for how these books fit into Christie’s body of work and into Christie’s own observations about justice, but the participants are encouraged to come with questions and observations of their own to share.

Reading List:

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side by Agatha Christie
They All Fall Down by Rachel Howzell Hall

Capacity: 20

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Mary Anna Evans

Mary Anna Evans

Mary Anna Evans is a tenured professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches courses that include mystery writing and suspense writing. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers-Camden and a PhD in English literature from the University of Exeter, and her research on Agatha Christie’s work has taken her to archives on both sides of the Atlantic, include the private holdings of The Christie Archive Trust. She is the co-editor of the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity, and HRF Keating Award-nominated Bloomsbury Guide to Agatha Christie. She is also the author of seventeen mystery novels, which have received recognition including the Benjamin Franklin Award and the Will Rogers Gold Medallion. Her Gothic suspense novel The Dark Library will be published in June 2025.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

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