From 'Crooked House' to 'Endless Night', atmospheric Agatha Christie novels that deserve a second read

I love a good Agatha Christie as much as anyone. I still return to the big ones—Murder on the Orient Express, And Then There Were None, Death on the Nile—for their ingenious plotting, impossible murders, and dazzling denouements.

But over the years, I’ve found myself drawn to another variant of the classic Christie plot: the whydunnit.

Christie may have mastered the whodunnit, but she also loved exploring the why. That led to a fascination with what made people cross the line: jealousy, resentment, greed, class anxiety, and family secrets.

“Agatha Christie always wrote a variety of stories,” says Christie historian Mark Aldridge. “Many of her short stories from the 1920s are about the supernatural or human nature,” says the associate professor of Screen Histories at Southampton Solent University, Hampshire, England.

The enormous success of her murder mysteries, he explains, sometimes overshadowed this side of her writing. But Aldridge feels these novels work as pieces of literary fiction and “not just a crime to be solved”. “This is why I think they are some of the more fascinating novels to discuss,” he says.

Christie is having another remarkable year with Netflix’s Seven Dials, a new Tommy and Tuppence adaptation this autumn on BritBox, and the BBC’s Hercule. This year also marks 50 years since her death.

All in all, it’s a good time to revisit some of her darker, less discussed novels.

“These books, be it The Hollow or Halloween Party, are taut psychological dramas like today’s Gone Girl (by Gillian Flynn) and Then She Was Gone (by Lisa Jewell). The buildup is as exciting as the reveal,” says Shriya Kulkarni, a Pune-based homemaker and a Christie fan.

Here are seven novels that show just how atmospheric and unexpectedly dark Christie could be.

The Hollow

The dread in The Hollow begins long before the murder; it sits inside the marriage central to the novel. John Christow is a successful, much admired doctor. His wife, Gerda is timid, and never convinced she’s good enough for him.

John barely notices, and instead finds her devotion an inconvenience. “No man likes being drowned in treacle,” he tells her.

A country-house weekend brings the couple face to face with John’s lover and an old flame. By Sunday lunch, when Poirot arrives, John is dying by the swimming pool, Gerda standing over him with a revolver.

The real unease comes from watching Gerda disappear inside a marriage in which her husband has never really seen her, and the consequent psychological tension.

Crooked House

Published in 1949, Crooked House is Christie at her most poisonous. It turns the country-house mystery into a study of a family where suspicion runs through the walls—and foundations—of the home.

Aristide Leonides, the wealthy patriarch of an unusually complicated household, is dead. His death seems natural until poison is discovered, making almost everyone under the roof a suspect.

The house’s crooked architecture mirrors the family: seemingly straight and respectable, but full of (crooked) tensions. Christie shifts focus from the mechanics of the murder to who had reason to commit it, ending with an extremely unsettling reveal.

Endless Night

Christie was in her 70s when she wrote this novel in 1967, and it feels far removed from her familiar formula. Instead, this is a love-slash-ghost story with Gothic undertones and a sense of impending doom.

Michael Rogers dreams of building a house on Gipsy’s Acre, a stretch of land overlooking the sea. He gets his wish after marrying the wealthy Ellie. But the land has a dark history, and local warnings of a curse abound.

“There’s no luck for them as meddles with Gipsy’s Acre,” a villager warns. The threat feels less like a mystery, more like fate closing in.

At Bertram’s Hotel

Miss Marple goes to London looking for something familiar: the old-fashioned Bertram’s Hotel, known for its polished service and said to have been inspired by Brown’s Hotel. But things are no longer what they were like when she was a girl.

The guests are eccentric characters and people whose stories don’t add up. When one heads to the airport on the wrong day, a chain of disturbing events exposes what’s really happening at Bertram’s.

Published in 1965, the novel is less a Christie puzzle and more a study of appearances and a changing England. Miss Marple’s affection for the hotel makes the mystery even more unsettling.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

Christie’s Poirot and Miss Marple are untouched by time, but Tommy and Tuppence are now elderly. However, they remain as curious, argumentative and incapable of leaving a mystery alone as they were in their youth.

It begins with a visit to Tommy’s aunt at a nursing home where residents seem to know more than they should. One woman asks Tuppence: “Was it your poor child? There behind the fireplace?” Soon, Aunt Ada dies.

The clues lead to old secrets, disappearances and rumours of black magic. The title, borrowed from Macbeth, sets the tone: “Something wicked this way comes.”

The Pale Horse

A murdered priest, a dying woman’s confession and a list of names lead Mark Easterbrook to the Pale Horse, an inn where three women are rumoured to practise witchcraft. Soon, there’s a string of unrelated deaths.

A sinister inn, fog and the possibility of black magic seem chilling, but can death be brought about through suggestion? Christie keeps the supernatural possibility alive just long enough to make you doubt what you’re reading. “Life is always dangerous—never forget that,” she writes.

Sleeping Murder

Christie wrote Sleeping Murder in the 1940s, but it wasn’t published until 1976, the year of her death, giving this final Marple novel an eerie quality before the mystery begins.

Newly married Gwenda Reed moves into a house in Plymouth that feels strangely familiar. Fragments of memory surface: a staircase, a voice, the image of a murdered woman. Gwenda doesn’t have a clue, but the house seems to know. Her search leads her to Miss Marple, who’s cautious about disturbing the past. “Let sleeping murder lie,” she advises. Gwenda and her husband don’t listen, and the eerie happenings lead to a rational, unexpected end.

Teja Lele writes on travel and lifestyle.