If you ever wanted to know the secrets of writing detective fiction, The Open University is staging a free short course of the work of 20th Century whodunnit queen Agatha Christie.
According to Guinness World Records, Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Now the OpenLearn short course, Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, sets out to show why her style of writing was popular and reveals some of the secrets behind Christie’s success in constructing the perfect mystery plot.
Academics at The Open University have analysed the whodunnit clue-puzzle narrative she used and its importance in her success as a leading figure in post-war detective-fiction. 
She stood head and shoulders above her contemporaries in the 1920s as the most famous of the queens of crime fiction, alongside Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh.
And while it’s only eight hours in length, the course, which has been abridged from the OU’s MA English Literature degree, focuses around one of Christie’s first novels, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Dr Anthony Howell, Staff Tutor and Senior Lecturer in English at the OU, who wrote the course, said:
“Christie is a pivotal figure in the golden age of detective fiction.
“In many ways, she picks up the baton from Arthur Conan Doyle, who was reaching the end of his long series of Sherlock Holmes stories. But Christie introduces disarming provincial settings and her detective-protagonists like Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple often work within domestic, every-day frames of reference.
“This course is likely to appeal to any fan of murder-mystery dramas, whether in the form of prose fiction or visual culture, especially those with an urge to discover how they really work and what rules they follow.
“The plots we see play out on TV and in the movies are all indebted to some degree to the clue-puzzle formulas Christie pioneered from the likes of Midsomer Murders and Bergerac to the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the more modern take on the Poriot-esque hero in the shape of the Knives Out series.
“Even fantasy fiction like the Harry Potter stories employ the tried-and-tested strategies of the whodunnit form.”
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