Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie is a 1980 Non-fiction works about Agatha Christie by Earl F. Bargainnier about Agatha Christie's writing style and narrative techniques used in her works. The book was published by Popular Press in hardcover in 1980. University of Wisconsin Press published a paperback edition in the same year (ISBN 9780879721596). Earl F. Bargainnier, who died in 1987, was Fuller E. Callaway Professor of English Language and Literature at Wesleyan College. A former president of the Popular Culture Association, he was the author of more than sixty articles including some about Agatha Christie.
Blurb from inside dust jacket[]
"The most popular English writer of the twentieth century, Agatha Christie has received little critical attention. This study of the technique of her detective fiction--67 novels and 117 short stories--is the first extensive analysis of her accomplishment as writer. Her work is of the type called Golden Age or classic detective fiction, and the study begins with a survey of the nature of that genre. Bargainnier then examines the major elements of Christie's fiction: setting, character, plot, and theme, as well as other narrative devices and techniques.
The study demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her genre and, with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity was able to develop for over fifty years surprising variations within those conventions. Hercule Poirot. Miss Jane Marple, and her other detectives have entertained millions around the world, as they solved the baffling problems she set for them and, as Bargainnier clearly shows, though those problems are most often the result of murder, Christie's presentation of them is gentle."