*LIVE!* Episode - Agatha Christie's Greatest Narrator? (Recorded at the 2026 Agatha Christie Festival)

All About Agatha Christie

Recorded live at the 2026 Agatha Christie Festival, this episode features a panel debate using a 'balloon debate' format to determine the great

Key takeaways

• The debate focused exclusively on first-person narrators, intentionally excluding third-person perspectives.
• Leonard Clement was a major winner in the rounds due to his witty, engaging portrayal of St. Mary Mead life.

Main topics

• Agatha Christie Narrators
• Balloon Debate Format

Notable quotes

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, in this book, I think we tell other people's stories in order to obfuscate.

Conclusion

The episode offers a deep, scholarly, and entertaining dive into the m

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) This is Believe. One network. Every topic. Everywhere. Speaker 2 (0:11) Welcome to All About Agatha, the podcast dedicated to reading and ranking every single mystery novel written by the queen of crime, Dame Agatha Christie. You might have heard of her. I am Kemper Donovan, and I am thrilled to be bringing you another live episode from the heart of Agatha land here in Torquay on the south coast of England. All About Agatha is now officially 10 years old. Yeah. Speaker 2 (0:42) In September 2016, my friend Catherine Brobeck and I began the process of reading and ranking all of Christie's novels. We had five glorious years together in which we did that and much more. And after Catherine's tragic passing, it has been my privilege to continue the podcast on my own and to come here every September to connect with fellow fans and scholars, all the people who have made it possible for this podcast to continue for as long as it has. So thank you for that. I am also especially excited to be returning to this year what has become a beloved format, the balloon debate. At past festivals, we crowned Agatha Christie's greatest novel, Agatha Christie's greatest short story, and Agatha Christie's greatest adaptation. It is now time to crown Agatha Christie's greatest narrator, an exercise that just may be particularly apt this year due to the anniversary of a certain novel. I will leave it at that because we will get to it and there is no need to spoil things yet. But speaking of spoilers, we all up here will do our best not to spoil anything major about the books and characters we discuss. But please know that it is difficult to have a substantive conversation without at least a little spoilage. So if you're overly concerned about spoilers, this may not be the episode for you. That was for the listeners, by the way. This episode is being recorded. You're all stuck. You're stuck in this room. I suppose you could stick your fingers in your ears, but I think we'll all be okay. So, who do we have up here? Who, along with me, is going to battle it out as to Agatha Christie's greatest narrator? I will start furthest away from me and go in. First up, we have Tina Hodgkinson, who is the author of a very accomplished book that came out earlier this year, Agatha Christie's London, a historical guide to the Queen of Crime's capital, in which she draws on her expert knowledge as a public speaker specializing in Agatha Christie and London history and on her work as a City of London and City of Westminster tour guide, in which, guys, she has created a series of walking tours centered on Agatha Christie in London. Next up, we have Brad Friedman, who can be found writing about Agatha Christie and other subjects relevant to the golden age of detection at his blog. And it really is one of the best blogs in the business for us Christie and mystery fans. Ah, sweet mystery. That blog has been going strong for the past 11 years. So Brad beats me. Brad has retired from a 31-year-long career as a theater arts educator, but he continues to work in theater in the San Francisco Bay Area where he lives and where he puts on his fair share of Christie plays. I also have to note it was Brad's idea to do a balloon debate about Agatha Christie's greatest narrator. He pitched it to me soon after his appearance at the 2024 festival, and I knew immediately it was going to happen because how could we resist such a thing? Next up, I have Dr. Jamie Berntall-Hooker, who has written and or edited several books on Agatha Christie, including Agatha Christie, A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, and with Mary Anna Evans, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie, among others, such as Queering Agatha Christie, a personal favorite of mine. He publishes a great newsletter called The Christie Catch-Up on Substack. I highly recommend it. And a visiting fellow in creative writing at the University of Suffolk, Jamie is also a crime writer in his own right who received the Crime Writers Association Short Story Dagger in 2025 for a fabulous short story. I recommend everyone read if you haven't already. If I'm being honest, I'm a little scared of him. More scared of him than I was before after reading it. But isn't that the best compliment? where a mystery author is concerned. And then finally, very much last but not least, is Victoria Dowd, the award-winning, best-selling author of the Smart Woman's Mystery series. She has been shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association dagger. She also writes the blog, Adapting Agatha. She is the vice chair of the Crime Writers Association, and before becoming a writer, was a criminal defense barrister for many years, as we have heard in years past. at this very festival, on this very panel, during which she gave such an interesting perspective on witness for the prosecution. Her historical crime novel, Death in the Aviary, was released this year and is the first book in a new series. And her standalone novel, The New Rules of Murder, will be published by Sphere in April next year. It also just so happens to be her birthday today. You missed Agatha's birthday by three days. You know, what could have been? And you already know about me, though I will just mention that in addition to hosting the All About Agatha podcast, I am also a mystery novelist. I just came out with the third book in my mystery series, which just so happens to be available in the bookstore at the back of this space, along with many of the titles that I have just mentioned, authored by my co-panelists. We do have pens, and we would love to sign any of them if you are so interested after this event. Okay, now for the rules. Many of you already know how this works. I will be brief. We've nominated nine narrators from Christie's Works who are ranked according to the number of nominations they received. Starting with our number nine and number eight narrators, we will pit these two against each other, debate which one of them should win. We each get one minute, and I will be timing each of us. And the winner of that round then goes up against whoever is next, all the way up to our final round, our top two nominated narrators. after which it will be up to you, our live audience, to decide by a show of applause who gets the crown as Agatha Christie's greatest narrator. I'm hoping that we'll have a little extra time for questions and maybe for us to mention a few honorable mentions that we weren't able to get to in the debate. An hour is all we have. An hour is a blink of an eye for the All About Agatha podcast. As many of you know, I can talk about this stuff for four hours quite easily. So we'll get to as much as we can. One final preliminary note. By my calculation, just about a quarter of Christie's 66 books are narrated in the first person, with the other three quarters being narrated in the third person. Though if we look at the first 13 books that Christie published, eight of them were in the first person, meaning she did a lot more of her third-person narration later in her career, which some people, perhaps Christie herself, might consider progress. So before we start debating here, I want to point out what is probably fairly obvious, which is that we will not be considering the third-person perspective in our debate, important as it is. Instead, we will be debating the strengths and weaknesses of various human first-person narrators, and in one case, multiple narrators working together, a narrative hive, if you will. So if anyone has any thoughts or queries as to third-person narration in Christie, which is so significant, maybe we can cover that after the debate. All right, let's get started here. We're going to start with our number nine narrator, who is Leonard Clement from The Murder at the Vicarage versus, and this is a little bit of a surprise here, Monsieur Poirot. He is our number eight nominated narrator. Now, I'm going to start us off, get our feet wet here. I figure that is only fair since I... I'm the one who dragged you all up here onto this stage. I'm going to time myself and keep myself honest here, and I shall start now. So Leonard Clement isn't just one of my favorite narrators in the canon. He is one of my favorite characters, full stop. The Murder at the Vicarage is my personal favorite Christie. Much of this has to do with Len's wryly playful narration. And I only realized this while preparing for this debate, but while we do get a bit of local color in the 13 Problems short stories where St. Mary Mead is concerned, and let's not forget that those stories almost all predate The Murder at the Vicarage, this is the first novel-length treatment of St. Mary Mead, and quite significantly, I think, one of only two novels set entirely in Miss Marple's village. The other is The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side, which is much later, of course. Even in The Body in the Library, which certainly starts in St. Mary Mead, there's an awful lot of hopping around. So it's hard to overstate how important Len is to the Miss Marple stories. Now, when it comes to Monsieur Poirot, I do like the flashes of narration that we get from him, especially at the end of Curtain. And I love the idea of treating his denouement monologues as instances of quasi-narration. I think that's a really interesting way to look at them. Even so, I think his narrative function is a bit too limited for me. So I am going with Leonard Clement here. Ooh, and I just clocked in at one minute. Exactly. All right. Speaker 2 (9:14) And I'll go ahead and click us over here. I know that we have to do this with the clicker. There we go. That is the murder at the vicarage. And let's end on my lovely little array of Poirot's there. So you have something to look at. Okay, Victoria, why don't you go next? Speaker 7 (9:30) So with Poirot, I do love the end of Curtain. I love the poignancy of it all. And it always makes me cry. Speaker 7 (9:41) He does sort of reconstruct stories as well. I do like that. I did have a little discovery that I made, which is to do with Curtin, that I have spoken to Dr. John Curran about. So hopefully I haven't made an error here. So it's been Speaker 2 (9:57) sanctioned. There Speaker 7 (9:58) is a possible error in the end of Curtin. So he does not take a drug and therefore things happen to Poirot, which I won't reveal. Speaker 7 (10:10) The drug in the first edition of Curtin is said to be amyl nitrate. And he doesn't take that. While I was writing about this, when I was writing my book, The New Rules of Murder, that is coming out next year. And one of the proofreaders said, that's not right. That's not a heart drug. That's a completely different drug. It's amyl nitrite. Speaker 2 (10:33) Time. Speaker 7 (10:34) Oh, no! Speaker 2 (10:36) I'm so cruel, aren't I? You can finish that thought. Speaker 7 (10:39) Okay. So I thought, no, I kind of got this wrong because I went to Poirot for this. I went to Curtin for this and I checked my other editions and it is now amyl nitrite. But in the original Curtin, the drug that she uses is amyl nitrate, which is not a heart drug. Does that count? Yes. Speaker 2 (10:59) Who are you voting for, Victoria? Speaker 7 (11:00) But I am voting for Leonard. Speaker 7 (11:05) All Speaker 2 (11:06) right, Jamie, you're up next. Speaker 4 (11:08) Thank you. So I love Leonard Clement. In my deep, dark past, I almost trained to be a vicar. And part of that was because I thought vicars were all like a cross between Leonard Clement and Geraldine Granger from The Vicar of Dibley, Speaker 2 (11:24) which Speaker 4 (11:25) would have been a perfect career. Sadly, they are real and it didn't work. However, Poirot. I love his narration, the end of Curtain, of course, his moments in Denouement, but also there's a letter from the 1940s called A Letter to My Publisher, which Agatha Christie wrote in the voice of Hercule Poirot. And it's just a wonderfully indulgent time to inhabit that character. And also... inhabit, as he does, the perspectives of murderers. He has no qualms going into the psychology of other people, absolutely convinced that he's right. And I admire his confidence and he has my vote. Speaker 5 (12:07) Time. Perfect. Right. You're up, Brad. I have a bias against a detective telling their own story. I think the sleuth is as mysterious a figure in a mystery as the murderer. Lucy Foley called Miss Marple enigmatic when she spoke about her. And I think that no matter how plain speaking a detective seems to be, they're always leaving something out. And that's part of the excitement of hearing what they have to say through someone else. So there's also the fact that Leonard Clement is one of the most wonderful narrators in. any piece of literature. And as evidence, I will read, Miss Cram is a healthy young woman of 25, noisy in manner with a high color, fine animal spirits, and a mouth that always seems to have more than its full share of teeth. So I vote for Leonard Clement. Excellent. Thank you, Brad. Speaker 2 (13:05) All right, Tina. Speaker 6 (13:06) Well, Leonard Clement. is delightful to read. He really brings the village of St Mary Mead to life and he's a wonderful narrator for the very first Miss Marple's novel. However, I chose Hercule Prorone. Now, I know many people have not read Curtains, so we can't, you're just going to have to take a total leap of faith with me when I say to you, Agatha is on the top of her game with this one. You are on a roller coaster. when Poirot is speaking directly to the narrator, to the audience. And here you can find out how his little grey cells work. We discover how he undertakes his investigations, how he collects his clues and his perspective in his relationship with Hastings. And although the section is short, it's full of twists and turns. It's like going on a roller coaster and it is ultimately shocking. So my vote is with Poirot. All Speaker 2 (14:01) right. Okay. And you're all going to have to keep me honest because I have messed this up in years past, but we do have three versus two for Leonard Clement here. Yes. Okay. Good. Good. Because I voted for him. You're all correct as a group anyway. Speaker 2 (14:17) All right. Since Poirot was fair game, perhaps you won't be shocked to see who's next. Miss Jane Marple. So we now have Leonard Clement versus Miss Marple. And let's start off now with Victoria. So we'll we'll keep on going in this order, but start with a different person each time. All right. Speaker 7 (14:34) I'm pleased that he won because I didn't get to say anything about Leonard. I like my vote goes to Leonard Clement. again, because he's an unreliable narrator in a different sense as well, because he doesn't know things. So he's a little bit like a cipher in the book, but he's just, he's the most wonderful vicar. He's got a wife who's gorgeous and 20 years younger than him. And he keeps referring to things that are unbecoming to my cloth. He's sort of that kind of guy who's inside the community, but on the outside as well as his role as a vicar. So he interprets village life for us as well, which I really like. And there are some very witty, dry humor parts to that. My vote definitely goes with him. Speaker 2 (15:20) Fabulous. All right, Jamie. Speaker 4 (15:23) Okay, all the love for Leonard Clement has wooed me over to his side. So, yes, his wit is absolutely wonderful. A great way of introducing the characters and how he evolves as well and reflects on his opinion of Miss Marple is a really interesting thing from the point of view of what Christie's saying in that novel. Miss Marple herself is, of course, a wonderful narrator. The only short story she narrates is Miss Marple Tells a Story. And I think if that had been sustained for a whole novel, it might have got, not grating, but it might have been difficult to sustain for a whole novel. But as a short story, it's absolutely enchanting. And I love the insights we get into her mind, though she's not narrating in Nemesis. However, for me, The Man of the Cloth has it. Speaker 2 (16:16) All right. Thank you, Jamie. Brad. Speaker 5 (16:18) Well, I have committed myself publicly to being on Team Marple, and she's wonderful in the 13 Problem Stories and in Miss Marple Tells a Story. She's quite lovely. She writes about her nephew. Raymond writes those very modern books all about rather unpleasant young men and women, and his wife Joan paints