Agatha Christie In The Classroom

It seems that more and more middle and high school students are read Agatha Christie books either as required or suggested reading. In many cases, her works appear on summer reading lists where the students are required to select a number of books to read off of a large list.

To get an idea on exactly which A.C titles are being read and/or discussed in class, I visited excite.com to look at some educational/library sites. Overall, I found that Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None" was clearly favorite. It appears on many suggested reading lists and many teachers require it. As for me personally, "Ten Little Indians" was required in one of my high school English classes and I really enjoyed reading it as part of a class environment. I had already read the book a few years back but I found that it was even more enjoyable the second time around.

As for the second most popular "classroom" A.C, it appears that it would have to be a tie between "Murder on the Orient Express" and "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd."

Spread out amongst random sites, I also found that middle and high schools students were also reading AC's "The Mousetrap," The A.B.C Murders (on a 9th grade summer reading list}, "Death On the Nile" (required reading for an 8th grade class), "The Pale Horse," and well as various short stories. One advanced high school English reading list contained several selections not otherwised noted: "Curtain," "Death Comes As The End," "Murder is Announced," and Nemesis."

For those of you are interested, Yale-New Haven Teacher Institute has two really great articles about using Agatha Christie's works in class. One is titled and the other (a must-read!) is "'Murder' They Read" by Diana Doyle.


If you have read an Agatha Christie book for a class assignment or because it was on a school summer reading list, please email me with the details and I'll add them to this page. Thanks!