Ahead of "A Haunting in Venice," Check Out All of Agatha Christie's Mystery Books

One of Christie's two most famous detectives (more on the second in a moment), Hercule Poirot is a Belgian detective who first appears in Christie's first detective novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles." He has a very distinctive physical description: a short, pristinely dressed man with a distinguished mustache. In his backstory, he was once a police detective in Brussels but now works as a private detective all over the world. Each story places him in a different setting, where he meets a colorful list of suspects and uses his exceptional skills to solve a crime — although some outcomes are more morally murky than others.

Christie's other iconic detective is definitely Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster and talented amateur detective. Miss Marple lives in the small (fictional) village of St. Mary Mead, where she both lives and investigates. Although she is unmarried and has no children of her own, she's always surrounded by colorful characters, including a self-absorbed nephew, a retired police detective, and a series of maids. Her mysteries often take place in more close-to-home locales, although she does have a couple of foreign adventures, too!

Unlike some of her other detectives, like Marple and Poirot, Superintendent Battle is not a private detective during the time we follow his cases. Instead, he's an active police detective, and a remarkably good one. Battle is a clever and thorough detective who often gets ahead of his adversaries by allowing them to make assumptions about the ineptitude of the "typical" police detective. His personal life, including his wife and five children, plays a minor role in a couple of his mysteries.

The Colonel Race mysteries are Christie's smallest "collection," with just two novels focusing on him. The colonel is a character spun off from the Hercule Poirot mysteries, where he's introduced as a former army officer and a former leader of MI5. With his background in the spy world, he's usually seen to have an exceptionally open mind to any and all theories, which allows him to solve his cases quietly and efficiently. Along with his two "starring" novels, he also appears as a supporting character in the crossover "Cards on the Table" and in the famous Poirot story "Death on the Nile."

Tommy and Tuppence is the only one of Christie's collections to focus on a crime-solving duo, rather than a single, brilliant detective. Thomas and Prudence Beresford are a husband-and-wife team who work together to crack their cases. After being friends for most of their lives, they meet up after World War I, launch an investigative agency, fall in love, and get married. Unlike the other Christie detectives, they explicitly age in "real time" throughout their series, growing older and raising a family along with their mystery exploits.

Christie also wrote several stand-alone novels outside of her popular collections, including: