( Copies of both novels are online.)ġ998 was also the year that the US Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended most copyrights for 20 years and froze the US public domain for published works– until the end of this year. In 1998, it was joined there by The Secret Adversary (1922), which introduced the detective couple Tommy and Tuppence. The novel entered the public domain in the United States in 1996. Christie’s first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introduced what may be her most famous character, Hercule Poirot.

That’s because the United States used fixed copyright terms, rather than terms based on the author’s lifetime, until the 1970s. But her career was long enough that her early work has started to enter the public domain in the United States. (For instance, Anthony Horowitz’s best-selling 2016 novel Magpie Murders, which I read while traveling last week, very explicitly both imitates and reacts to Christie’s style.)Ĭhristie died in 1976, less than 50 years ago, so her works are still under copyright in most countries. Her novels continue to be adapted for movies and television (recent examples being 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and 2018’s Ordeal by Innocence), and their fingerprints are all over many crime novels to this day. In her more than half-century career writing detective fiction, she established (and then often went on to break) many of the expectations of the English “whodunit” puzzle story. Few authors have had as longstanding an influence on their genres as Agatha Christie.

The murder on the links movie