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In her lifetime she was known as the Queen of Crime. No other individual writer of books has sold more copies worldwide than Agatha Christie. Her clear and direct prose has a reading age of between 9 and 11 years, which is part of the reason that she has been translated into more languages than Shakespeare. She was made a dame for her services to literature. She created the mould for the English detective novel, establishing more plot devices and twist endings than any other writer in the genre. Her creation Hercule Poirot is the only fictional character ever granted an obituary by The New York Times. She was the first Grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America and she is the darling of French intellectuals, praised by Michel Houellebecq and deconstructed by Pierre Bayard.

Christie was acute enough to have Poirot say in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles: “Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend.” Among her killers is a child psychopath and a policeman. And yet there is a tendency to dismiss Agatha Christie as a repressed middle-class late Victorian who was a racist, a snob and an uninteresting writer. It's a position that is in itself a kind of snobbery. Although she exhibited the prejudices of her time and class, Christie's novels remain engrossing and entertaining because of the ingenuity of her plotting.

Her prodigious output - more than 80 novels, plus dozens of short stories and plays - provides a template for the best of so-called “cosy” crime fiction, though there is more acid in her portraits of village life than she is usually given credit for. Her series detectives - Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple and Tommy and Tuppence Beresford - remain reassuringly themselves, more or less unaffected by the horrors upon which they have supped.

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Christie's novels are firmly placed in a post-1918 world in which the war seems almost not to have happened. There are occasional passing references, but in St Mary Mead the clock stands at half past three and there is honey still for tea. It is as if Christie is using the detective novel's predisposition for bringing order from chaos to shore up the tottering conventions of middle-class life.

But she has introduced millions to the genre. Dame Agatha remains the comfort food of crime fiction. She is an echo of home cooking when we are poorly or far, far away.

One to read: The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)

Audio: BBC interviews with Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie’s home set to be opened in 2009 by the National Trust

The official Agatha Christie website

Video: Miss Marple – The Body in the Library

Video: Miss Marple’s Light Bulb Moment

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