Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, was a British author known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime"—a moniker which is now trademarked by her estate—or the "Queen of Mystery". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Kogoro Akechi, and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.
The Time Machine is an 1895 dystopian post-apocalyptic science fiction novella by H. G. Wells about a Victorian scientist known as the Time Traveller who travels approximately 802,701 years into the future. The work is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device.
Silent Witness is a British crime drama television series produced by the BBC that focuses on a team of forensic pathology experts and their investigations into various crimes. First broadcast in 1996, the series was created by Nigel McCrery, a former murder squad detective based in Nottingham. Twenty-seven series of Silent Witness have been broadcast since 1996, with series 27 airing in January/February 2024.
Mystery is a fiction genre where the nature of an event, usually a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story. Often within a closed circle of suspects, each suspect is usually provided with a credible motive and a reasonable opportunity for committing the crime. The central character is often a detective, who eventually solves the mystery by logical deduction from facts presented to the reader. Some mystery books are non-fiction. Mystery fiction can be detective stories in which the emphasis is on the puzzle or suspense element and its logical solution such as a whodunit. Mystery fiction can be contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism.
The Moonstone: A Romance by Wilkie Collins is an 1868 British epistolary novel. It is an early example of the modern detective novel, and established many of the ground rules of the modern genre. Its publication was started on 4 January 1868 and was completed on 8 August 1868. The story was serialised in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round. Collins adapted The Moonstone for the stage in 1877.
Chloë Victoria Annett is an English actress. She played Holly Turner in Crime Traveller and Kristine Kochanski in series 7 and 8 of the sitcom Red Dwarf.
Kristine Z. Kochanski is a fictional character from the British science fiction situation comedy Red Dwarf. Kochanski was the first console officer in the navigation chamber on board the spaceship Red Dwarf. As well as appearing in the television series, she is also a major character in the Red Dwarf novel Last Human. In series 1, 2, and 6 she was played by Clare Grogan and was then played by Chloë Annett for series 7 and 8, and the 2009 special Back to Earth.
Anthony John Horowitz is an English novelist and screenwriter specialising in mystery and suspense. His works for children and young adult readers include the Alex Rider series featuring a 14-year-old British boy who spies for MI6, The Power of Five series, and The Diamond Brothers series.
Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating was an English crime fiction writer most notable for his series of novels featuring Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID.
Waking the Dead is a British television police procedural crime drama series, produced by the BBC, that centres on a fictional London-based cold case unit composed of CID police officers, a psychological profiler and a forensic scientist. A pilot episode aired in September 2000, and a total of nine series followed. Each story is split into two hour-long episodes, shown on consecutive nights on BBC One. A third series episode won an International Emmy Award in 2004. The programme was also shown on BBC America in the United States, though these screenings are edited to allow for advertising breaks, as well as UKTV in Australia and New Zealand and ABC1 in Australia. A total of 46 stories aired across the nine series. The show aired its final episode on 11 April 2011. A spin-off from the series, titled The Body Farm, revolving around forensic scientist Eve Lockhart, was announced by the BBC in January 2011 and ran for just one series.
Murder City is a British crime drama series produced by Granada Television, first broadcast on 18 March 2004 on ITV, that focuses on two mismatched detectives, DI Susan Alembic and DS Luke Stone, who scour London solving complex cases. The first series consisted of six episodes. A second and final series of four episodes was subsequently commissioned and began broadcast on 5 April 2006. Following declining viewership, a third series of Murder City was not commissioned. BBC America began airing the complete series on 17 August 2006, and it was subsequently released in a Region 1 four-disc DVD box set by Image Entertainment on 14 August 2007.
The gentleman detective is a type of fictional character. He has long been a staple of crime fiction, particularly in detective novels and short stories set in the United Kingdom in the Golden Age. While not necessarily aristocracy, the heroes of these adventures are often members of the British gentry or gentlemen by conduct. They are sometimes contrasted with professional police force detectives from the working classes.
John William Cooper is a Welsh serial killer. On 26 May 2011, he was given a whole life order for the 1985 double murder of siblings Richard and Helen Thomas, and the 1989 double murder of Peter and Gwenda Dixon. The murders were known in the media as the "Pembrokeshire Murders" or the "Coastal Murders". Cooper was also sentenced for the rape of a 16-year-old girl and a sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl, both carried out while a group of five teenagers were held at gunpoint in March 1996, in a wooded area behind the Mount Estate in Cooper's hometown of Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire.
Oblivion is a fantasy novel by British writer Anthony Horowitz. It is the fifth and final book in The Power of Five series. The book is set in England, New York City, Giza, Dubai, Brazil, Italy and Antarctica. Horowitz began writing Oblivion in 2009 and finished it in 2012, when it was then released in the United Kingdom on 4 October 2012. Horowitz has stated that he had researched global warming for this novel.
Liad Shoham is an Israeli writer and lawyer. He is Israel's leading thriller writer and has been dubbed the Israeli John Grisham.
Career of Evil is a 2015 crime fiction novel written by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym for J. K. Rowling. It is the third novel in the Cormoran Strike series of detective novels and is followed by Lethal White in 2018, Troubled Blood in 2020 and The Running Grave in 2023.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is a comic science fiction detective television series created and primarily written by Max Landis. The two seasons are inspired by the novel series of the same name by Douglas Adams. The series is co-produced and distributed by BBC America and Netflix, along with AMC Studios, Ideate Media and IDW Entertainment. Filming primarily took place in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Alun Kyte, known as the Midlands Ripper, is an English double murderer, serial rapist, child rapist, paedophile and suspected serial killer. He was convicted in 2000 of the murders of two sex workers, 20-year-old Samo Paull and 30-year-old Tracey Turner, whom he killed in December 1993 and March 1994 respectively. After his conviction, investigators announced their suspicions that Kyte could have been behind a number of other unsolved murders of sex workers across Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. He was apprehended due to the ground-breaking investigations of a wider police inquiry named Operation Enigma, which was launched in 1996 in response to the murders of Paull, Turner and of a large number of other sex workers. Kyte was sentenced to a minimum of 25 years imprisonment for the murders of Paull and Turner.
