Christie, who died 50 years ago this month, is internationally recognized as the Queen of Crime. Indeed she’s legally recognized as such — the phrase has been trademarked by her estate, and anyone else billed under the title is likely to receive a cease-and-desist letter (“astonishingly pitiful,” said Val McDermid, when she was warned off in 2022). She’s the world’s biggest-selling fiction writer (she is estimated to have sold between two and four billion books) and one of the most adapted: virtually every one of her 66 crime novels has made its way onto screen, stage or radio. Netflix’s adaptation of The Seven Dials Mystery is only the latest. Traditionally, these adaptations were cozy affairs. More recently they’ve tried to be edgy, but few have played to the political content of the original books, particularly those of her younger days. Which is a shame, if only because at a time when conspiracy theories are again depressingly common, it’d be good to remember how prevalent — and how wrong — they were a century ago.

The Secret Adversary (1922), her second novel, sees a charming couple of amateurs, Tommy and Tuppence, thwart an international conspiracy to bring down Western civilization. It was written at a time of economic unrest. There had been a serious downturn in 1921 — “one of the worst years of depression since the Industrial Revolution,” wrote the Economist — accompanied by a wave of strikes: more than twice as many working days were lost to industrial action as in any previous year. More alarmingly, there were fears of unemployed ex-servicemen being inspired by the revolutions in Russia and Ireland. Meanwhile, the Liberals were being supplanted by the seemingly inexorable rise of the Labour Party.

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In Christie’s story, Mr Carter explains that, however disastrous a Labour government would be, they’re not the real problem. Nor even are the communists. There’s someone further back in the shadows. “The Bolshevists are behind the Labour unrest – but this man is behind the Bolshevists.” No one knows his identity. “But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age.”

Similarly, in The Big Four (1927), Hercule Poirot fights the cabal behind “the worldwide unrest, the labour troubles that beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some”. Their scope is global. “In Russia, you know, there were many signs that Lenin and Trotsky were mere puppets whose every action was dictated by another’s brain.” As Poirot says, “Their aim is world domination.”

This was characteristic of the popular fiction of the time. The biggest thriller hero of the Twenties was Bulldog Drummond, who battled his supervillain enemy over a succession of novels, plays and films by Sapper (the pen name of H.C. McNeile). Again, there’s an international organization controlling Left-wing politics in Britain. “Ever since the war you poisonous reptiles have been at work stirring up internal trouble in this country,” Drummond says to a Labour MP in The Black Gang (1922). “Not one in ten of you believe what you preach: your driving force is money and your own advancement.”

The idea of the Labour Party being fellow travelers was common. Dorothy L. Sayers, another billed as a Queen of Crime, presented in Clouds of Witness (1926) the Soviet Club in London, where there’s much excitement over the presence of the Labour leader, who “is going to make a speech about converting the Army and Navy to communism”.

Maybe this recurring theme might be seen as an attempt to understand the otherwise incomprehensible scale and horror of the First World War and its social impact. When things had gone so far wrong, there was a need to believe there might be an underlying cause of the discontent. “Behind all the world’s creeds, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and the rest, lay an ancient devil-worship,” argues the charismatic villain in John Buchan’s The Three Hostages (1924). Now that “the War had cracked the veneer everywhere, the real stuff was showing through”, most obviously in the rise of communism. He intends to exploit the moral disorder so that he can seize power.

Fanciful, of course, risible even. But the idea of the hidden hand manipulating politics did have an impact, preparing the ground for real-life developments. The fall of the first Labour government in 1924 was triggered by accusations about the influence wielded by the Communist Party of Great Britain. In the subsequent election campaign, the Daily Mail produced the evidence — a letter supposedly sent by Grigori Zinoviev, Russian head of the Communist International, instructing the CPGB “to stir up the masses of the British proletariat”. There was a clear chain of command, it was alleged. “Moscow issues orders to the British Communists,” wrote the Mail, “the British Communists in turn give orders to the Socialist government, which it tamely and humbly obeys.”

It was entirely untrue — and the Zinoviev letter itself was a forgery — but the suspicion that there was some kind of Bolshevik influence was well established by now. The accusation of loyalty to an outside power was precisely what the thrillers of Agatha Christie and Sapper had warned against, and their many readers recognized the danger. The result was that Liberal voters deserted to the Tories in their droves, determined to keep out the socialists so that, although Labour increased its share of the vote, its number of MPs fell. The lesson was learned, and come the General Strike of 1927, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was quick to deny any external influence, telling the press that a check sent from Moscow, “for some thousands of pounds”, had been returned uncashed.

Thereafter, the focus on communist subversion faded a little, merging into a much older suspicion of Russia. Ngaio Marsh’s A Man Lay Dead (1934) featured a secret Russian brotherhood “of amazing antiquity” which, in the days of Peter the Great, “practiced various indecent and horrible rites, based on a kind of inverted monasticism”. More recently, it had turned itself into a pro-Soviet political organization, even if it did retain its fondness for “erotic performances and mutilations”.

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In The Devil Rides Out (1934), Dennis Wheatley went further and identified the real-life mastermind who had caused the war. “The monk Rasputin was the evil genius behind it all,” explains our hero. “He was the greatest Black Magician that the world has known for centuries. It was he who found one of the gateways through which to let forth the four horsemen that they might wallow in blood and destruction.”

More generally, though, detectives and thriller-heroes turned their attention elsewhere. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929 and the ensuing Depression, there was a fashion in crime fiction for uncaring financiers and rapacious businessmen. These seemed more pressing threats to the nation’s well-being. Popular literature was popular precisely because it reflected the fears and concerns of its readers.

In Leslie Charteris’s The Smart Detective (1933), Simon Templar (aka the Saint) is visited by a woman who works for “Oppenheim who owns the sweat shops”. She outlines the system: “I work with fifty other girls in an attic in the East End. We work ten hours a day, six days a week, sewing. If you’re clever and fast you can make two pieces a day. They pay you one shilling a piece.” Oppenheim, by contrast, has just bought a collection of emeralds for a quarter of a million pounds. “It’s just one of those things that makes you feel like turning communist sometimes.” Variations on the theme were to be found in the likes of Arthur Wynne’s Death of a Banker (1934), John Rhodes’s Death of the Board (1937), Nicholas Blake’s There’s Trouble Brewing (1937) and Gathorne Cookson’s Murder Pays No Dividends (1938).

And in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940), where Alistair Blunt is head of “the greatest banking firm in England”. On him rests the economic stability that had kept the country free in an age of dictators. He is, says another character, “the answer to their Hitlers and Mussolinis and all the rest of them”, and Blunt tends to agree: “I’ve done something for England, M. Poirot. I’ve held it firm and kept it solvent. It’s free from dictators – from Fascism and from Communism.”

But this is the Queen of Crime in her mature years, and the message is more subtle than in the earlier conspiracy thrillers. However sound his economics, Blunt is a murderer, and tries to persuade Poirot that he cannot be held to account. If he’s arrested, he says, “a lot of damned fools would try a lot of very costly experiments. And that would be the end of stability – of common sense, of solvency. In fact, of this England of ours as we know it.”

The fate of the nation is at stake, and it’s left to Poirot to restate the essential principle that underpins Christie and most of the Golden Age. “I am not concerned with nations, Monsieur,” he says sternly. “I am concerned with the lives of private individuals who have the right not to have their lives taken from them.” Ultimately, of course, it’s that humanity, the value of the individual, that has ensured Christie’s continuing popularity.

Gillian Anderson, Actor 

It’s been a minute since I was in my 20s and the world has changed drastically since I was. But I have a fair few Gen Zs in my life and I want to shout through a megaphone: Give yourself a break!!!!! Don’t take everything so seriously!!! Do not waste a second stressing about getting your life sorted, having a career, figuring everything out. Give yourself permission to do everything and anything. Give something a go and if that doesn’t feel right, try something else. So much can be learned from allowing yourself to “fail”, getting back on your feet and trying again. Have fun experimenting. And most important of all, spend time making long-lasting friends. In future, which like it or not comes for us all, you will regret not making the most out of your youth when you had it.

Nick Cave, Musician 

Be kind, be bold, be civil, read books, get off social media, stay alert, love stuff, create, build, reform, forgive, converse, and stop breaking things. I wish that back then I had known about the preciousness of things.

Helen Thompson, Author and academic

I wish I had known both that you have to choose the best of yourself and run with it and that the chances to thrive are not what one assumes or expects. I wish I had both had more conviction of purpose and practiced more humility.

Bret Easton Ellis, Novelist and Screenwriter

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ‍‍*shrug emoji*

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Author and essayist

Kathleen Stock, Writer 

Onions need more cooking than two minutes contact with a lukewarm pan. Buy your paracetamol before your hangover, not after. While you are worrying about what everybody else is thinking about you, they are worrying about something else. Try and hear what your gut is telling you. Seeing the dark comedy in awful situations will get you through them. If you make one great friend every year, that’s a wonderful average.

Matt Rowland Hill, Writer

When I showed up for my first term at university 20 years ago, while the other students were joining social clubs, I acquired an addiction to heroin. I don’t recommend doing that: trust me, it comes with all kinds of inconveniences. But, even if you avoid hard drugs, the world you’re living in provides much more insidious ways of becoming an addict. In fact, maybe you already are one.

It was also in my first year of university that I started using Facebook. Later, I moved on to the harder stuff: Twitter and Instagram. My addiction to social media — and its delivery system, the smartphone — was less obviously ruinous than my addiction to smack. But the worst thing about addiction is the way it gradually separates you from your own life as a human among other humans, until you don’t know what you’ve lost — because you can’t even remember what it was like to be fully alive anyway.

The world we’re all living in now was designed by very smart people to keep us mainlining dopamine from the devices in our pockets. Find ways of resisting the tech and staying human. Otherwise you’ll spend your life in a fog of addiction, and you won’t even be alive enough to wonder where it all went.

Jed Mercurio, Writer and Director

In my 20s, I learned more from my mistakes than I ever did from my successes. It’s tempting to wish you’d never written a particular script or book, but that’s not possible. What is possible is to commit to learning from failure and becoming a better writer as a result.

James Pogue, Essayist and Journalist

It’s uncomfortable advice, but I would say that the great lesson I took from my 20s was that it’s a time when you should try to experience some real danger, physical hardship, and toil. I notice in my 30s that it’s become much harder to work that sort of thing into life, but the well of resilience and capability it offered me has been (so far) lifelong, and it translates into all sorts of unexpected situations. If there’s one thing I notice about my generation, it’s that we often seem to lack really basic familiarity with the physical world — how to sew on a button, how to keep a plant alive, how to spend a cold night when the heater is broken or we’re out camping. There are a lot of ways to get this kind of experience, and I don’t want to suggest any one particular path, but most all of them involve some hard work, some real danger — even just working as a carpenter for a bit is much more dangerous than most of the jobs college grads will do today — and a testing of your own limits. I tend to think people who have this kind of background and experience wind up maturing into adults who are a lot more multifaceted, even-keeled, and sure of themselves moving through the world than a lot of us who grew up in the digital age.

Geoff Dyer, Author

Drink less, and read more, especially books you think you’ll have more patience with as you get older (late Henry James, Dostoevsky) because in fact you will have less. Learn languages before your brain turns to mush. Play as much sport as you can. If you’re a man: don’t be a jerk. If you smoke (and you shouldn’t have started, obviously), stop immediately. Start using moisturiser (face and body). Stay hydrated.

Lias Saoudi, Musician (Fat White Family)

I think back on that decade now as the great regression, a desperate stab at a kind of pre-pubescent febrility. The bloke I became in my 20s owes the teenage me a serious apology, in fact. By any measure, I was a more intelligent, self-aware, considerate, creative and positive human being at the age of 19 than the one I’d become at 29. There was a period towards the end of my 20s where I could afford my own cocaine, where I didn’t have to chip in with a few other people to afford a gram — other than that, I have nothing good to say about those years whatsoever.

Jonathan Sumption, Historian and Former Supreme Court Judge

Remember that people’s prejudices are surprisingly resilient and their habits resistant to dictation. The world will not be changed by a few individuals or even a whole generation. In the development of mankind, a decade is the blinking of an eye and a lifetime is a brief interval.

Sarah Ditum, Author and Journalist

Here are two things I did at university, one of which I’d generally advise and one of which I’m not sure I recommend but which definitely wasn’t bad for me. The first is: I read everything I possibly could that struck me as interesting. People think the point of university is the qualification. No. The point of university is the massive library. Go into the stacks. Read some dusty pamphlets no one’s touched for 30 years and aren’t on the internet. Learn something nobody else knows. It’s so much fun, and I wrote some of my best essays on things I found that way (more importantly, I discovered things that shaped my thinking forever).

The second thing I did is: I had a baby. This definitely made things harder that they could have been (and my partner and I had a lot of support from family and friends, and needed all of it), but it worked out, and I think one of the reasons it worked out is that university (or early adulthood in general, if you’re not going to university) is likely to be one the last times you’ve got some leeway from the fixities of adult life — if I hadn’t done it then, I think I’d have been trapped in the life plan and not got around to it till I was 35. So don’t necessarily have a baby when you’re 20. But do give the freedoms you’ve got a hard workout, because if you don’t take chances now, you might be waiting a long time for the opportunity to come round again.

Irvine Welsh, Novelist

My only advice to anyone in their teens and early 20s would be: ignore the advice of anyone over, say, 25. They will offer you nothing except a tiresome and irrelevant justification of their own existence. Life has to be experienced, and for advice on how to navigate it, peer education is the only way. They say that “those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. Well, if you want to improve this shit show, read proper researched and critical history books. Not stuff written by establishment lackeys or two bob grifting conspiracy merchants with their go fund me pages; look at the world created by all those old fools over thirty. They don’t understand it, so they certainly don’t get the one you’re bringing into existence. Get them to fuck.

Jason Williamson, Musician (Sleaford Mods)

My 20s were still under the relative cushion of adolescence and the reality of survival had yet to fully kick in. The thing I most depended on as some kind of compass for sense and reason was not to panic and trust that life, so long as I got up every morning and faced it, would clear a way for me.

I don’t mean to parent here, but I will say that if you can largely avoid cocaine, weed and alcohol and do a bit of exercise, it will make the ability to face life so much easier. And contrary to popular belief, such sensible behaviour will not dent the power of whatever ideas you have for your own contribution to the world.

Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher

Going to university is a transition of unmasking false appearances, of mercilessly demystifying fake authorities from parents to political leaders, of bringing out the hidden reality of domination and corruption. In your early 20s, a shift takes place which should not be dismissed as mere conformism. We become aware that appearances matter, or, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous: fake it till you make it. Often, there is more truth in the mask, in what I pretend to be, than in (what I think is) the real face behind the mask. Freedom is in our societies is often an illusion which justifies domination and exploitation; however, only if we remain faithful to the idea of freedom we can we hope to come closer to actual freedom.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Writer and Activist

In 1997, I was in university. On the summer break some Dutch friends and I settled on going to the Gambia and Senegal. I remember early discussions about appropriate behaviour; how to deal with risk; did we read the relevant sections of the Lonely Planet? They were white, wealthy and young. None of them had visited a developing country. Inevitably, they were shocked by the heat, the chaos, noise, filth and constant warnings of theft and robbery.

Dirty toilets, swarms of flies everywhere, the smell of cooking food in the air was mingled with odours of decaying trash and wafts of open sewers. The only thing that seemed to cause excitement was the white tourists who were pestered by hordes of young men peddling useless items as souvenirs. None of this was new for me. Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia are full of scenes like that.

It is daily life for millions of Africans.

I watched my young friends transform from rosy-eyed adventure seekers to ill-tempered complainers.

It was interesting to watch my friends from the very wealthy Netherlands not only survive in Africa but also to hold heated debates about the IQ of the locals and the role colonialism played there. They were strangely ignorant when they arrived, but in a way it was refreshing to hear them acknowledge that the poverty and discomfort they witnessed were the products of culture. They left with an awakened awareness of difference, and a fresh understanding of how lucky they were to have been born in a culture that generated wealth and comfort, and respected human integrity. So take a Lonely Planet trip to Africa and have your eyes opened.