I have just been reading Agatha Christie’s short stories. But to enjoy her fully today, I suspect, you need to be a social historian - or a novelist. In everything she wrote, she employed one deep secret of her craft. But she may not even have been conscious of it.

It took 70 years of cutural change to reveal it.

That secret is, simply, that she shocks the reader with endless social transgressions. Her every story is coded with social prejudice and her characters are class-labelled on arrival...
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