Agatha Christie is the Queen of Crime, a well known poison aficionada, and quite possibly the most homicidal novelist who ever lived, yet rarely is her legacy connected with the hardboiled tradition, that dark noble literature born of existential philosophy, midcentury ennui, and the American West’s booming trench coat industry. Instead, Christie and her works are lumped in on the side of order and justice. A quick perusal of her archives and quotation collections indicate that a large portion of the population looks to her for a sense of hope, optimism, and encouragement, even. But running just underneath that inspirational surface is a bubbling lava field of darkness, one that permeates every aspect of Christie’s work, her characters, and her prose. In honor of the great woman’s birthday (she was born on September 15, 1890 in Torquay, England), we’ve rounded up a small collection of Christie’s darkest, bleakest, most cynical, Bogart-chewing-on-glass quotes. Together they give us a surprise ending, a final twist of just the variety Christie herself made so famous: Agatha Christie is, after all, one of the most noir authors who ever lived and wrote.
Enjoy these pithy, world-weary lines, grab the nearest gimlet, and raise a glass to the Queen of Crime. All crime. The coziest damn noir you ever read.
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Agatha Christie’s Most Noir Quotes
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“Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.”
—An Autobiography (1977)
“One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave—our own self.”
—A Daughter’s a Daughter (1952)
“Many homicidal lunatics are very quiet, unassuming people. Delightful fellows.”
—And Then There Were None (1939)
“Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.”
—The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920)
“A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves.”
—The Secret Adversary (1922)
“A woman who doesn’t lie is a woman without imagination and without sympathy.”
—Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)
“A man doesn’t want to feel that a woman cares more for him than he cares for her. He doesn’t want to feel owned, body and soul. It’s that damned possessive attitude. This man is mine—he belongs to me! He wants to get away—to get free. He wants to own his woman; he doesn’t want her to own him.”
—Death on the Nile (1937)
“The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering.”
—An Autobiography (1977)
“Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.”
—The Moving Finger (1942)
“Any woman can fool a man if she wants to and if he’s in love with her.”
—The Mousetrap and Other Plays (1978)
“I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then—I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn’t, luckily, have to bother about that.”
—An Autobiography (1977)
“If you place your head in a lion’s mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.”
—The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920)
“One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.”
—And Then There Were None (1939)
“Why shouldn’t I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they’re loved and wanted and then show them that it’s all a sham.”
—The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
“One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.”
—An Autobiography (1977)
“Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.”
—The Labours of Hercules (1947)
“Time is the best killer.”
“One never quite allows for the moron in our midst.”
—The Mirror’s Crack’d from Side to Side (1962)
“Some of us, in the words of the divine Greta Garbo, want to be alone.”
—Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
“When a man’s neck’s in danger, he doesn’t stop to think too much about sentiment.”
—And Then There Were None (1939)
