Me. Sixth grade. Cincinnati, Ohio. Sitting on a late afternoon in the living room before dinner. Terrified out of my head and unable to stop reading. Desperate to finish. This novel, of Christie at her cleverest, is the first and purest crystalline experience of me obsessing over a novel. Ten Little Indians (or And Then There Were None) is one of those groundbreakers that changes narrative forever. All horror films and reality shows that involve people dropping out one by one owe a debt to this classic.

Yes, starting from the first page with the “scarlet Rolls Royce” driving through a quaint village, that holds a gorgeous American heiress. Death on the Nile is the ultimate style novel for Christie, where she fuses a genius mystery (I believe she’s mining Wings of a Dove here with the plot) with a decadent foreign location (the Karnak! The Nile!) and the most eccentric characters. An ultimate Agatha, and it was a huge influence on me to travel the world. Plus, it’s pure Poirot.

Jane Marple always plays second fiddle to Poirot, and when I was younger, I was fully behind this pecking order. Something has changed in me, and I find as I mature, a deep love for Marple mysteries. This, in my opinion, is the finest, a strange invitation to witness a murder that turns out to be exactly as promised. It’s a very wicked plot, and it shows what Christie can do with a quiet village.

I’m a fan of Christie’s one-off adventure novels. You can feel the writer trying to stretch her legs beyond the confines of a closed-circuit who-done-it plot. This novel is packed with travel—subway, boat, train—and jumps continents—Europe, Africa—and Christie even weaves in political and social unrest. But she also is playing with narrative, using two dueling accounts to frame the plot. Finally, there was a 1989 made-for-TV movie of it starring Stephanie Zimbalist and Rue McClanahan that I’m not embarrassed to recommend watching.

Spoiler, don’t read further if you haven’t finished it. Okay, whenever I encounter the term “unreliable narrator” my mind immediately flashes to this novel. Another astonishing magic trick performed by Christie. What other writer has been so endlessly experimental?

Many readers think the later Marple novels are wooden and flat. Many don’t like Nemesis. I’m sorry for them, because you put Marple on a bus tour of house and gardens, arranged by her old friend who appeared in A Caribbean Mystery. Soon, she’s hunting for the murderer of a young woman, and, in my mind, it’s a story of youth and age, an obsession with innocence, and innocence lost.

Perhaps no novel is quite as clever in plot as this Poirot classic. Christie loved puzzles, nursery rhymes, and maddeningly childlike patterns—case in point, victims seemingly being selecting according to the first letter of their names. I often wonder what she would have made of the Zodiac killer with all those puzzles and ciphers. The ABC Murders is that kind of novel galore, and we also get a lot of Poirot bon-mots and investigative legwork.

A witchy novel, which has made my list partially because One Grand’s very own Aaron Hicklin is a big fan. Endless Night, about two young lovers of different classes who seem to be cursed, was written in 1967. It’s fascinating to watch Christie in her later years, writing about the young, trying to reckon with the cultural revolution that drastically transformed the social milieu which she chronicled so successfully in earlier eras. Sometimes—and understandably so—her attempts come off a little clunky and tin-eared. But in Endless Night she does achieve a sort of bizarre love triangle that hints at a more permissive age.

It surprises me that Hitchcock never felt the itch to tackle a Christie novel. Five Little Pigs would have been ideal, as it deals with so many of the two masters’ shared interests: repetition, family secrets, memories and hauntings. (The Hollow would have been my other Hitchcock suggestion). It’s hard enough for Poirot to solve a murder when the body is right in front of him, but now he has to deal with recollections of a murder from sixteen years ago.

Okay, I love this novel, but I’m including it because I love the 1982 film even more. So this recommendation also serves as a love letter to all of the wildly terrific cinematic takes on Christie over the years that’s been a huge influence on me. The film, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot, alongside Jane Birkin, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Roddy McDowall, James Mason, and Sylvia Miles, wisely moved the action from the British coastline to sunny, glamorous Majorca. It’s a visual treat with costumes, musical numbers, and plenty of campy ripostes. And yet it’s also a devilish mystery. I’ve always wanted to write a dissertation on Christie’s twisted concept of time, and this novel is the incarnation of that manipulation.