When it comes to knifing Agatha Christie in the back, there is no shortage of willing assassins.

Raymond Chandler's 1944 essay, The Simple Art of Murder, described Christie's contrived plots as a ''dreary routine'', while Edmund Wilson said her writing was ''literally impossible to read''.

Queen of crime: Agatha Christie constructed her novels ''like crossword puzzles''.

''You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out,'' Wilson wrote in Why Do People Read Detective Stories? ''And you cannot become interested in the characters, because they never can be allowed an existence of their own even in a flat two dimensions but have always to be contrived so that they can seem either reliable or sinister.''

Sour grapes? Possibly, says associate professor Brian McFarlane, from Monash University. ''She probably earnt a good deal more than they did; galling I suppose if you, in all modesty, felt you were a much better and more significant stylist, with a keener eye for the way things go in the real world.''