Like many top criminals, she has a string of aliases. Call her Lady Mallowan, Mary Westmacott, Ajiasha Kelisidi or plain, old Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, and in so doing you will have figured it was "she who done it".

What she has done is gain a legion of loyal readers in China, and as with all good detective novels there is a fiendish twist: she's achieved all this from beyond the grave.

The first witness for the prosecution is Shen Yijie, 29, a Shanghai IT worker who has lived in Hong Kong for more than 10 years. She has attended two events at Shanghai's Tongji University in recent months to mark the 40th anniversary of Christie's death.

Shen, who runs an online fans forum, says she was pleasantly surprised by how many people showed up to talk about the writer, her fiction and her reception in China since the 1940s "as these days Chinese prefer Japanese detective stories to those written half a century ago".

However, these latter-day masters come nowhere near to Christie in terms of sales. Devotees say that if you tot up book sales through the centuries, her only real competitors are The Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

In all, 2 billion copies of her books have been sold in various languages. Her work has been adapted for the screen 180 times, while a new adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express is reportedly slated for release next year.

Even though far fewer people read classic detective fiction than in the 1920s and '30s, Christie's devotees never seem to be able to get enough of the genre and its acute observations of human nature in a world in which neat, predictable order is the norm.

Even after the most brutal of murders, in Christie's world, order appears to be restored and readers are made to feel safe again, once the culprit confesses to his or her crime, not in the face of overpowering evidence, but cold, cogently presented logic.

"Detectives like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are supremely confident about their intellectual prowess, and faced with that, murderers are only too willing to admit their deeds," writer Wang Jinwen says. "Such an age is gone forever."

Zha Liangzheng, aka Louis Cha, the contemporary master of martial arts fiction who writes under the name Jin Yong, says Christie is his favorite detective novelist, and that he has read almost all her novels. What he finds attractive is her intelligence and logic.

His own work has a knack of creating suspense, such as the cryptic message that a murder victim leaves near his killer in The Legend of Condor Heroes.

Wang Lin, a 31-year-old civil servant, devotes much of his free time to plays and detective stories. He has played a member of the jury in the Chinese stage adaptation of Christie's Witness for the Prosecution 99 times, and says he appreciates her "from a different perspective".

He has read Christie, who was born in 1890 and died in 1976, since he was at primary school, and once headed the play section of the Chinese Agatha Christie online forum. In January, New Star Press published his translation of her short story collection, While the Light Lasts.

"I've read a lot more detective novelists in addition to her, but I love her because in her novels murders are not that scary, and she sets the stories in exotic countries because she herself visited places in Africa and the Middle East. There are plots involving things like archaeology, and she's really good with poisons, which I find appealing."

Early days

The first of Christie's works to reach China was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was published in a detective fiction magazine in the 1940s. But it was not until after she died that she became hugely popular.

In July 1979, in the aftermath of the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), and as China began implementing the policy of reform and opening-up, the 1978 movie adaptation of Death on the Nile was screened in the country and proved a phenomenal success. Overnight, Poirot became a popular figure.

In November that year, the foreign literature periodical Yilin was founded, and with it was published Death on the Nile, the editor regarding the novel as far superior to the movie. Yilin sold 400,000 copies, exhausting stocks in some cities and making it highly sought-after. And about the same time, China Film Press published a book that included the novel and 1974 screenplay of Murder on the Orient Express.

Many of Christie's works were translated into Chinese in the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1981, more than 20 of her novels were published, featuring not only Poirot, but also the popular Miss Marple, such as the novels Nemesis and Sparkling Cyanide (also published as Remembered Death.)

In 1998, Guizhou People's Publishing House published 80 of Christie's works, but not all of her detective stories. In 2013, New Star Press bought the copyright from Mathew Prichard, her grandson, to publish all 85 detective novels.

"We're the first Chinese publisher to release all her detective works," says Wang Huan, the editor in charge of the project at New Star Press. Forty-three books have been released, with the rest to be on shelves by the end of next year.

"Readers are looking forward to the full collection. Famous titles like And Then There Were None, Evil Under the Sun, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile were best-sellers, with more than 100,000 copies sold," he adds.

Yet Shen says few Chinese read Christie's books these days, with most only being aware of her fiction through TV and movies.

Even among the Christie devotees at Tongji University, her mention of some of the writer's less-popular titles drew blank stares, but everyone seemed to be aware of the recent BBC adaptation of And There Were None, screened in Britain last year. Many Chinese have watched it online video-streaming sites.

"Life's different to what it used to be, and few people have the patience to sit down hours on end and read a 300-page book, even if it's a thrilling detective novel," Shen says.

Serial killers

In Christie's novels, Miss Marple solves cases in the Victorian countryside, while Poirot brings his classic reasoning to bear as he does his investigative work. But in the Japanese detective stories that are now in vogue, the overwhelming mood is one of darkness. Authors create thrills to appeal to the imaginations of readers who have become accustomed to psychopathic serial killers created and developed over the past 40 years.

Guo Yi, 34, a diehard fan of Christie, read all the author's works in about three months when she was at university. She says, "in general, classic detective fiction fails because the narrative is extremely slow. Agatha Christie is a combination of Conan Doyle and Jane Austen, so many male readers don't like it. But she has created almost all the murder models of detective fiction. It's very difficult to create new ones."

She says what attracts her to Christie's novels is their gentleness and kindness. Christie explains in a classic way why people murder, and drawing on her insights of human nature and social relationships, she can cast suspicion on every character in a novel.

Shen adds, "she is full of sympathy for human nature."

Christie's intriguing stories, with their cool logic, take many readers on a nostalgia ride to a time when everyone in a community knew everyone, when life was slower, when everything seemed to be in perfect order, and indeed when everyone seemed to have the time and the patience to spend hours solving a mystery in a book.

Shen says she started reading Christie when she was in middle school, her father being a detective fiction aficionado. Christie then led Shen into an interesting world of puzzles and mysteries. For her, crime stories are an intelligence test in which all you need do is sit in a chair, read the stories and enter a fictional world to solve the riddles.

She has read all of Christie's works, she says: 68 novels, 21 short story collections and novellas, 18 plays, one autobiography, two poetry collections and six romance novels. She writes articles about Agatha Christie for magazines and is translating Parker Pyne Investigates and Christie's autobiography to be published by New Star Press.

Shen registered on the Chinese online forum for Christie fans in 2006 and took over running it six years later. She says it has more than 30,000 registered members.

"We want fans to feel comfortable on the forum and feel free to speak," she says. "At the same time, we hope to become a chronicle relating to anything to do with Agatha Christie in China."

The website includes copious detail, in words and pictures, about the publication of her works in China since the 1940s. Between 2003 and 2005, forum members were particularly active in broadcasting plays and writing their own detective fiction.

Plans are now afoot to overhaul the forum so it is more attuned to mobile internet.

Shen says that while fewer people read Christie these days, her works will endure. That certainly applies to her plays, which are very popular. And Then There Were None, generally considered Christie's scariest work, has been adapted into a Chinese play that has been performed more than 300 times over the past decade.

yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 07/02/2016 page1)