Christie clues, craft, context, and community.
All About Agatha studies Agatha Christie through reading, rankings, interviews, adaptations, and festival-minded debate. It moves between cozy enthusiasm and serious craft talk, with room for spoilers, trivia, stage productions, and the mechanics of fair-play mystery.
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All About Agatha is a deep Christie reading project that has grown into a larger conversation about why Agatha Christie remains so durable. Its center of gravity is still the work: novels, short stories, stage pieces, adaptations, narrators, settings, clues, tricks, and readerly fairness. Kemper Donovan approaches Christie with visible affection, but the show is not content to admire from a distance. It asks how the books function. It notices hotels, buses, cigarettes, servants, cocktails, charity, domestic rooms, and the social codes tucked inside apparently tidy mysteries. The pacing is conversational and bookish. Episodes often begin with community news, festival appearances, live events, book tours, or listener-facing notes before settling into the Christie matter at hand. Once there, the attention can become pleasingly granular. An interview about Agatha Christie’s London can linger on the Savoy as both real hotel and fictional meeting place for Poirot, Hastings, Tommy and Tuppence, and Miss Marple. A holiday episode on The Water Bus can turn a small exchange between Mrs. Hargreaves and Mrs. Chubb into a discussion of moral avoidance and practical kindness. A Golden Age conversation can frame murder mysteries as games among author, reader, characters, and murderer. That is the show’s strength. It understands Christie as entertainment, but also as design. The guests broaden the map, bringing in annotation, scholarship, theatre, adaptations, and contemporary mystery writing. Live episodes and festival previews give the feed the feel of an active Christie circuit rather than an isolated reread. Spoilers are part of the bargain, and they are usually announced directly. The show best suits listeners who already know at least some Christie and enjoy hearing the machinery examined after the reveal. It is also welcoming to newer readers who want context, reading paths, and a sense of which titles matter in the wider Christie conversation. The mood is affectionate, detail-rich, and lightly obsessive in the best literary-fan sense. All About Agatha makes Christie feel less like a closed canon than an ongoing argument among people who still care deeply about the clue, the corpse, the room, and the final turn of the key.
Made for: For Agatha Christie readers, Golden Age mystery fans, adaptation watchers, and puzzle-fiction obsessives who enjoy spoilers, rankings, literary context, and serious-but-friendly debate.
What sets it apart: The show combines close Christie reading with interviews, live literary events, adaptation debates, and historical texture. It treats Christie’s stories as engineered puzzles and cultural artifacts, not just beloved comfort reads.
All About Agatha is a podcast all about, well, Agatha. Agatha Christie, of course: the Queen of Crime, a real-life Dame of the British Empire, and author of sixty-six mystery novels that spanned the Twentieth Century, defining a genre. For five years, Catherine Brobeck and Kemper Donovan revisited these novels in publication order, ranking them according to pre-set criteria (plot, character, etc.). Tragically, Catherine Brobeck passed away at the end of 2021. She will be forever missed. Since then, Kemper has completed the podcast's ranking project, and continues to celebrate the greatness of Christie by attempting to solve the ultimate mystery where she is concerned. Why Christie--and Chris…
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Christie, London, and the Savoy come into focus in a useful, if slightly slow-starting, conversation.
The episode works best when it treats Christie as a writer whose fiction grows out of places people can actually walk into. The Savoy section is the liveliest stretch, as Kemper Donovan and Tina Hodgkinson connect a real London hotel with Poirot, Hastings, Tommy and Tuppence,…
Torquay festival plans frame a sharp look at Mrs. Chubb, Mrs. Hargreaves, and the loaded two-pound gift.
The episode opens in Torquay with the Agatha Christie Festival, and the two September events on the schedule give the conversation a clear sense of place and timing. That festival material takes up a little early space, though it also helps anchor what follows.
Christie as play, with Curran tracing how the murderer tilts the game.
Kemper Donovan's All About Agatha conversation with Dr. John Curran, the Christie scholar and author of The Murder Game: Play, Puzzles & the Golden Age, has a clear center once it settles into the idea of play.
Great books, taken chapter by chapter, with delight
Warm matchmaking for thoughtful readers.
Literary history with evidence, wit, and range.
Difficult books, strange histories, patient thought.
Global policy, questioned carefully.
All About Agatha examines Agatha Christie Mallowan’s “The Water Bus,” a story written around 1964–65 and published in the 1965 collection Star Over Bethlehem and Other Stories.
Kemper Donovan interviews Alex Michaelides about his new novel The Fury and discusses Agatha Christie's influence.
All About Agatha brings Kemper Donovan together with Westmapod hosts Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown to rank Agatha Christie's six Mary Westmacott novels.
At the 2026 Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay, Kemper Donovan moderates a live debate on Christie's greatest narrator.
Kemper Donovan and Catherine Brobeck examine Agatha Christie’s 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, focusing on its narration and mystery structure.
At East End Books in Provincetown, Kemper Donovan connects his novel Sweet Spot to Agatha Christie and the craft of mystery writing.
Kemper Donovan argues that the familiar drawing room ending appears in only 22 of Agatha Christie's 66 novels.
All About Agatha covers "The Edge," first published in Pearson's Magazine in February 1927, in which Claire Hallowell is the only suspect and the central question is "whether a murder took place at all." Kemper Donovan walks through Claire's discovery of Vivian Lee's handwriting in a hotel register 40 miles from home and her year of silence before confronting Vivian on a cliff path called The Edge.
Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, tells All About Agatha host Kemper Donovan why she structured Killers of Roe as a murder mystery, with each chapter opening on a Christie quote.
Kemper Donovan interviews Tina Hodgkinson about her book 'Agatha Christie's London', a historical guide to the settings of Christie's mysteries.
All About Agatha marks an Easter-themed episode on Agatha Christie Mallowan’s The Water Bus, with Kemper Donovan, Dr.
Kemper Donovan opens All About Agatha Christie by warning listeners about spoilers for 450 from Paddington, After the Funeral, And Then There Were None, Nemesis, Sparkling Cyanide, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, and two John Dickson Carr novels.
Kemper Donovan reads and responds to listener mail about Agatha Christie mysteries in a special Valentine's Day episode.
Kemper Donovan interviews Sophie Hannah about her new mystery novel, No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done.
This episode is a summer rerun discussing adaptations of Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None' with guest Dr.
Kemper Donovan interviews Kate Gingold about her book 'Agatha Annotated', which explores Agatha Christie's 1920s novels through a glossary format.
Kemper Donovan hosts a live event at Shuler Books to discuss his mystery novel The Busy Body and his podcast about Agatha Christie.
Kemper Donovan interviews Andrew Winans, director of an off-Broadway production of Agatha Christie's The Hollow, and promotes his book tour.