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Originally Posted by DonQuigleone
While Agatha Christie was indeed prolific, I see her popularity waning. While Conan Doyle is still going strong, Christie is no as prevalent in the popular conciousness. For one thing, while Christie adaptations were extremely frequent on television in my youth, today they exist only as reruns.
Not only that, but Agatha Christie's novels (with the possible exception of And Then There Were None) are all extremely formulaic. She basically wrote the same novel again and again with minor variations. The same also goes for Enid Blyton too, who also wrote largely to formula.
To illustrate, for Poirot there are 33 novels and 50 short stories, all of which are largely the same. Likewise, there ar 21 Famous Five novels, which again are all largely the same. Both of them were too prolific for their own good, and so no single work of theirs can ever stand out.
A similar criticism might be leveled at Conan Doyle with Sherlock holmes, but on the other hand Holmes wrote a larger variety of plots (it wasn't all murder, as it was with Christie), and Doyle placed a much larger emphasis on the relationship between Holmes and Watson, which makes the series more interesting. But I wouldn't even be sure of Conan Doyle having that much staying power either, even though he's already managed to last this long.
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I can't talk about Enid Blyton as I haven't read any of his work but I agree with you on Agatha Christie, formulaic story and mostly static main characters tampered my interest to her work. I would say than Michael Connelly's work share the same issue.
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Originally Posted by Sumeragi
Onii-chan~ Sume can teach you kanji. What will you teach me?
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It's probably a good idea to not ask, so much way than it could go wrong...