Agatha Christie

During the Q&A period following her lecture on Egalitarianism and Inflation, Ayn Rand was asked to name an intellectual woman that she admired. She had this to say about Agatha Christie:

[She] is a woman with the most prestigious, magnificent talent for what I regard as the most important aspect of literature — plot imaginations… She’s over eighty, she’s written eighty novels in her life and all of them, the least interesting, are better than what most other mystery writers write. [She] is the only woman that I can read with the greatest of pleasure… I really admire her and the ability to write ingenious plots is certainly a profoundly intellectual ability.

Two of Agatha Christie’s novels, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Secret Adversary can be obtained for free online at Project Gutenberg, and The Secret Adversary has been scanned by Google Book Search. Her books can be bought online at Amazon, or from my favorite used bookseller, Thriftbooks.com.