Rights & Provenance

Where these books come from, and who may read them where.

These works are in the public domain in the United States, and only there. Agatha Christie died in 1976. In the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, Australia and most other countries, copyright runs for the author's life plus seventy years — so these books remain under copyright in those places until 2047.

If you are reading outside the United States, please check your own country's law before downloading or redistributing anything here.

Why these particular books

United States copyright for works of this period runs 95 years from publication. Everything published in or before 1930 is therefore in the US public domain as of 1 January 2026 — which is why The Murder at the Vicarage and Giant's Bread, both from 1930, joined the library this year, and why nothing later than 1930 appears below.

Where the text comes from

Every book here is the Standard Ebooks edition. Standard Ebooks is a volunteer project that takes public-domain transcriptions — mostly from Project Gutenberg — and painstakingly re-typesets them: modernised typography, structural markup, corrected transcription errors, proper semantic tagging of names, letters, and verse. That care is what makes a reader like this one possible, and it is theirs, not ours.

Their editions are dedicated to the public domain under CC0. We ingest them from the project's public repositories on GitHub, which is its documented channel for programmatic access, rather than scraping the website — the site asks automated agents to stay off its download pages, and that request is worth honouring even though the text itself is free.

If you value this, support Standard Ebooks. They did the difficult part.

The reading companion

The companion is only ever given the book up to the point you have read. It is also instructed to set aside anything it may already know about these novels from its training — which, for books this famous, is the part that actually matters. It will not tell you how a story ends, and it will not quietly steer you toward or away from a suspect.

Your questions are sent to Anthropic's API to be answered. Nothing you ask is stored on this site. Your reading position, highlights, and display settings live only in your own browser.

Every book in the library

Title Published US public domain
The Mysterious Affair at Styles 1920 2016
The Secret Adversary 1922 2018
The Murder on the Links 1923 2019
The Plymouth Express Affair
First published in a magazine in 1923. Not part of any collection in this library; included here because it would otherwise be unavailable.
1923 2019
Poirot Investigates
UK edition 1924 (11 stories); US edition 1925 adds 3 more. Standard Ebooks follows the US edition, published 1925.
1924 2020
The Man in the Brown Suit 1924 2020
The Secret of Chimneys 1925 2021
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 1926 2022
The Big Four 1927 2023
The Mystery of the Blue Train 1928 2024
Partners in Crime 1929 2025
The Seven Dials Mystery 1929 2025
Giant’s Bread
Published under Christie's pen name Mary Westmacott. Entered the US public domain on 1 January 2026.
1930 2026
The Murder at the Vicarage
First Miss Marple novel. Entered the US public domain on 1 January 2026.
1930 2026
The Mysterious Mr. Quin
Entered the US public domain on 1 January 2026.
1930 2026

Corrections

If you believe something here is misattributed, mis-dated, or should not be published, please say so and it will be taken down while it is checked.

Publisher's statement, carried from the source edition: The source text and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. They may still be copyrighted in other countries, so users located outside of the United States must check their local laws before using this ebook. The creators of, and contributors to, this ebook dedicate their contributions to the worldwide public domain via the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.