Agatha Christie was a master of her craft, and MDM have crafted a masterful puzzle coin to celebrate her works

One of the classic literary genres, the murder-mystery, or ‘whodunit’, traces its origins back to the mid-19th century, with such authors as Edgar Allan Poe, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It reached a crescendo in the 1920s Golden Age, and since then, has become progressively more popular, and perhaps darker and more graphic in tone. One of the all-time genre legends is undoubtedly Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Mallowan, more generally known as Agatha Christie.

She is very well-known today, perhaps more so than in her lifetime (she passed in 1976), and thanks to a steady stream of adaptations for television and film, her characters like Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot have become household names. Through a long career spanning over half a century, she published 66 detective novels and 14 collections of short stories. Today, she stands a giant, being the most translated author in history, having a play that ran continuously for over sixty years, and being voted the best author of all time by the Crime Writers Association. Her work continues to inspire an incredibly popular field of literature and popular entertainment.

It falls to MDM to encapsulate this author’s talent, and long body of work, in a single coin, and they’ve done a top-notch job in doing so. The reverse face depicts Christie, with a magnifying glass in her hand, focused on a fingerprint. Her face sits in a central area that is raised above the rest of the coin, excepting the rim. That lowered area expands the view to place her in her writing room, filled with ideas from her works, like a mousetrap, weapons, and leg sticking out from behind a wall. The obverse layout is similar, but Christies head is replaced by the issue details, and the scene is that of a sedate library.

The party trick with this release is the seven gilded segments that drop into the lowered area on the reverse face. Each of them is dated to one of the author’s famous crime novels, from ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ in 1926, and through the 1937 hit ‘Death on the Nile’, and ending in 1952. Each has scenes and objects from various novels. We’re particularly impressed how they’re all obviously unique, but have morphing elements that flow into each other, linking them into a coherent whole. MDM say there is a lenticular shadow effect on the coin, but it doesn’t show in the video.

The packaging is just outstanding, with a leather-look, gilded book, decorated in a mid-20th century style. When opened, it reveals a sepia-toned endpaper, with the coin, and a magnifying glass, sunk into the other side. It all sits within a slipcover. Just terrific theming. All together, a fine homage to one of the finest authors of all time. At five ounces, it won’t be a cheap purchase, but MDM seem to have invested plenty of effort into it, and Christie fans will find much to appreciate here. Available to pre-order, just 500 will be struck.