When we were all in a tizz about a recent murder trial involving mushrooms, the most common comment was “Isn’t it just like an Agatha Christie novel?”

The Queen of Crime was a great aficionado of death by mushroom or toadstool, and she used the device in at least four novels. Florrie Gibbs in Murder is Easy supposedly dies of poisoned mushrooms that she picked herself. There’s a poisoned mushroom stew in By the Pricking of my Thumbs and a poisoned sage and mushroom soup in The Secret of Chimneys. In The 4.50 from Paddington, Lucy Eylesbarrow creates a dish with mushrooms that is blamed for the entire household becoming ill.

The 4.50 from Paddington is one of librarian Melissa Jones’s favourite Christie novels. It’s a Miss Marple mystery, but a lot of the sleuthing is done by Lucy Eylesbarrow, who is smart, resourceful, beautiful and quite a good detective. The teenage Jones, already obsessed with Christie ever since she found a paperback with a huge wasp on the cover in her mother’s bookshelf (Death in the Clouds), saw Lucy as the kind of woman she wanted to be – along with other strong female protagonists such as Anne Beddingfield, Tuppence Beresford, Eileen Brent and Victoria Jones.

Perhaps Miss Marple herself was too old to be a role model for a teenager, but along with the legendary detective Hercule Poirot, she still had immense appeal. Christie summed her up pretty well: “Miss Marple has some faint affinity with my own grandmother, also a pink and white pretty old lady who, although having led the most sheltered and Victorian of lives, nevertheless always appeared to be intimately acquainted with all the depths of human depravity.”

Melissa Jones has had great fun acquiring a collection of Christie books for State Library Victoria to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Dame’s death this year. Twenty-two first editions with striking covers are on display in the library’s new World of the Book exhibition. Support has come from the library’s pioneering Women Writers Fund, set up in 2021 to correct the historical gender imbalance in the state collection.

As every Christie fan knows, her fascination with poisons didn’t stop at mushrooms. She trained as a nurse during World War I and moved on to a hospital dispensary where she got to know a great deal about poisons. She killed 80 of her fictional victims with deadly substances such as cyanide, arsenic, strychnine and thallium, often administered in fiendishly ingenious ways: through a dart, a nasal spray, or – horror of horrors for English breakfast lovers – hidden in the marmalade.

But her expert knowledge was also used for good. Her description of the symptoms of thallium poisoning in The Pale Horse contributed to catching a serial killer, stopped a murderous wife and helped a nurse to treat a sick child.

Why, sceptics might wonder, does a mere writer of detective novels deserve to join Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and the Brontes in the World of the Book exhibition? Well, there was never anything mere about Christie. She is the highest-selling author of all time, holds the Guinness World Record as the most translated author in history, and was made a Dame in 1971 for developing crime fiction as a serious literary genre. Jones loves her for her puzzles: murder in an enclosed space, a limited list of suspects and the unravelling of secrets. She also loves the endings: “When there is uncertainty in the world, people like to read about certainties – and you can always be certain that Poirot or Marple will discover the truth.”

World of the Book is on display at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, until May 16, 2027.