Agatha Christie vs. Keigo Higashino: Who wears your mystery crown?

Two very different flavors

If you love crime fiction, Christie and Higashino are can’t-miss authors. But don’t lump them together. Reading Christie is like playing a high-stakes guessing game—blink and you’ll miss the key clue, and the solution won’t land until the final second. Higashino, by contrast, feels like listening to a heartbreakingly human story; sometimes the “who” hardly matters because you’re already neck-deep in the lives on the page.

The genius of Christie

Let’s start with Agatha Christie—the Queen of Crime. She pushes the word “guess” to its absolute limit. Take Murder on the Orient Express: a snowbound train, a wealthy man stabbed again and again, and a carriage full of people who all seem connected… and somehow not. You trail after Hercule Poirot, grabbing at every scrap of evidence. One minute you’re sure the governess slipped up; the next you’re convinced the retired colonel’s shifty glance means he’s hiding something.

Christie loves her red herrings. Someone “saw a stranger”? They made it up. Someone with a perfect motive? Of course they also have an airtight alibi. I once kept a whole page of notes and still picked the wrong culprit. Only when Poirot gathers everyone and peels back each lie, one by one, did my jaw drop: So many people were in on it—how did I not even consider that? That’s Christie’s magic: every clue is on the table, yet you fall into trap after trap. When the truth finally snaps into place, it’s shocking and somehow inevitable. If you crave the pure puzzle-solving high, Christie will hook you and never let go.

The heart in Higashino

Higashino plays by different rules. For him, the mystery is a vehicle; the real destination is the ache of being human. I opened Journey Under the Midnight Sun chasing a killer, but halfway through I was completely consumed by Ryoji and Yukiho—their shadow-and-sunlight lives, the way they hold each other up across years and compromises. You know terrible things have happened; and yet as you watch Ryoji quietly sacrifice and Yukiho glide forward with immaculate poise and hidden scars, anger gives way to a heavy, helpless tenderness. The last line—“She never once looked back”—left me staring at the page for ages, tears slipping down before I noticed.

Or take Secret: after a fatal accident, a husband discovers his wife’s soul inhabits their daughter’s body. There’s almost no intricate deduction—just a family caught in an impossible tangle of love and duty. More than once I set the book down and thought, What on earth would I do? Higashino is unmatched at bottling ordinary people’s struggles and letting them burn slow. By the time you reach the end, the case files feel secondary; it’s the lives—messy, tender, compromised—that keep echoing.