Drawing the Detectives

Agatha Christie's 125th Birthday

In tribute of Agatha Christie, We have been set the task of redesigning a book cover for one of her many famous novels. 

Agatha Christie is one of the most highly credited novelists ever to live who produced a  hugely extensive collection of novels, most of them being detective novels and short stories.

I was given a novel called 'The Secret Adversary'.

The Secret Adversary is a detective novel and is Christie's second novel ever to be published. The book introduces the characters of Tommy and Tuppence who feature in 3 other of her books. The story follows these two characters in starting up a business they call 'The Young Adventurers Ltd' with a slogan reading 'Willing to do anything, go anywhere'. The storyline is based around a woman named Jane Finn and more importantly, a treaty agreement she had with her when she disappeared. Tommy and Tuppence are given the task of finding this woman and preventing the treaty falling into the wrong hands.

The original book cover features a creepy looking man wearing a suit revealing a bear's head underneath a mask. As with all other Agatha Christie novels, there is a huge variety of alternative book covers (shown on the left).


I am hugely fond of the original book cover due to it's ambiguity and colours used. The colour pallet is typical of the early to mid 20th century as well as the hand drawn illustration. The alternative book covers shown above were designed a lot later on and in my opinion have more relevance to the storyline and therefore are more effective. However I think the original is still a lot more aesthetically pleasing and suited to the genre and era of when it was written.

I aim to produce a more modern take on the cover. I will be exploring the use of colour and type and will be looking to simplify the cover into maybe one or two colours and one or two shapes. The end result should hopefully communicate the story line or an aspect of it as well as looking slick and simple.

I have explored a number of other detective novels written around the same time and looked into their book covers. They range from simplistic to artistic and use a whole range of colours. The more illustrative ones use more subtle, soft colours and create more expressive imagery. Whereas others use a more modern approach using only a few shapes and colours incorporated with the text.

I have read through a number of storyline summaries and have had some ideas on what shapes to include. As the story line is based on a missing treaty, I had ideas to include objects and symbols associated with this.

For my first idea, I decided to use an image of a hand written treaty. The colours chosen are typical of the time the book was written (early 20th century). The hand rendered image can be associated with early illustrations before things were done on computers. I then matched the header and footer colour to the image. I used Bell MT Bold for the font as I think it works well along side the type within the image. 

The blocks of colour behind the text are there as a template or grid. This morning we were shown some examples of book covers by Penguin Books. They have used a template for all their books throughout the years. This template is simply two blocks of colour at the top and bottom with the title written in between. I have slightly replicated this and used the blocks of colour to frame the text

For my second idea, i used a quill and ink. I decided to use this image as when this novel was written, there would have still been a lot of use for quill and ink instead of print. I like the ambiguity of the relevance of the image to the plot of the novel as it would not be obvious straight away. I used Black and Yellow as this commonly signifies danger. Danger is a common theme throughout the novel. I used fonts that look slightly hand-rendered to fit in with the image as well as the genre of novel.

The amended image works a lot better with the surface at the bottom being filled in with black. It makes the text at the bottom a lot more readable as well as giving the cover a composition.

My third idea is a lot more simple than the previous two. I have decided to make it monochrome and used a very simple typeface of Gill Sans. The image is relevant to the plot in that a treaty is similar to an agreement, therefor the shaking hands portrays this. The dark red, I feel, works well with the genre of book as its quite dark and dangerous. The text reading "Agatha Christie" is very recognisable and would stand out on a shelf of books.

Although we only had a day to work on this project, it has made me realise how easy it is to come up with a number of ideas after only a small amount of research. I am extremely fond of the book covers I came across during my research. My favourite style are the illustrated, hand-rendered imagery with a hand-rendered text on top. This gives the novel a really bespoke, collectable feel to it.