Words that kill

Agatha Christie is probably the best crime writer ever. She wrote more than ninety books, but only 82 as Agatha Christie. For this illustration I counted the words of 65 of those books. Including her most famous like “Ten Little Niggers” and “Murder on the Orient Express”. She also have a long list of movie and television adaptations. Take a look at her wikipedia article.

She used the word “murder” only 4158 times… not too bad!.

Most commonly used words: poirot (13236), mrs (10845), mr (9100), quite (7388), something (6469), really (6288), sir (5243), rather (4883), woman (4431), anything (4394), doctor (4167), murder (4158), suppose (3856), away (3611), inspector (3531), marple (3390), lady (3273), moment (3261), believe (3210), dear (2729), suddenly (2719), case (2704), tuppence (2609), matter (2549), smiled (2523), killed (2421), shall (2373), someone (2367), seen (2336), understand (2302), death (2240), wife (2201), nice (2150), dead (2107), felt (2042), died (2036), tommy (2005), nodded (1985), another (1964), police (1940), sort (1927), everything (1917), husband (1902), shook (1897), married (1896), bit (1881), natural (1855), else (1849), oliver (1823), exactly (1822)…

The battle between Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple has a clear winner. Poirot has more than quad hits than Miss Marple.

I’m working in a new implementation of my word-counting tool. The target is to be able to count words combo, instead of single words. I will publish someday a whole analysis, but I want to share some of my first results with you. For these 65 books one of the most used four (representative) words combo are “miss marple shook her head”. And the three words combo winner is “said miss marple” with 1217 hits.

Another illustration. This time the words sizes are proportional to it’s repetition.