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“... for solving the mystery’ was the first rule. The Detection Club, whose members included Agatha Christie, Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers, agreed. Their protagonists mix deduction with intuition and observation, making the impossible seem not only logical but obvious. It took some time for the neat formula that is now characteristic of the ...”

“... puts it, ‘a classic of bibliographical detection, a thousandfold more exciting than anything Agatha Christie and her kind ever penned’. It’s a generous compliment, but inexact. In the first place, as I have said, it is not clear what crime Wise committed by uttering his forgeries, or by making money out of them. Secondly, ...”

“... with a joke or a pun. Ker CHING. As Orwell pointed out in ‘Decline of the English Murder’, Agatha Christie and Christie-like middle-class crimebusters are oblivious to the tragic, being interested mainly in the puzzle, not the awfulness of a life ending in murder and the grief of those who loved the ...”

“... the fantasy, as well as helping to explain it. If detective stories, including now those of Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, become cult objects sooner than thrillers, no doubt it’s because of the fun of using detection on detectives. But there are other conditions: there must be characters who appear in book after book, providing both scope ...”

“... so as to avoid making them in the work. He also spent a great deal of time in his studio reading Agatha Christie novels – he liked to start at the end and read the chapters from last to first.Hodgkin’s studio is at the back of his house in Bloomsbury, near the British Museum. His partner, Antony Peattie, still lives there. It began life as a stable ...”

“... because it features a mayoral election and a crime story, but it’s nothing like that. It’s Agatha Christie writ large across Copenhagen; or, as my wife put it, like the best episode of Taggart you’ve ever seen, lasting 20 hours. This is not a criticism. Detective fiction is a conventional form, and it’s hard to imagine it otherwise. Where ...”

“... often leads down into the seedier stretches of the lower middle class as well. The traditional Christie village exists in some sort of geographical and temporal no man’s land, whereas Flaxborough is recognisably a town not too far from Norwich or Ipswich, and a late 20th-century town at that. The family grocer, offering slivers of cheese and slitting ...”

“... an inflation of Dimblebys, a lobotomy of Heavy Metal percussionists, Daphne du Maurier, Dame Agatha Christie – then, finally, his voice rasping with emotion, a raven’s croak of intensely local pride ... the birthplace of Bill Giles, television weatherman, cold front pundit, guru of the wind-chill factor. A meaningful silence advects along the ...”

“... life than the tea-table domesticities of Gloucestershire. The general effect is rather that of an Agatha Christie detective story with the mystery left ...”

“... a golden age detective story – the ‘Mayhem Parva school’ of detective fiction made famous by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. What Chabon does is to take the neat classical form – the symmetries of suspicion, the reassuring world in which wrongdoers are always discovered, and the values of Little England restored – and to split it open ...”

“... my favourite over his hurdles so excitingly. The book is also like a different kind of game, Agatha Christie’s, in which you have to spot the person whom Agatha Christie thinks her readers will suppose to be the least likely person. To add to the gaming spirit, Charles Griffin has supplied cartoons in which ...”

“... an easy one – he refers twice to a master short story writer called O’Henry and says of Agatha Christie that she is among those ‘whose mastery of plot is unbettered and whose use of language to achieve their aims is total’.There’s a reactionary growl underlying all this good clean fun interpretation. Phelps believes that Wodehouse said ...”

“... the accident. The younger policeman, noticing the cover, mistook it for another of his favourites, Agatha Christie, and soon he and Oksana were talking happily about their ideal England, a country where people drank their Earl Grey at four, a land of spaniels, shooting parties, prize-winning pigs and serial poisoners. Wodehouse gained another Russian ...”

“... But the sorts of detail James includes also amount to a criticism of Austen. James has talked of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh as ‘historians of their age’, meaning that they can often capture society as it is with more accuracy than people writing in less workaday genres. So she has Lizzy dealing with Mrs ...”

“... confronting the genteel concoctions of ‘golden age’ detective novelists. Three of them – Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh – come before members of Professor Benstock’s syndicate. Bibliographically, the results are useful: critically, they’re not. All are pleasant to read, like souvenir brochures; but all rely too much on ...”