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“... suspended between adoration and shock. He looked and sounded rather like Hercule Poirot (could Agatha Christie have heard of him?), but for little grey cells substituted planetary forces, sevenfold rays, the three bodies of man. Chiefly, though, he was a direct teacher, by talks and example, of the disciples he gathered round him; anyone who knows the ...”

“... of a 14th-century Italian monastery felt as familiar and comforting to us as afternoon tea in an Agatha Christie vicarage. A crucial part of the strategy behind The Name of the Rose was the creation of a reader who would feel at home in the Middle Ages (the period in which Eco had always specialised, after all, and for which he presumably felt a certain ...”

“... an antinational and inflammatory nature’, confiscate Wuthering Heights along with Trollope and Agatha Christie. Lola explains that she is reading Trollope precisely ‘to take my mind off all this’, gesturing ‘vaguely and rudely at the scene in general and the guard himself’. ‘Old-fashioned books is what I like. Not the new kind of thing, no ...”

“... to get a picture of a locality, an institution, a person, writers as apparently different as Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and Martin Amis go for atmosphere, seizing on simple strong images, then orchestrating and art-directing them until they pervade every aspect of a novel like a smell (the mixed metaphors of this sentence perfectly express the ...”

“... and her village that can be derived from a careful sifting through the fairly numerous books that Agatha Christie wrote about her. The remaining pieces are all to some extent the same sort of thing, relying for the most part on the mild entertainment to be derived from treating detective stories as historical documents through a close study of which ...”

“... decor and costumes.’ Fey, Warholish asides about literature just can’t be shut out (‘I like Agatha Christie, love her. And Raymond Chandler is a great stylist, a poet. Even if his plots are a mess’); nor can assorted chunks of information about the Capote life. It’s undeniably interesting to learn, for example, that he once bedded Errol ...”

“... the tangling of the bedsheets. We know what we are in for, just as surely as we do when we open an Agatha Christie or an Elmore Leonard. The formula is simple, repeated with variations in most of M.R. James’s 33 ghost stories, and still guaranteed to give pleasure today just as it did to those fuddled dons and sleepy schoolboys who first heard James ...”

“... sales are calculated at around 250 million copies, which puts him in the stratosphere with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner. What can be precisely reckoned is that more films – 108 – have been made of Zane Grey’s 58 stories than of any other novelist’s work. As the disparity implies, many of Grey’s stories were filmed two and ...”

“... the author might have wanted it to happen differently.’ That said, she also has a weakness for Agatha Christie and Miss Marple’s fussy talent for ‘human algebra’. People wouldn’t be people, and characters in novels wouldn’t be proper characters, without their contradictions. Alida’s favourite subject is maths, ‘and this semester she was ...”

“... referring to crime novelists – the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie – in an attempt to wrest the detective story away from the English suburbs and towards the grittier (and far more romantic) novels written by himself and Dashiell Hammett. An explanation of sorts had already been offered by George ...”

“... front to an unsuspecting world. By 1980, however, the club was becoming like ‘some ghastly Agatha Christie play’, as Janna put it, with members disappearing from issue to issue. ‘Here we are,’ Ad Astra noted, ‘surprised by time.’ After so many changing scenes, the last are sadly similar: the hospital ward, the nursing home, the ...”

“... included Arthur Lowe and Richard Briers, and Writers for Europe, whose membership ranged from Agatha Christie to Tom Stoppard. Ogres such as Benn, Paisley and Powell were no match for these recruits. The 1975 referendum has attracted the attention of various political scientists, including the psephologist David Butler and his collaborator the German ...”

“... things even easier than usual for himself by including a run of dedications by the same hand. Agatha Christie is an interesting writer and an even more interesting phenomenon, but is the wording of her dedications interesting or original? ‘To Margaret Rutherford, in admiration’: I share the admiration for Margaret Rutherford, but not the ...”

“... dated), his intellectual debts are self-confessedly to ‘Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, and even Agatha Christie’. The imaginary kingdom of Prester John which forms the main theme of Gumilev’s study refers, not to the legend of a Christian king beyond the domains of Islam as it developed in Europe, but to the existence from time to time of Christian ...”

“... missing Grail solved. Suddenly, after so many wanderings, the narrative achieves purchase, with an Agatha Christie-style dénouement and an explanation that has a surprisingly wicked twist in its tail. But the preceding novel has not won sufficient interest in either Frederick’s mysterious death or the characters who might be responsible for it to make ...”