“... 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 ...”

“... with parrots on them, rode a motorbike and exploded in essays such as ‘Are Women Human?’ Like Agatha Christie, she was an author of mysteries who guarded a secret of her own. Christie’s secret was an unexplained disappearance; Sayers’s was a concealed appearance. A few years after her time in Mecklenburgh ...”

“... new state of ruin’ and the SFRS investigation into the second fire ‘fascinating … worthy of Agatha Christie or Ian Rankin’, is grating. It would have been better not to have mentioned the failure of the fire alarm to sound than to describe this fact as merely ‘curious’. Her tone, like that of the GSA as a whole, is defensive. ‘Sprinklers ...”

“... she explains, ‘never made toast.’ McLelland’s move from Belvoir to Styles, the home of Agatha Christie, was, she thought, ‘a come down’. Indeed the mass exodus from service between the wars was owed only in part to new opportunities: it was also a result of snobbery. A parlourmaid giving evidence to the government inquiry explained that ...”

“... are prohibited. All the suspects have to be present, so the setting must be circumscribed. Agatha Christie preferred small villages and house parties, but almost anything would do: an island, a plane, a train. G.K. Chesterton’s settings in his Father Brown stories are stranger and simpler: a beheading in a walled garden with no exits, the theft ...”

“... had been modernised by Wells Coates, architect of the new Lawn Road flats in Hampstead where Agatha Christie lived. Like Lawn Road, the Laughtons’ home was the last word in convenience, with central heating, a gas cooker and an open-plan living-room. Nellie took greatly to the combination of show business and streamlined Modernism and seems to ...”

“... matter, provided you are writing about the Balkans. In her 1925 novel, The Secret of Chimneys, Agatha Christie depicted the London financier, Herman Isaacstein, in ‘very correct English shooting clothes which nevertheless sat strangely upon him. He had a fat yellow face and black eyes, as impenetrable as those of a cobra. There was a generous curve ...”

“... widely read writer was born in the city. The planetary imaginary of Jules Verne – second only to Agatha Christie in number of works translated worldwide – was nurtured in a port where clippers still docked. But though naturally honoured in Nantes, where his statue presides over its botanical gardens, he retained no affection for it, sentimental ...”

“... this scene. Steep gables, Georgian windows, two wings, a walled garden (derelict) behind it. Agatha Christie could have set a murder here. Whose house was it? Dave photographs it from all angles, catching its dark-grey domineering presence among the disused fields which were once the townland of Greian. Then we go over the hill to the next ...”

“... have been composing the score for Endless Night, a Sidney Gilliat thriller adapted from a late Agatha Christie novel, for which the word ‘Hitchcockian’ might have been invented. The connection goes beyond Herrmann’s music, however: Gilliat, 34 years earlier, had been one of the screenwriters on Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. The plot of ...”

“... Thomas said, ‘I’d much rather lie in a hot bath sucking boiled sweets and reading Agatha Christie.’ But it’s more likely that he wasn’t being disingenuous at all: indeed, much of Lycett’s account would lead us to take Thomas at his word. He wrote with a great deal of care some great poetry, but for much of his life the reading and ...”

“... And this is where real life and the movies part company: in serial killer films, even in Agatha Christie, the murderer is a nexus of fascination, often attractive or charismatic, a superior mind or a wilder soul than the other characters. In life, however, he or she is more often than not a dull, even pathetic individual, someone from whom we ...”

“... interpret his decision to quote with no further comment? A few lines on, having mentioned a poor Agatha Christie novel he is reading, Beckett concludes: Paris is lonely, and Montparnasse in particular, without you and I feel remorseful that I didn’t give you a better time that last fortnight? Make up for it some day. Je t’embrasse bien fort. What ...”