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“... are owned by Chorion, Lord (Waheed) Alli’s organisation, which puts Wheatley in the company of Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Georges Simenon and the Mr Men. When I asked about their plans for him they would say only that they hope to license publication soon and that several publishers have expressed interest: the corporate equivalent, I ...”

“... not a gifted writer, despite her excellent taste as a reader – she loved magical realism, Agatha Christie, Marguerite Duras and D.H. Lawrence. (‘If I could write a novel like Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I would die happy,’ she often gushed. Of course, ditto for me.)If there’s a whisper of satire here it’s never amplified – and satire as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... cod while men prowled around a cabin, as determined and pugnacious as dogs.’ In the same year, Agatha Christie published The Sittaford Mystery (Major Burnaby cheated at the séance!), Margery Allingham published Police at the Funeral (cluster of unexplained deaths in Socrates Close, Cambridge!) and Dorothy Sayers published The Five Red Herrings (Lord ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... career for me to perceive her magic. I remember watching The Mirror Crack’d (1980), based on an Agatha Christie story, in which she plays a murder suspect, overacting wildly and wearing a strange purple hat. Watching her as a child star in Lassie Come Home and National Velvet, I was far more interested in the animals.The Taylor I grew up with was the ...”

“... exactly what you think. Be as brutal as you like. And I very much want you to tell me if all the Agatha Christie bits of it work or not because I’m not very good at clues and red herrings and things like that – ’ ‘I’m terribly sorry but I’ve got to ring off. That was the front-door bell and it may be something important so I’d better ...”