“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... genres such as spy fiction or action thrillers, the form could provide a congenial home for women. Agatha Christie’s primacy as the queen of crime was unassailable, and Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh had numerous devoted followers. Here was a genre where James could make a name for herself and earn money. Her literary career began ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had to laugh,’ Plath wrote, ‘as I send all my poems first there anyway.’ She read Agatha Christie and looked at her ‘table of flowers sent by Ted’s parents, Ted, Helga Huws & Charles Monteith, Ted’s editor at Faber’. And she listens: ‘The British have an amazing “stiff upper-lipness” – they don’t fuss or complain or ...”

“... I’ve read all the detective stories there ever were, I should think,’ a character says in Agatha Christie’s Peril at End House. ‘Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ My back is OK but I’ve spent the last 15 months reading detective fiction, most of it written between the late 1920s and the mid-1950s, an extended survey of ...”

“... and the system of land-holding meant that many people had no money to buy food. It is like an Agatha Christie novel in which everything – motive, attitude – points to an obvious suspect, but the culprit turns out to have been the vicar’s wife, whom no one suspected.In fact, nobody is suggesting that the Administration actually caused the ...”

“... or second-hand shop, and the books we actually read, stories by Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner and Agatha Christie. When my eldest sister went to Birmingham University to study English in the mid 1970s the bookshelf began to change character: T.S. Eliot, Camus, the Mabinogion. It may be that Laing was part of Birmingham’s contribution to the family’s ...”

“... arrest, everybody knew that. The real reason why the body disappeared as in a cheap thriller by Agatha Christie was that the Government (or the Writers’ Union) feared a crowded funeral parlour, followed by a wake, finished with a riotous funeral procession. The body was bought back from the cold half an hour before the time the funeral procession was ...”