Search Results

“... Agatha Christie​ is, according to her website, ‘the world’s bestselling novelist’. That is a difficult claim to prove, and the official site makes no attempt to do so, but when you think that she wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections, all of them still in print in multiple formats in dozens of languages, you can begin to see how she got to a total of one billion copies sold in English and another billion-odd in translation ...”

“... here is achieved, I suppose, by the writer who gets such a clue into the title of a book, as does Agatha Christie in Why didn’t they ask Evans? And it is Agatha Christie, too, who regularly contrives that just as the clue is dropped a distracting incident occurs. Here we are close to the art of the stage ...”

“... Of the four Queens of Crime who dominated the 1930s – Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers – Ngaio Marsh reigns supreme for excellence of style and characterisation,’ writes Margaret Lewis in her introduction. The proposition could be contested; it could be maintained that Christie is more ingenious, Allingham more lively and Sayers has more intellectual weight ...”

“... first sight Janet Morgan does not seem the obvious person to choose as the official biographer of Agatha Christie. She describes herself on the jacket of the book as a ‘writer and consultant’, who now ‘advises governments, companies and other organisations on long-range strategic planning, new technology and different approaches to whatever they ...”

“... he describes in a letter to the Morning Post, written on 16 December (ten days, that is, after Agatha Christie had vanished), and now reprinted in the present volume of selections from Conan Doyle’s letters to the press. Mr Leaf, this letter declares, is ‘an excellent psychometrist’ who ‘at once got the name of ...”

“... The pensée that no woman has ever given more pleasure in bed than Agatha Christie, now mildly feline, is much too kind, we would have said in the early Sixties when trying to write crime fiction under that then-monstrous shadow, doing the splits in the process. Everyone then mouthed the inanity that ‘the plot must come first’: a sense of character in crime-writing was a Gothic gargoyle, an afterthought ...”

“... it becomes clear that a wider reference is intended: the clues dropped are just like those in an Agatha Christie country house mystery, where both the number of characters under suspicion and their extreme simplicity – in most cases nothing but a name and a label – keep the reader alert to points of reference. This is ingenious of Mr ...”

“... coalesce, and the genre has seemed to satirise itself. Wodehouse may be thought to be alluding to Agatha Christie when he has someone say: ‘I’m speaking from an undersized hamlet in Hampshire called Marsham-in-the-Vale.’ But he or some adjacent joker of the time might also have written the lines assigned by ...”

“... eyes and bushy grey eyebrows, they form as dim a background as the village gentry in early Agatha Christie. Ruth rattles on about her Xmas prezzies: ‘Mrs C’s bumper Rowntree pack and Auntie Peachey’s Beano Annual. She knew for certain Dad’s present was another family boardgame and desperately hoped it was Cluedo – “I accuse Professor ...”

“... Experience, of Amis himself. Marsh has said of Dead Babies: ‘Basically it’s a reworking of an Agatha Christie whodunnit, it’s just that it’s set in a hyper-real world.’ The same could be said of Pierre Bayard’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (Fourth Estate, £10), which first appeared in France a couple of years ago, to be greeted by Le Monde as ...”

“... of these figures much resembles the ‘short, stout, elderly man, his hair cut en brosse’ that Agatha Christie describes. Well, they often manage the stout bit, but for the rest they are tallish, more like middle-aged, and Finney’s hair in particular looks like a terminally oily black carpet. They all have moustaches with an old-fashioned twirl, but ...”

“... catalogue of deaths and suicides announces the final surrender of the Golden Age Murder Mystery: Agatha Christie force-fed on Pevsner and the humbug of Kenneth Baker’s latest flag-waving anthology. A sub-genre that has always been profoundly conservative (hence its popularity, up there with P.G. Wodehouse, in America) is reduced to editorialised ...”

“... of very distinguished academics have taken time off from their learned pursuits to write imitation Agatha Christie detective stories, so when I first learned that Michael Dummett, widely regarded as the most formidable philosopher of his generation, was about to publish a book about Tarot cards, I rather naturally assumed that it must be an exercise of ...”

“... printing, ‘it became easier to feel that you had “finished” the Bible as you might finish an Agatha Christie, and correspondingly easier to think of the sacred writings as like a … spiritual “miracle diet” with a defined set of unambiguous recommendations and vetoes.’ Such a dismissal of medieval spirituality is one way of patronising ...”

“... recited at a sustained G sharp. ‘One pair red trousers’, I scribbled, ‘one orange. Woman in Agatha Christie cloche hat.’ Ermengarda Greville-Nugent was remembered in the prayers. The sermon, when it came, didn’t allude to Brexit or prorogation. Instead the preacher quoted secular historians as grudgingly impressed witnesses to Charles I’s ...”