 Hello and welcome to an evening with Agatha Christie. It's my pleasure to welcome you from wherever you are around the world, and it seems somehow strangely appropriate that this evening we are gathered in the library to discuss and unravel the story of the Queen of Crime Fiction. Here at the British Library, I am surrounded by thousands, thousands of books. Among them are countless editions of the works of Agatha Christie. Hardly surprising as it is thought that one billion have been printed to date around the world. She is the most printed and read author of all time, if we leave Shakespeare and the Bible writers aside. They've been translated into over 100 languages, and I'd like to think perhaps that Christie was more responsible for the image of Britain around the world than almost anyone else possibly. Her works are essential parts of our culture and our language. Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, The Mousetrap, and of course the body in the library are etched into our language and culture. And all began 100 years ago this autumn with the publication of the Mysterious Affair at Stiles. Tonight's event is presented with the wonderful collaboration and support of Agatha Christie Limited and is presented in association with Hist Fest, a new history festival which aims to present events that break the mould of who talks about history and what constitutes history. We begin tonight with a panel entitled The World of Christie. With Mark Gatiss, Sarah Phelps and James Pritchard, hosted by Rebecca Ridell, who is the director of his festival and a noted historian and author. Thank you. Hi, hello everybody and welcome to the first part of our special evening of Agatha Christie festivities. During this first discussion we're going to be looking at Agatha Christie's life, legacy and also the world in which she lived as well. To do this I'm joined by some amazing speakers and Agatha experts. And so first of all we have Mark Gatiss, who's an award-winning screenwriter, actor, producer, behind some of the huge BBC shows such as Sherlock and Dracula, but also, crucially for this evening, has written several, written and starred in several episodes of ITV's Poirot with David Souche. We're also joined by Sarah Phelps, who is the genius behind the recent raft of BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie's work. So adaptations such as Ordeal by Innocence, the ABC Murders and then there were none as well. And alongside Sarah and Mark, we're also joined by James Pritchard, who is the CEO and chairman of Agatha Christie Limited and also the great-great-grandson of Agatha Christie herself. He's also overseen numerous adaptations of Christie's work. So Mark, Sarah, James, thank you for joining us this evening. Pleasure. I guess, first of all, I'm just interested to delve a little bit into Christie's life. And I think the most sensible person to go to, first of all, would be James. And could you tell me a little bit about her background? We know obviously she was born in 1890 to an upper-middle-class family, but could you tell me about her early life and how she first became involved in writing? Well, she grew up in Torquay, as you say, she was born in 1890. And she had a pretty, what you might call a pretty nondescript life. I mean, you say she was born to an upper-middle-class family, but I wouldn't say by those standards she was wealthy. She had a pretty quiet upbringing through to the, I guess, the First World War when things started to kick off both in terms of her private life. She got married to Archie at the beginning of that war. And then at the end of that she had her first book published. And I guess from there, I mean, I guess the rest is history. And one of the interesting things is that she did actually take part in the First World War as well, didn't she? She was involved in the Red Cross during that time, which obviously brought her into close proximity to... Well, she started off as a nurse and then she worked in a dispensary for a pharmacist. And that was where her kind of knowledge of poisons and those kind of things came from. And that was something she used throughout her life. And she obviously had books, as we know, it's easy to say with hindsight that they are a phenomenon. They are huge. They are, I believe, the second best-selling sort of literature, second only to Shakespeare. But there was a moment in her early life when kind of her literary output and her personal life collided. And that was in 1926. And Mark, I wonder if I could bring you in here. And there's a story about an incident where she disappeared. I had nothing to do with it. Are you sure? I know what they say, but I had nothing to do with it. Yeah, so good. I wonder if you could tell us about this and, you know, the impact that it might have made to her popularity and that kind of thing. Well, obviously, it's an extraordinary confidence of things, isn't it? She publishes The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is a masterpiece, I think, and kind of changes detective fiction forever. And it coincides incredibly with her, essentially, with her disappearance. So, I mean, if you were planning such a thing, you couldn't do it better. I know she didn't. But actually, she became the most talked about woman in the country and possibly worldwide whilst releasing her best book. So she disappeared for 10 days, I think, and then was found. They dragged pools and everything. And then they thought she was dead and who's this huge manhunter. Then she was found living under an assumed name in a hotel in Harrogate. And no one has ever really known exactly what happened. She seems to have entered some kind of fugue state after her husband said he was going to leave her. And it's remained an intriguing thing. I mean, for me personally, I think as a child, one of my first encounters with her, really, was probably the film Agatha with Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, which is this fictionalized, but rather good mystery about what might have happened in that strange period. But I suppose something really quite remarkable happened there. She'd done a mysterious fair style. She'd done a few books and then this incredible game changer, which of course we can't reveal the end of, Roger Ackroyd. And then at the same time, she became the most famous person in the country. So it sort of all started there, I guess. And then moving on, I suppose to her writing and her style of writing, Sarah, I was reading an interview with you and you said, and I'll quote you here. You said that when I, and I quote, when I came to read and then there were none, I was startled and shocked to find that they were in fact brutal. There was a cold and witty mind behind them. Could you tell me about that mind and what that meant to you when you were adapting her work? Yeah, I think that's stunning most of all, because as I said before, I'd never read any Agatha Christie before I read and then there were none. I'd never watched any adaptations because I thought they were all going to be a cozy kind of, here comes the village busy body to sort out a murder. Nobody really cares about the body. It's just conjurings of, you know, plot. And it was, I think that what always really struck me that it was when I was reading and then there were none. I kept thinking, my God, this is like, this is like, this is not a cozy little person. Sort of like, this is remorseless. This is absolutely brutal. And at the same time it's, I found it really subversive. And I kept thinking, this is got this really bleak gallows humor behind it all, very knowing, very, like I say, subversive. And that meant that when I came to read the other books I read for adaptation, I could never divorce myself from that first kind of sense of blood thinning shock, which was like having a bucket of icy water dashed in your face and quite a strict lady shouting, don't you ever take me for a fool again. And I always kept thinking that whenever I read anything else, even the work that she wrote before and then there were none, you just kept seeing that kind of, it's like a glint. She never kind of puts it front and centre. Well, she does put it front and centre, but some of the times, especially in the later novels, you can see this kind of glint of that, of those sharp teeth hiding behind something else. And I've got a theory about why that is, why it does sort of retreat a little bit, but I'll come to that another time. Oh, you tease, you tease. You're going to have to answer that before the end of this session. I'll try anyway. It might be a load of old rubbish, but we'll see. But then obviously she has had a huge influence and impact. I want to move on to talking about how she has influenced yourselves. And for James, I imagine that this is quite a difficult question for you because she's your great-grandmother, but also such a massive literary icon. Was there ever a moment, and I'm assuming it would have been when you were very young, was there ever a moment where you realised, ah, actually, she's Agatha Christie, she's pretty important. How was that for you? Well, I can literally say that if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't be here, so I think I win this one. But I mean, actually, I mean, well, I mean, oddly, or maybe not oddly, I can answer that question quite easily because it was actually, I think the day she died that I realised quite what she was. I remember coming back from school, I was whatever I was, five or six, and my father was kind of lying in a darkened room, obviously very sad, and that wasn't usual at the time. And then I remember watching the six o'clock news, the lead item, and I think even then you realised that that wasn't normal. So I suspect that that was the moment that I realised that she was something more than just my great-grandmother. I've always sort of had these two people in my life, really. I have Agatha Christie who is the person who wrote all the books on the walls behind me and did everything that we've talked about that these guys have worked on and everything else. And then we have the person that we refer to in the family as Nima, which is my father's name for her when he couldn't say grandma, who was just, I mean, I always refer to my father as the most spoiled grandchild of the 20th century, and I don't necessarily mean that financially. I mean that from a kind of love and effect. She was the most amazing grandmother. She used to take him to places, do things with him. She was very much there for him. I mean, his father was killed in the Second World War. So, you know, his mother brought him up to some extent on her own for a while, and she was a very big part of that life. And you couldn't have asked for a better grandmother if you tried. That's so interesting. When you think about the balance between family life and also her prolific output, I mean, did he ever, if you don't mind my asking, did he ever speak about the writing processes and her work in that way? Well, I think the thing about her writing is she, I think in the end she wrote very quickly. She talked about it as a bit like giving birth in that the kind of idea Jess stated in her head for weeks and weeks and weeks, and presumably she had multiple ideas because she wrote more than one book a year at various times. And then when it was ready, it kind of came out fully formed and she wrote longhand, I typed or whatever. I mean, actually she dictated some later novels. And I think at that point, they came out pretty quickly and pretty fully formed. So she just must have had the most incredible mind, the most incredible brain. Thank you. And Sarah, you've obviously mentioned already that you haven't read any Christie before doing your adaptations. But what did, I mean, I came to Agatha Christie later on in my life as well. But that said, she was always there, wasn't she? I wonder for you what she meant to you before you approached the adaptations for the BBC? Mainly what she meant to me was really, really massive cues outside the mousetrap in the West End. I used to run radio mikes in the West End for like Oklahoma and shows like that. So I'd always be bustling about and you'd always be aware of these massive, massive cues outside the mousetrap. That's kind of a little bit sort of asinine actually. I mean, you're always aware of it. You're aware of Poirot. You're aware of Markle. They're part of your kind of cultural landscape. It's like saying, just because I've never been run over by a bus, I don't know what one looks like. And you're aware of, you know, you're aware of David Sushi, you're aware of Joan Hickson. And I remember being around my grandfather's one time and there was a, there was Peter Euston of playing Poirot and all the great and the good of Hollywood. You know, Glenda Jackson and Maggie Smith kind of being waspish and bitchy, but we never got to see any more of it because we had to get in the car and go home. So you're always aware of it all the time. It's just, I was, you know, I was, it was never on the shelves at home. And I think generally when you first start reading that, you know, you're picking up stuff that's on the shelves at home or you're picking up stuff that's in the library. And I was never sort of directed to them and they were just never there. I mean, there was the whole rack of like Ian Fleming books, you know, like, so I read all of James Bond by the time I was about 10 years old, which probably, you know, informed quite a lot about the person that I am. So I think I had a really preconceived notion and a very kind of concrete notion of what the works were. Very, very kind of, but that was what being, had been informed by, you know, oh, it's a Sunday afternoon, turn on the TV, here comes Miss Marble to solve the murder. And they always seem to be categorized as something which can either be waspish and bitchy and glittering and delightful or really, really solid, cosy, entertaining, tea time drama. So that would have been fixed in my mind. So that when you go, it's not that at all. It's like watching something being unpeeled of its skin. It's like watching the English national psyche being cleansed slowly and remorselessly. I kept thinking, this is, I mean, it's not a disservice because, you know, it burns money, loads of people enjoy it. It's really, it's people love it. That's just not what I wanted to do with the work at all. At all. And, you know, I don't mean to say that everything has been kind of like cosy and comfortable. I think that's the perception of how people come to it. I want to be comforted. But I'm going to watch Poirot solve, you know, multiple murders and somehow that's comforting. And I just wanted to say, I was always really fascinated by the fact that, you know, that, because I've done a lot of work and research about the voluntary aid detachment in First World War. And of course, she was part of that voluntary aid detachment as a dispensing chemist and had passed all of her exams. And I kept thinking about the way she writes and about her looking at, I mean, it's a 60 odd year writing career. It's a very, very long life. It is absolutely say is make up evil. And I always imagine her looking at the sort of like that huge turbulent blood-soaked time through the prism of the grain of difference in a drug that can either give life or make it a poison. And that really, really infinitesimal balancing act and just, you know, watching a whole landscape of how the 20th century changes. Modern warfare, the human body, the human psyche, the economy, the orthodoxies of sex, of politics, of power in the world. And just thinking of all of it, she kind of, the edge of her pin and she screws it to the board and that's what I wanted to write about when I was doing my adaptations. Also, why should it be cozy? Someone dead. The hell we're torn in the universe. Go with that. I think that's a lovely visual image of the power of her work. And Mark, your whole body of work has been kind of drenched in murder mysteries and the macabre. And I just wonder how Agatha Christie comes into that. How has she influenced you? Well, I read most of them when I was a kid on holiday that they still feel like holiday books to me, which is where they're the best place for them. I think around the pool side somewhere. But I just remember being, you know, it's the same sort of thing. You're so aware of them. I remember Margaret Rutherford film and stuff like that. But I was always very into it before I'd read one. And then I just started reading them and I just simply couldn't stop. I remember literally gasping at the solution of Roger Ackroyd and things like that. And then an Orient Express was on TV one New Year's Eve. And it was just like, I loved everything about it. But as Sarah says, it's an interesting thing because she's basically a very broad church, is Agatha Christie. And you can contain many mentions within. And there is a very cozy version. There is a more arch version, which is like the Eustonov films, which is sort of high camp. That's also Agatha Christie. There's a very straight version, which is sort of Joan Hickson, I think, that kind of version of Miss Marple, et cetera. And then much darker readings. And I think she can take it all. That's the great thing. Like any great writer, she can take a lot of, she's very stubborn and rigorous presence. But the great thing is, I think she, not only could she withstand those things, but it's also good. It keeps it healthy and alive because you're not saying this is some kind of fossil. You're actually trying to keep, not only the brand going and the sales of the book, but actually to keep people interested in this thing. I mean, to me, if you boil it down, what she is, is an extraordinary mind. I mean, she had about 35 of the best ideas anyone's ever had for murder mysteries. I mean, it's just incredible. It's the stage where you just go, she did all those at once. And she puts ideas in short stories, which would keep other people going for the rest of their life. It's absolutely amazing. Sarah, did you want to come in there? No, I was just going to come in on how, on that she can beat all of these things. And it's all about kind of investing it over the real muscularity. And I found that one of the things that was real really interesting. And I got quite a fair amount of kickback from some quarters about the way that I sort of read and have adapted her, is that it's a zone. Somehow I've taken something that isn't there, and it is there. It really, really is there. I mean, what Mark was just saying about the short story is because, you know, when I was doing Witness for the Prosecution and James sort of said, well, there's a plan. I don't want to do the play. That's a second idea. Let's go with the first. And some of the stories in that collection of shorts that the Witness for the Prosecution comes in are phenomenal. They're like Roald Dahl. And there's one story, the name of which escapes me at the moment. I'm sorry, which is about, you know, a lost traveler who winds up taking shelter in a family's house overnight. And it's one of the most disturbing things I've ever met. There's a short story about an utterly toxic and terrifying marriage called Philamel Corner. You can't read this and go, here's a nice lady. She's not. And yes, she can be all of those things. She can be high art. She can be very, very straight reading. She can be all of those things. But I really, I think that underneath there is a deep, dark current of going really a very, I always feel that there's certainly, as it gets towards the later end of her career, that there was a very strong tension between the book she knows people want to read, that the Agatha Christie, that this huge global audience wants to read and the book she wants to write. And because her writing is entirely made of clues, you really got to be looking more focusing on tiny little clues so that when they drop later you go, oh yeah, sometimes you find little things in some of the later works because obviously I did a few of them. Where you go, tonally that feels strange. What is that doing there? And when you kind of follow a particular little kind of narrative clue that doesn't seem to quite fit, you go down into a sort of rabbit hole and go, oh, is this a book she wants to write? So that was always the sort of way I came to her, sort of adaptations, looking for the clues which don't quite seem to tonally fit with the rest of the book. But yeah, sorry, I went off on one there. No, that's really interesting. And James, it's just made me think about your unique position in the Agatha Christie story. And I wonder about your reading of her works and whether you have a favourite and how you first approach your great-grandmother's writing? I mean, I, well, I've always said, well, not always, because it happened more recently, but Sarah has changed the way I read the work. She's taught me a lot. Oh man. But she's taught me a lot about them. And I think one of the things I'm incredibly grateful for Sarah about is that she's taken the work seriously. And has adapted that what she sees. Now, it's not what everyone sees, because thank God for the rest of us, not everyone sees in the world what Sarah sees in the world. But she has done her job of adapting the books. And I think going back to Mark's point, there are lots of different ways of relating to Agatha Christie. And I mean, I think the more serious view is actually probably the right view. I think that slightly cosy, and particularly the kind of, maybe the more eusternal view, is probably not the way, certainly I don't think the way she wrote them. I think she wrote them as serious. She certainly felt that the deaths were real, that murder was a horrific thing, and people should be punished for murder. I mean, I think without giving any spoilers away, perhaps she let one or two, or in one or two books, should I say one or two murderers are sort of allowed to get away with it to some extent. But that is all out of however many stories. And there are some pretty horrific people who get killed in Agatha Christie's, but that is still unjustifiable. She does not think that murder is an acceptable answer to someone living a bit long, being a bit of a pain in the neck, and having a lot of money. She abhorred that. So, look, I read them relatively regularly. I don't really have a favourite, I guess. I like lots of them for different things. I mean, I love things like, and then there were none, and Death on the Nile, and Murder on the Eurydice Express, because there's a reason why they're the most famous. But I also like some of the lesser novels. Like Sarah, I think some of the later novels are really interesting in what they're doing. Books like Crooked House, like Pale Horse, like Endless Night, they say something about a different world. And I think what Sarah says is right. I think by then she was, there's a reason why so many of them don't contain Poirot and Marple. I think it was when she had the courage to say to her publishers, no, you're not getting a Poirot or a Marple this year. I'm writing what I want to write. But I think that's the thing is, you can read a book one day and go, that's my favourite, and then you read something else the next. One of the amazing things is how actually so many of them are so good. There are very few which are even less good than even the best ones. I mean, there are one or two maybe later on where she got a little bit whatever, but on the whole, they're pretty strong all the way through. And I guess the other thing that we've not really noted as well is how the Christy influence expands beyond books, beyond TV adaptations. So we have things like Cluedo, and we have murder mystery weekends that people go on. I think you can draw, you can trace a very clear line back from then towards Christy's work. I'd like to move on to some of the more challenging aspects of adapting Christy's novels now. So obviously we've spoken about the cultural context in which she grew up and in which she was writing. We know that she had an keen interest in archaeology. She traveled to Egypt and things like that. Mark, perhaps I'll start with you first. Given all of this, are there unique challenges that present themselves when adapting a work from an author whose body of work is in a very specific time period? And how do you deal with that? I don't know about that. I mean, again, there's a sort of, there's a joy in doing things set in that period because I mean, that was the sort of diktat with the sous-chef Sir David, indeed. It was that they were all essentially set in 1936. It was a very busy year for a coup d'etat. It made a lot of sense because it was all about, you know, the joy of that period and the art deco, all that absolutely made sense. I don't think it's, it's not time specific. It's just that's the kind of golden age, just let me know. I mean, for me, the principle thing really is the reason that Christy has survived and all her competitors have fallen away, she really is the queen, is, you know, Dorothea says, they're gorgeous books though. Whimsy is a beautiful character. It's very moving. His sort of first world war flashbacks and all that, but nobody remembers the plots. Nobody. They're just not, they're just not the same. And I think what Christy really triumphs at and when you're adapting is a gift, is if the actual mechanics of the story are absolutely copper bottom brilliant. And then interesting, the ones I did were, were later books, you know, regarded as not the, not the greatest, but there were still so many lovely things to mind. You know, I mean, if you're as Sarah as if you're approaching something like ABC, which is just an absolutely dynamite idea, you know, then it's all there, isn't it? And you can enjoy reading the change and everything, but the idea is so crystal and brilliant. But for instance, something with like, I did, Castle Among the Pigeons and one of the main things was there were actually two murderers. I've given that away. And I know, but it was like, this is a really clever idea. It was just really clever, a lovely setting. And I felt I could have, you know, tons of fun with it. It's a girl's school in the 30s. There's very colourful teachers to play with and all sorts of stuff like that. So, I mean, in many ways, all that's a gift. And I think what I tried to do really, I suppose with channel, all those different influences, the sort of more arch version, which is kind of cozy and fun, plus the actual darkness of people getting their head smashed in, whatever. And that's what, I suppose that's what we all enjoy about it, isn't it? But it's, you know, you know you're in safe hands really. That's a lovely thing. You think, well, you know, you're not messing with anything really, because she's done it all for you. I don't know how true this is, but it was written in Christy's obituary and I quote here, she never cared much for the cinema or for wireless and television. And Sarah, obviously, you know, you've made a very impactful mark on the Christy legacy, I think, in the way that you've adapted her works and you have, in a way, changed the tone and the way that her books feel on screen at the very least. Was that a conscious decision or was that something that just happened organically? It was just something that just happened because I was so shocked by, and then there were none. And it was while I was writing that and thinking about how remorseless it is, you know, and then thinking about, well, she writes, obviously, she's got a huge audience, thirsty, gagging for what comes next. So she writes very, very fast and publishes very fast. And then in the summer of 1939, it's published in pretty much, it's finished and published them. And as I was reading, I kept thinking, you could read this in so many different ways, locks room murder mystery, portrait of psychopath, disposition on the nature of guilt or the portrait of a country represented by all these kind of ludic figures, you know, the general, the playboy, the spinster, the schoolteacher, on this salt scoured island where they can't see anyone and no one can see them. And this remorseless oblivion heading towards them. It doesn't matter. You can't, there's no mitigation. You can't plead. You're not going to be let off. There's no leniency. It is coming and it is going to smash you. It's over. The remorseless white unblinking eye of God is on you. And I kept thinking, Christ, doesn't this feel like standing on the edge of the world about to be catapulted into the next great destructive bloodbath of World War II after you've just struggled out of the last one? And I kept thinking, I wonder if there's a way of doing quintet where you could look at sort of like five periods of the British history, the English history of when she was writing through the absolute prism of the sort of genre that she made her own, which is murder mystery, which has always been viewed as a sort of slightly, not particularly a literary genre, let's be honest, a bit kind of, oh, well, the ladies will enjoy that one. It's not kind of like serious and heavy hitting and doing something that says, let's look through the eyes of this author, let's look at five decades of, you know, the blood-soaked tumultuous 20th century. And so when I was sort of, looking at that, I never had the consciousness of wanting to say, I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to have people swear. I'm going to have them take drugs and I'm going to have them have sex because that's the only way to make an audience sit up. No, if you're on an island, everyone starts dying. You're going to swear and you're going to have sex because that's what you do if you're on the lip of the grave and you thought you might die tomorrow and there's one person with a gun who could keep you alive. Of course you're going to buff him. And, you know, drug use was right anyway. And I just thought, one of the other things that was really conscious in me because at the time, you know, we had this whole kind of like, let's vote. We're going to shoot ourselves in the face for a nostalgia that never existed. And I was thinking that one of the dangerous things about presenting the kind of past in a sort of cozy way where injustice is tied up and like, look how safe it is. It's all nice. It makes you feel that the past, everybody knew their place. And everybody was happy. It wasn't like that at all. And it was when you kind of, you know, when you look at the sort of the way that, for example, and then there were non-presents, its characters, you know, like us saying all these people sound like they could be characters in a board game. And they're all English and everybody speaks with the same accent and everybody knows who the other person is. They think and then they find out, Jesus Christ, you're a murderer and you've been getting away with it and it hasn't bothered you. There's no red mark of cane upon your brow. If it wasn't for the fact that it brought you to this place and made you start to sweat, you'd have been fine. You'd have been carrying on living. And in 1939 to have them look at sideways at somebody who you should be trusting because they're like you and have them go, who the hell are you? This is completely subversive. So all of these ideas are what kind of informed how I wrote. I never wanted to think like, oh, let's make it. Let's go and really be deliberate about something. If you're deliberate about something, it stands out a mile. It's cheap. It's torturing it. It doesn't have its roots in anything real. So I never had that. I just plowed into the books. And I didn't, my rule of thumb when adapting is I never watch any other adaptation. All I go in is the book and what the book tells me. So whatever is on screen is what the book has told me. That's really interesting because it must be incredibly hard not to have seen a Christy adaptation. And Mark, when you were writing... Oh, apart from the final curtain, the last sushi, which was Kevin Elliott wrote the adaptation for, do you know the one, Mark? Yes, yes. Absolutely phenomenal. So that I have seen, which means that I, if somebody said to me, do you want to adapt, you know, and I'd go, no, because I don't want to ever tread on anything that Kevin Elliott has ever done because it's a really masterly, elegiac piece of work, and sushi is fantastic in it. It's really wonderful. So yeah, but I avoid like the play. Sorry, Mark. I was trodden you. Mark, I was just wondering about your, when you came to write, came to write Poirot, I should say, had you watched any adaptations before and assuming yes, and how, and if you had... The question should be, the question should be how many times did I watch adaptations? I mean, well, I grew up with so many of them, you know, Hickson and then obviously with Poirot's and everything. And when I was in Poirot, an extraordinary thing happened. It was a very personal thing, but I got married whilst I was making shooting Poirot, appointment with death. And David, the day before the ceremony, David came over in full costume and blessed me. And it was ridiculously moving experience because it was kind of like all my Sunday nights blessing me, you know. It was something very... So lovely. It was. It was something very strangely moving about. It was just like, gosh, this is like Sunday coming back and kissing you on the forehead. Anyway, no, I mean, I was very aware of, I just love the René Claire and then they were gone and the Finney, Orange Express and stuff. I love them all really. But I mean, and there are different, different gradations, you know, you can enjoy the absolute horror of the other two. And then there were nones from the 50s and 70s, which are just dreadful. But they have a kind of, they have something about them because the source material is so good. You didn't think, how do you manage to mess this up so badly? Which they did. But so I, you know, I mean, again, it's the same as, as enjoying the books in different ways. It's, it's very, she's very robust. So you can watch some less good adaptations to enjoy them. I mean, weirdly, the Rutherford's, of course, are mostly adapted quarrels, which is absolutely outrageous. But they're very enjoyable films. And she's a delightful presence. She's not really Miss Marple. She's just Margaret Rutherford solving mysteries. But I mean, I would watch that. So yeah, I mean, I was very familiar really with them. And therefore it was a, it was a joy to be asked, you know. And I guess, can I just, can I just turn in something? Yeah. You know, just talking about not watching other adaptations that after I'd done and then there were none, I think I was on to witness for the prosecution by this point. And as usual, I'd, I'd had some wine had been taken and I'd formed the sleep on the sofa with the telly on. And I woke up and the, the TV was blaring and Oliver Reed was running about wearing a huge turtleneck jumper and carrying a gun. And with this sort of half-naked actress and sort of like dodging behind pillars and everything. And then suddenly Dickie Attenborough was there with Cobweb, Cobweb's in his eyes. I was like, what the bloody hell is this? And at some point I was like, oh my God. It's, and then there were none. But it's a film version where Lombard and Vera get away with it based on the kind of like the stage adaptation that she'd written for New York post World War Two to which I'll come back if he was. But, and I was watching Guy, this, this is insane. I mean, just some of the sort of like the costume decision, but it took me ages to work out what it was. It just like, oh, this is a thing I've just finished writing. Yes, you're unrecognisable. Completely. James, one of the themes that, that strikes me about Christie's output, specifically from her two most well-known characters, so Poirot and Miss Marple, is this idea of an outsider stepping into somebody else's life, well, a group of people's lives. And I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit and how important that theme is in, in her works. I mean, there's, I mean, the, the kind of basis of most of her works are kind of closed circles. So, you know, the kind of genesis of the country has. Mystery model is that kind of thing of a bunch of people who know each other in a house. One of them dies, you know, who did it. It had to be someone in there. No one could have come from outside and, and all that kind of thing. And therefore, to, to solve it, you need, I mean, on the whole, you need someone who comes in from outside. And I think she very cleverly probably, you know, Poirot kind of almost, I guess happened by accident, certainly to the scale he did. He wasn't planned to be the long running character. He turned out to be, you know, he was kind of a late addition to mystery, he was kind of a late addition to fair styles, but to create someone who was so other, who was, you know, not just not from that kind of country house set, but he was also, you know, from not the UK. He was from Belgium. I think was incredibly clever. And then Miss Marbles, a kind of whole different kettle of fish. I mean, she is sort of from that world, but she does sit just outside it in a very interesting way, and therefore can judge it and watches it. And I think that, you know, very few people did. I suspect that she observes people in the way that my great grandmother observed people. I think that is definitely something she inherited from that. So, you know, there is that. I'm aware Sarah's got. Come in. I was just going to say that one of the things I love about it is that her two most famous sleuths are outsiders. One is a refugee fleeing war. The other one is a spinster. And it's basically you stand. It's like the, the Shakespearean fool. You stand outside of everything and you comment on it. And in terms of sort of like the English country house being presented as the site of murder, I would have always thought, well, that's Chris's slide joke. Yeah. Which is, well, this is where it all happens, isn't it? This is where somebody draws a line on a map that sends a load of boys over into a kind of land where they're just going to be cut down by the awful art. I always think that's a slide joke about the, the sort of like the seats of power from Christie. And even though, you know, she was quite an habituate of the English country house anywhere. I do think that everything is sly. A sideways kind of subversive little dig, which is like, this is where all the power is. Here's a body on the floor. Nobody seems to really mind, but it's so important. And here comes the outsider, the unmarried woman, the Belgian refugee and their job, it seems to be to parcel up Englishness and give it back to you was something safe, but nothing's ever going to erase that blood stain. I think that's a point. I really like that. I'm very conscious that we are, and we only have a few more minutes left. And I've got a couple of questions I'd like to, to ask, and all three of you, but I'll ask them together and hopefully you can give me, give me, there's enough time for you to give me your answers. So first of all, what are the key ingredients for a Christie story? And second to that, who's your, what's your favorite, what has been your favorite adaptation? Mark, I'll start with you. The ingredients. I mean, that's hard because, you know, she, as I say, she had, she had so many brilliant ideas. She brings the changes all the time. And there is a, to some extent, it's like, she's presenting herself with the problem, isn't she? What can I do different? And then, you know, I do this, you can't say anything without giving anything away. But she brings, she does it so breathtakingly. I suppose it's really, as James says, it's a sort of close circle. I mean, that's just, that's just what you need. The more disparate it becomes, the more difficult it is. And then you need to have someone in on the investigation. But I suppose what she really does is, it's brilliant sleight of hand. She, she, she, just when you think you know how she does it, she tricks you again. And that's, that's like a master conjurer going, ah, ah, ah. And if you think, oh, I know how she, yes, this is a pattern. And then she just switches it again. She's always ahead, I think. And that's a wonderful thing. But I mean, it's, what I was saying about the puzzles I think is very important. They are puzzle books. But what she does, sometimes I think unconsciously, is smuggles in a lot of social commentary, because of the time she's writing. And sometimes much more consciously. And as Sarah says, she's sly. There's a sly humor, but it doesn't get, it doesn't detract from the puzzle, but it just gives you a wonderful picture. And I think sometimes people criticize them for being too sort of plain or, you know, but there's a, there's a wonderful kind of clarity to it. It's really, there are some, you know, obviously working with archetypes, but you just think, well, I know where I am. And this is really now all laid out for me. And if I don't guess it, then it's because I'm not as clever as she is. And my favorite adaptation of my goodness, I would have to say, it's the hand on my heart because I watch it at least six times a year. It's, and it has everything for me. It has to be the use of evil under the sun, which I think is the best way of having a good time you can have in the cinema. It's an absolute glory. It's a brilliant way of taking, you know, quite a, quite a serious book and having massive fun with it, casting it to the, to the nines, and yet taking all the detection very seriously. It's a really satisfying whole, because you just go on holiday with Diana Rick and Maggie Smith at Peter Husteldorf and also solve a brilliant mystery in Santa. It's a glorious thing. And James, your, your, the key ingredients for a Christie story and your favorite adaptation. Well, I think Mark sort of covered it, but my, my, my phrase is always, it's plots. It's, it's, she had this mastery of plots. And somehow she managed to write, you know, 66 full length novel, whatever it is, 150 short stories, 20 odd plays without really repeating herself, without making any mistakes, without having any, I mean, yes, some of the stories may be a little bit farfetched in some ways, but, but they actually work. They're not, you know, there's, there's, they don't have errors in them. And that is why it lasts. That's why we're still doing them, because the kind of, the kind of structure is there to adapt them for whatever time and to, to put your spin on them that you want to. So, you know, I think it does come back to the fact that she just wrote these incredible stories as she would have called them. And that is what we all still enjoy and people enjoy all over the world, because you can read them in any language, you can read them if you're, you know, if English isn't your first language necessarily, but also they work in translation and they work being adapted in foreign languages as well. So, yeah, it's the stories. And your adaptation. Well, I mean, this may sound as if I'm trying to be nice to Sarah, but I do. And then no one has a very special place in my heart. It came out, I can say this because I had absolutely nothing to do with it, except it did come out just as I took over as chairman of this business from my father. So I kind of felt, I felt attached to it in that way, but I wasn't, I wasn't involved in its genesis. And I think it just did something very interesting for us. It did make people look at a writing in a different way again. I mean, we had, and don't get me wrong, I love the suches. I mean, Curtain is, as Sarah's mentioned, I think one of the great films that we've done of all types, let alone the fact that it was, well, it was shown as the last of, you know, a series of however many. But, you know, we'd had all of, we'd done of all the pyros, we'd done all the marbles. And, you know, we were at that point going, are we ever going to make TV again? And suddenly Sarah comes along with this take on and then there were none. And it just feels so different, so modern, so alive, but it is also incredibly faithful to the story. And it looks at it in a different way. And I think that really helped me on my way in the business. So yeah, I'm going to go with Sarah and then there were none. And Sarah, we've just got a couple of minutes, but your turn to answer the question, the key ingredients. The key ingredients. A sickening, disgraceful sense of shame. A terrible thing done that you will do anything never to face. That's a key ingredient. Absolute taproot inanity, the darkest, darkest recesses of the thing that you're trying to forget. Power and how much somebody, what they'll do to hang on to it. Those are really, really key ingredients. And also the sense of the world whirling around you. People don't just step onto a board from nowhere. They stepped from somewhere. That's really important. Those are the crucial things besides everything else, besides everything else, that sickening feeling of shame and also of want, I want this. I want this. What will I do to get it? I don't want this. This is how far I will go to stop it from happening. Crucial elements. My favorite adaptation. Well, I don't know and I'm not going to sort of talk about anyone. I think Curtin has got to be up there as being absolutely down. But also, can I just give a quick play to the adaptation that I haven't written yet and don't know if I ever will. That's kind of up to James, which is one of her short stories and one of the greatest, greatest short stories, which is called The Mystery of the Blue Jar. It's one of the nastiest, most cruel, most heartbreaking heart-rending, astonishing short stories that will thick your blood with cold to use Antonia Byatt's phrase. It's really, really marvelous. And if you don't know it, I really just recommend that you read it. It's from the collection that The Witness Prosecution comes from. It's an early short story and it's staggering. So it's not an adaptation, but it's one I'd like to do. Well, there you go, James. The pressure's on. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Mark, Sarah, James, thank you so much for your time. It's been my pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you to Mark, to Sarah, to James, and to Rebecca. In a few moments, we present the second panel of this evening, Christie and Crime Fiction. In the meantime, you may be interested to know that the British Library has its own Crime Fiction imprint, Crime Classics, which unearths forgotten gems from the golden age of crime fiction. If you'd like to explore further, please click the tab entitled Books at the top of your page. Thank you. We now present the second panel of this evening's Evening with Agatha Christie, here from the British Library in association with Hist Fest and Agatha Christie Limited. The panel entitled Christie and Crime Fiction features three of our leading contemporary crime fiction writers, Sophie Hanna, Rachel Haasel Hall, and Vaseen Khan, again hosted by Rebecca Radial. Thank you. Hello, and welcome to the second of our panel discussions this evening. Now we're going to be looking at Agatha Christie and Crime Fiction as a genre. So 100 years ago this year, Agatha Christie published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and introduced us to one of her most famous characters, Poirot. Over her lifetime, she's published 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, and has become one of the biggest, well, actually, sorry, the biggest selling author of crime fiction, Full Stop. To explore crime fiction and Christie's work and how it's influenced crime writers, I'm joined by an amazing panel of speakers. So we have Sophie Hanna, who is the best-selling writer of, who is a best-selling writer of crime fiction herself, and her 2013 novel, The Carrier, won the Crime Thriller of the Year Award. She's also the author of four highly acclaimed Poirot mysteries herself. Alongside Sophie, we also have Rachel Howsell Hall, who's a critically acclaimed author of crime fiction as well. His work includes the detective Eloise Norton series, and the Christie inspired, they all fall down. She serves on the board of directors for the mystery writers of America. And joining Rachel and Sophie, we also have Vasim Khan, who is the author of the best-selling and award-winning Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novels, which are set in modern day India. And they feature a detective named Ashrin Chopra. And this, in homage to Christie, the most recent novel in the series, is called The Last Victim of the Monsoon Express. So Sophie, Rachel and Vasim, thank you for joining us this evening. I guess the first thing I want to, want to really ask you about are your own novels, because you've all done something very different with the crime fiction genre. Vasim, you've taken the concept of the Orient Express to India. Rachel, you've taken the spirit of, and then there were none, to modern day LA. And Sophie, you've actually taken on the voice of another author by writing Poirot novels. So I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your journey into crime fiction and the books that you write. If I start with Vasim. Right, so one of the things that you quickly realise if you're trying to break into crime fiction is that you have to do something different. It is the world's most popular genre now, but it's also incredibly crowded. So for me, because I'd lived in India for a decade, I wanted to write about India. And I personally think, as too many crime authors, that crime fiction is a really good vehicle for exploring social issues. You have Chopra, who's in his late forties, he retires from the Bombay police force. But he also inherits a one year old baby elephant at the same time. So the elephant is a metaphor, it's a symbol for India. It allows me to add some subtle humour throughout the series. But what we're doing is we're exploring India as it is. But the inspiration for some of the stories in that, not just the last victim of the Monsoon Express, but another novel in the series called Murder at the Grand Raj Hotel, which again is a very agthakristi style death in the Nile kind of vision, where Chopra is called in after the murder of a wealthy American at this premier Indian hotel based on the real Taj hotel in Bombay. And he does what Christie's pro would do. He goes around, number of suspects come to the fall, and then we have a big denouement when he gathers everybody together and we find out who committed the murder. And for me, the inspiration for that came from my younger days because I grew up in Britain. My parents were born in the subcontinent, came to the UK. I was born here, we grew up here. And I remember in my teens, the only thing that the entire family would watch together was the pro adaptation starring David Sushay. And that was quite amazing to me because my father couldn't even speak English very well. But he just loved seeing this very quintessentially English TV show with this English, not English, but the setting was English, but the detective and with his quirks and his mannerisms, something about that appealed to him. And I think that stayed with me throughout the year so that as I started to write crime fiction, I couldn't help but be influenced by Christie. Thank you. That's really interesting. It seems to be a running theme and it was mentioned in the panel discussion earlier about how that ITV Poirot series has been so formative for so many people's experiences of Christie. Rachel, turning to you, so in America, Christie is just as huge as she is here. And how did you come to crime fiction? What was the inspiration behind your stories and how does Christie play into that? Right. I came into Christie pretty late in life, growing up in America and as a black American, she wasn't much of a force in our world because just because. My mom did, actually she watched Masterpiece Theatre, which was a PBS show which had lots of adaptations of Christie novels into movies. And so I knew about her, but I didn't understand what the big deal was. When my husband and I first started dating, he watched, he loved one of his favorite movies was Murder by Death, which is a Neil Simon movie with all the satire of, you know, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie and these characters. And it was really funny. I'm like, well, who is the little lady supposed to be? And that's when I went back and discovered Agatha Christie. I was an English American literature major, and I did not read Agatha Christie. We did the usual, you know, English canon that did not include genre writers because genre writers, they don't matter. So after watching Murder by Death, I started kind of digging. I was like, oh, she's kind of cool. I like these stories. And, you know, I read and then there were none. And I liked that one a lot. And I saw it in different books that I'd read. So that stems from a Christie story. Oh, Murder on the Orient Express. Oh, I've seen that kind of around. And so I thought to myself, you know, I would like to see an African-American woman in this kind of milieu. I wanted to see, you know, something very uniquely American and in black American in a Christie novel because, you know, black folks aren't in locked room mysteries. And so I wanted to take my favorite story, which was, and then there were none. And have it be led by an African-American woman in first person and knowing that it's first person and knowing what the story's ending was. It's like, okay, how am I going to do this? And then also take, as Vasim said, social issues and have them embodied by certain, especially very American types of people. So it was a challenge. It was fun. I used all of my, you know, what I've learned in my formal education on how to write this book. And it turned out cool. I had fun writing that ending. And then Sophie, and how did you come to crime fiction then? Because you do a lot of different things, but crime fiction seems to be the running thread. Yeah. So I became absolutely obsessed with mystery fiction, which is crime fiction, but the thing that I love is the mystery. And I became obsessed with mysteries as a very, very young child. I was maybe about six or seven. And I discovered Enid Blighton's secret seven books. I did read the famous five as well, but the secret seven were my, my passion. So I read all of those and it's about, you know, they're all about a gang of kids who solve mysteries before the, the boring, stupid grownups will always get it wrong. And I just fell in love with them. And then when I was just getting to the point where I was too old to read Enid Blighton and I was about 12. I'd read all of Enid Blighton's mysteries. My dad bought me a copy of The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie. He used to go to lots of second hand book fairs. And he knew I liked mystery. So he saw this copy of Body in the Library, which is an excellent Miss Marple novel. And he just bought it on spec thinking, oh, well, she might like this. And I read it age 12 and thought, this is everything I have been wishing for in my wildest dreams. Cause what I'd been hoping for was to find kind of Enid Blighton mysteries for grownups. And that was what Agatha Christie seemed to me to be. So between the ages of 12 and 14, I read every word that Agatha had published. And by the time I was 14, I was one of the world's leading experts on Agatha Christie. And it just set up in my brain, the blueprint for what the ideal novel should be and do. And it made me, it just sort of reaffirmed my love of the mystery genre. And ever since then, it has been my absolute favorite thing to read and my absolute favorite thing to write. And I love in particular that combination of the frustration of being desperate to know the answer and not knowing the answer combined with an absolute guarantee that you will know the answer. Because in real life, I'm a very curious person. Some might say nosy, but I would not. I would say curious. And very often if there's a mystery in real life and I'm desperate for the answer, I have to accept that I might never get it. Whereas in crime fiction, you know that you are going to get that moment of satisfaction where you go, now I understand how it all fits together. And that's what I most love. Well, that that links really nicely onto my next question, actually. And I remember reading somewhere, probably erroneously, I must confess and hold my hands up to it. But I remember reading somewhere that Christie sometimes used to leave the decision as to who was the main culprit until the final chapter. And so that she could choose the most unlikely person, unlikely character to have committed the crime, whether this is true or not. And I'm interested in the way crime writers carve out stories that feel authentic and true. And at the end readers go, ah, of course, of course it's that person. And I wonder if you could perhaps tell me a little bit about that and your techniques for doing it. If we start with Rachel. I like earning every twist I give a reader. And I like planting the seeds very early on. I want to tell you basically who did it, but with this hand say she did it. But with this hand do all kinds of crazy things like magic. I want to, when you get to that end, I can say, well, I told you in chapter two who it was, you just didn't, you know, you didn't pay attention or you were so excited to plow ahead. I like when a reader gets to the end, there's some sort of satisfaction that only, if I had only paid more attention or thought more about that over there, I would have solved it. I don't want it to be very, I don't want it to be a Scooby-Doo reveal. You guys know Scooby-Doo, right? Okay. Yeah, so I want it to be like this fully formed and very honest reveal. And that takes time. That takes draft after draft for me, planting seeds in every chapter about who this is. And we were talking earlier about first drafts and how I hate first drafts because I, myself, I don't know what's going to happen. Even if I have an outline, we all know that ideas sink sometimes outside of that idea of what you have. And it's around the third draft where I am totally convinced of who done it and then I get to go back and make sure that it's evident in every chapter I write. That's interesting. Sophie, do you have a similar approach or do you differ in how you carve out a story? Well, I would not like to wait till the last chapter to decide who did it because I, I mean, I agree with Rachel. I think we as writers are better able to cleverly misdirect the reader and plant the clues and write things so that we know that the reader will interpret it in this way, but we really know that it means that all of that sort of setting up, setting the stage to make the revelation when it's time can only really be done if you, the writer, know exactly what's going on from the start. Now, that's not true if you're willing to do endless rewriting. So I could imagine going a lot, but you see, I couldn't actually because I wouldn't know, I wouldn't know how to write chapter one or chapter two or chapter three if I didn't know what story those chapters were part of. So I have huge admiration for crime writers who can start writing their crime novels, not knowing any of the plot beyond what they're writing in that moment. I have huge admiration for all the many writers who say they do that and pull it off admirably, but personally, I like to know everything so that I can then decide how to portray things and reveal things and misdirect, and I can't imagine being able to do that without knowing up front. Yeah. And Vassim, how about you? Where do you fall in this sense? Well, I'm going to act as a tiebreaker here and I'm going to fall on Sophie's side of the fence and I'm going to go back to something she said a couple of minutes ago, which is the mystery element of crime fiction because I think more than anything else, the kind of crime fiction that I write is about the mystery element and at the other spectrum of crime fiction you have fast-paced adventure thrillers where the mystery is less, it's much more about the action and all of those kind of things. So for me, it's the intellectual challenge that you're giving to a reader so that in tandem with you, they go through the plot and they solve this mystery hopefully and if not, they at least get that great payoff at the end where they scratch their head and say, oh, God, I missed that clue and otherwise I would have solved it. And to do that, in my opinion, certainly the way that I work is to start with the crime, usually a murder, and then I ask myself the four main questions, how, what, why and when, when did this happen? Why? What is the motivation for this person dying? How was the murder committed, et cetera, et cetera? Once you know all of those things, that's when you can go back backwards or at least the way that I do it, I would then go backwards and start thinking, right, now who else can I justifiably put as a red herring here? What clues can I put to point to somebody other than the person that I know who did this? And then I go back and say, now, how can I make these clues interesting? How can I make them an intellectual puzzle for the readers to follow? And Sophie's been brilliant at doing that with her new plural mysteries. I think the first one started with three, three rings that you put into people's mouths. And cufflinks. Cufflinks that were put into people's mouths. Now that kind of small clue, that's an intellectual challenge because it immediately asks the reader to ask themselves, why in the world would a murderer leave these cufflinks in these three dead bodies mouths? So that for me is the way that I would approach this, going backwards and then making it intellectually stimulating. Okay, I'm getting the impression here from all three of you as well, that there must be some kind of little buzz that you get as authors that you can't share with anyone at the time when you've created a really great red herring and you know it, but you have to keep it to yourself. And I was going to ask you about your favorite ones, but I can't, of course. I believe it. The next question I had, which I think is a key attribute to most crime fiction, is the central character, whether they're a police detective or they're someone working on the outside, kind of looking at a case happening elsewhere. So I'm interested to know about the key attributes of the crime fiction detective or sleuth, if you like. Sophie, I think I'll start with you because I also want to push you a little bit on the question I asked you before with regards to writing using someone else's voice. So if you could tell me about Poirot and how you came to channel Christy in your writing. Yeah, well, first of all, in terms of what you just said about the characteristics a detective should have, I don't think there is a set of characteristics. I think, you know, as long as your detective character is doing whatever you want him to do or her to do successfully, you know, Poirot is a very flamboyant detective, but, you know, Ruth Reynolds Inspector Reg Wexford, he's not so flamboyant, he's more a sort of good, responsible, ordinary, ordinary man. Inspector Morse is very sort of bad tempered and he likes his opera. So like, I don't think there's one set of characteristics that detectives in fiction should have. I tend to particularly like, especially now in contemporary crime writing, detectives where I think, this is an unusual, you know, this is just a person that I haven't met before who happens to be a detective, rather than, here's an author who's sat down and thought I'll create a detective and given them all the characteristics that they think detectives should have, because that leads to very hack need and unoriginal writing. In terms of Poirot, I am not in any way trying to write in Agatha Christie's voice or to channel her voice. In fact, one thing I was clear about right from the start is that I don't believe one writer can or should try to mimic the writing voice or style, the writing voice or the prose style of another writer. I don't think it can ever work. I think your voice and your style as a writer, it's like your fingerprint, it's completely unique. So I was very clear from the start that I am not writing new Agatha Christie novels and I am certainly not writing as Agatha Christie or in her voice. All I'm doing is, I mean, I'm certainly writing Agatha Christie brand novels, but that's very different from writing Christie novels. So what I'm doing is writing new novels in which Agatha's detective Hercule Poirot is the star attraction. And I saw my job as basically to be creating new and challenging and brilliant and exciting mysteries that Poirot, that Agatha Christie's Poirot could then solve. And so the way I got round the voice thing, because I didn't want people to think this is someone trying to write a Christie novel in Christie's voice and getting it wrong. So what I decided to do was create a new narrator and a sidekick for Poirot, Inspector Edward Catchpool. So he is the narrator of all four of my Poirot novels so far. And he's also working with Poirot on all these murder mysteries. And that to me seemed like a brilliant way to deal with the fact that it was a new voice and a new person writing about Poirot. Because if anyone reads my Poirot and thinks these don't seem exactly like Christie Poirots in their tone, there's a sensible reason for that within the framework of the book, which is this is a new person talking about, writing about and working with Poirot. Thank you, that's a really interesting approach there because as you say, there have been some authors that have done exactly what you said you were guarded against doing. And yeah, it often works, it often doesn't. Basim, moving on to your central character what was the reasoning behind him and what were your, could you tell me a little bit about the attributes you wanted to give to him or that came about organically? Well, I can sum up what I think a crime fiction character protagonist needs to have with one word and that is likability. And that's if you want people to read a series and continue to read the series now, we have to be careful what we mean by likability. What I don't mean is someone lovable and warm and cuddly. That's not what I mean at all, what I mean is say you take the case of Poirot for example and on the face of it, he's not a likable person. He's quite superior minded and he's quite curt and abrupt and he's got these quirks and mannerisms. But if you read enough Poirot you do fall in love with him and he becomes likable to you and I think there's a lot of characters that can be a lot of different character attributes that can be fit underneath that's that overriding characteristic of likability. So for me, Inspector Chopra, he is likable by the fact that he is an honest man in a very corrupt environment and everybody knows that the Indian Police Service has a reputation for dishonesty and bribery and corruption and the rest of it. So he stands as a character who's different to that. He doesn't take bribes, he doesn't believe in the kind of things that people get away with in that society in which he operates and that in itself gives him this inherent property of likability. But there's other things that small things like taking in this one year old baby elephant even though he lives on the 15th floor of a tower block. Why would you do that? You can easily send him somewhere else but his inherent goodness prevents him from doing that. So these kind of things I think under that banner of likability are the single most important attribute but likability defined as a way of creating a character that people want to spend more time with. Thank you, thank you. I just love that you have an elephant as a sidekick in your novels. That's just like the most unique thing ever. Rachel, so your long-running series and your Eloise Norton novels could you tell me about what you think about a central crime fiction character and how that plays into the characterization of Lou Norton? Yes, I wanted and I'm always interested in and committed to writing these fully realized people and that means that they are not perfect. They have blind spots. They are interesting. They have bad habits. I want them all to be just like us. I really want them to be just like us because I don't want them to I want every reader to see themselves in some part of a character for Lou Norton. She's strong and brave and she will take a bullet for anyone because that's who she is as a detective. She's also someone's daughter and she's someone's sister and she has marriage problems and she is jaded about many things that are LA and even with the LAPD who she works for. They're nicks in her and with those nicks you get to play. You get to have these your characters have these conversations where everyone's kind of bringing in their baggage sometimes they're too polite to call people out on their baggage. I want them to be complex but relatable. It was fun writing Lou Norton because I didn't know how she'd react to certain cases that I'd give. The first being a young girl found in a condo hanging dead. She reacted different in that case and what she did in the last book was that she was dealing with big mega rich churches and hoarding and gentrification. Through her I got to talk about some social issues which we talked about earlier as well as figure out who this woman is and how the people around her would react to her. For they all fall down it's interesting Sophie is talking about she's not writing as Agatha Christie inspired by and it's been interesting for me because there have been some readers like well that's not an Agatha Christie book. I never said I was writing as Agatha Christie it's inspired by it but there's no way as a black woman in Los Angeles California whatever want to write as Agatha Christie and Miriam is not the typical Agatha Christie character in the first place. She's a woman of a certain age and divorced. She's kind of petty and funny in that way and you talk about lack of ability some people may not like her because she's I would see her on the Real Housewives of Los Angeles type of show. She's a character but we all have that one friend who can be totally inappropriate sometimes but they're great at cocktail hour and Miriam's that type and whether you like that or not that's a subjective thing but she's honest she loves her daughter she can't understand why she's on an island even though some of us would like to put a lot of people on islands and send them away but she's again she's a very uniquely American character and an African American character who I have her and six other people put through the ringer Agatha Christie style which is a very very good example of a woman who is in a very very good glass doing that taking something again very English and turning it into some crazy Americans on a Mexican island somewhere. It's great it's great it's really really I mean all of your books are fantastic and really enjoyable reads and I want to move on to the idea of the who done it he says in one of the books every one of you in this room is concealing something from me so it seems to me it seems to me that the crime fiction is as much about secrets as it is solving a mystery and how those secrets reveal the maybe not very nice character well the darker side of characters and beneath the facade so alongside you're finding out who committed the crime who committed the murder the rest of it you're also finding out things about characters that aren't related necessarily directly to the crime as well I'm interested in this idea of a who done it and secrets as well and how they play into each other and Rachel I wonder if you could speak on that a little bit as a theme of crime fiction every story I write everyone has a secret and I love it because as you just said it may not relate to the crime but it colors every answer you give someone like right now you know you have no idea what I'm hiding back here in my head like there's a safety pin on my shirt or something like that and I'm very aware of it but you may not know but I won't turn like this because you may see it and I want every one of my characters to have that little thing they're holding back so they're either scared of it being revealed or they'd be embarrassed it may not be a life threatening one but again it colors every interaction you have with someone else and I think for crime fiction authors we need those secrets just one to help us figure out who these characters are even if they're on the page for a minute it also drives the narrative of the red herring it's like oh I can tell I'm not answering a hundred percent maybe she could have done it and as a writer that makes me excited that's like my third draft when I get to do that kind of art where you're shaving things and making little divots and people but yeah everybody has to have a secret even if it's I have a poppy seed in my back molar and you can't see it but I kind of taste it and it's driving me crazy I just want to end this interview because I want to dig in my tooth to get the seed out so yeah I love secrets please stay with us please don't end the interview it's fine that's great and Basim how about you how do secrets play into your writing and crime fiction from your point of view I think secrets are a part of the human condition all of us have secrets and usually you know some white fib that we may have told our partner or our kids or whoever our colleagues at work what crime fiction does I think is take the magnifying glass and exaggerate those secrets to the point that they become toxic and malicious and give the reader the impression once they discover these secrets that this person could have been capable of murder and I think throughout if you're going to write crime fiction you have to really find out which secrets can be exaggerated in that way and still retain some sense of possibility or realism sometimes I'll read a crime fiction novel and there will be a twist which reveals a secret and I just want to throw the book at the wall because it makes no sense whatsoever it's just totally beyond the pale but the very best crime novels manage to reveal those secrets in a way that seems completely realistic to us and the other thing to note is that you have secrets which are at a very personal level but also you have secrets that can be told at a higher level so for instance I'm writing a second series now set in 1950 in India and it introduces India's first female detective the first book is called Midnight at Malabar House and persists the detective while she's investigating the murder of a senior British diplomat because a lot of Brits were still living in Bombay after independence and this man is fated by the Indian government but as she investigates she begins to find not only secrets that are personal to him and his lifestyle but also secrets pertaining to the work that he was doing at a higher level for the Indian government now the way that you reveal and entwine those secrets leads to the mystery element that Sophie was talking about earlier how did you keep that intellectual interest and challenge going for the reader right to the very end when you hopefully have this big reveal that's interesting I think you're right we do all in real life have secrets but it's how those secrets kind of if we were thrust into a crime drama of our own how would those secrets affect our outcome but Sophie how about you and how do secrets and why as I suppose as well play into the crime fiction genre from your point of view well I mean secrets are absolutely essential because if nobody felt the need to be secretive about anything then every murder mystery would be very short the detective would arrive and say who murdered this dead body and the murderer would go it was me let me explain why I always think I'd be a terrible murderer because I'm very indiscreet if I've done whether it's something nice or a murder I always want to tell everyone about it so one of the things that I think you know those of us who are really familiar with the genre you start to see all these potentials for parodying the genre and one of them I've often thought would be hilarious to do as a parody is to write a murder mystery where nobody's keeping any secrets everyone's just very honest very open and so the detective arrives and they all go sit down we will tell you everything that they just do but yeah I mean secrets are the driving force of crime fiction in fact crime fiction is much more about secrets than it is about crime because so much of the genre you know if you were interested let's say you were interested in crime fiction from a criminology point of view there'd be whole swathes of crime fiction where you wouldn't learn that much about actual crime because more crime writers are interested in psychological stress and human relationships and mystery and secrets and all of that good stuff and I think for a lot of us certainly for me the crime part is the part I'm least interested in if I could find a way to make it high stakes enough that people would be desperate to find out without writing about murder then I probably would because I'm not actually that interested in murder in and of itself and one of the things I do in all my books is I always think okay somebody needs to die that's clear I'm not particularly interested in murdering them in an interesting way so you will notice that a lot of my murder victims are very boringly killed they're either stabbed or shot whatever gets them dead most efficiently and involves me in the least research about crime and then I have more time and space to focus on what I'm really interested in which is what do people want other people never to know about them and what aspects of our because the thing about secrets is yes it is all about what we don't want other people to know but when we don't want someone else to know something about us it's because we don't want to know that about ourselves it's like our own sense of psychological survival it's only possible if we kind of pretend we're not the real us but some better version and that pretence can't happen anymore once everyone knows that you've killed Butler and hidden his body in the coal shed you know so yeah I think secrets are absolutely fundamental to crime fiction well I love how you said about wanting to write a novel where everybody just can't help but tell the truth I think that would be fantastic in a way I suppose to the challenges of writing crime fiction and by challenges I mean in a twofold way it's a genre that has a very rich history especially in the English language some very well known big beasts of the genre in terms of the writers and also the characters you alluded to Inspector Morse before but then also I probably get a lot of a lot of aggro here but I believe it began with the Moonstone and Wilkie Collins although I think there have been a few short stories beforehand and then obviously Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes what because of this huge legacy what challenges are the writing crime fiction nowadays and on top of that what are your pet hates and Vassim I'm going to go to you first for that one well I work in a crime research centre so the biggest challenge nowadays is of course the level of technology that we have available to solve crimes it's very difficult if you're going to set your crimes in a very modern environment to avoid the fact that say London for instance is the most CCTV surveilled city on earth it's difficult to say that nobody saw anything because it's usually captured on camera somewhere and DNA analysis all of these other tools that we have now and increasingly artificial intelligence in the way that draws together links between various clues and bits of evidence and networks of criminals means that it really is a lot more difficult for you to portray a plot where the the people who are investigating it know absolutely nothing and then have to do the shoe leather and the interrogations et cetera but for me I think that's one of the beauties of the challenges of trying to write really good crime fiction because what you do is you put yourself back in your readers point of view do readers really want a long essay on CCTV or the brilliant new techniques that are out there or do they really just want characters that they can spend time with a really good mystery fully realized characters as we heard earlier and do they then want to be able to revisit those characters particularly if you're writing a series revisit you as an author because they trust you they trust that you're going to deliver a good story that occupies their time in a meaningful way and as far as bug bears are concerned with the crime fiction I think I hinted at it earlier and that's the industry and I understand why they do this because it's marketing it's advertising but you know you end up seeing 30 or 40 books a year advertise as the greatest twist that you have ever come across the unanticipated the the most shocking thing that you've ever seen and that's fine I understand why it's done but it's usually not true usually you can see the twist coming usually it sits far from shocking or unanticipated but what's great about crime fiction is that occasionally you will come across a fantastic book where you could not see it coming and that flaws you and then you just cannot help but start talking about that book to everybody and saying you must read this fantastic crime novel I've just come across thank you and Rachel I'll move on to you but just and Rachel and Sophie with the caveat that we are getting close to the end of our time now but what do you Rachel what are your pet hates and also what are the challenges that you think the genre faces the challenge right now especially in America is inclusivity I mean crime fiction tends to be very white very male and we're now changing that because you know black folks are more than just criminals in in the world so making this genre more criminal I mean I'm more more inclusive and fortunately with so many stories to tell we can go back and tell those stories but from different perspectives the biggest challenge right now is how we're portraying police police especially in America have always been the heroes and we know now that they have some issues and how are we going to reflect not just dishonest cops but cowardly cops cops who have who are not all together upstanding and honorable and how are we going to reflect that now in in our writing because we now know that they do cheat and they do steal and they are dishonest so that's going to be interesting and how you know this pandemic is going to play out in crime fiction that'll be interesting too as people are trapped in homes where you know there are abusive spouses and abusive parents and how is that going to reflect in society and then of course in literature yeah I think it's interesting thinking about the pandemic side of things and the next generation of writers and their influence and Sophie how about you what are the challenges that you think the genre faces I think the challenge the overwhelming challenge the genre faces as probably the most popular fictional genre is to keep coming up with ways to be new and unique and write crime novels where readers will read it and go even though I've read a million crime novels this is completely fresh and unique which links to one of my bug bears which is lack of originality I read so many crime novels where I'm like oh this kind of thing again which I'm not keen on my other bug bear which I'm actually quite fond of and it's given me an idea from one of my other parody ideas so for ages it seemed that every crime novel I read started with a phone call from a person from the past so protagonist in the present would be having a lovely time you know opening the fridge and getting out some orange juice 2.4 kids and a lovely husband the phone rings and they pick up the phone feeling very jolly and say hello and someone on the other end of the line goes hello and it's the person from the past with whom you committed a murder 20 years and for ages every novel I read started like that and I have the burning desire to write a sort of satire of that subgenre where when the person from the past says hello in an ominous and threatening way the protagonist in the present goes oh hi it's you hey remember that murder we committed look I've been telling my husband all about it you must come over for dinner so that we can all disrupt the murder we could totally take the wind out of the sails of the person from the past so that was one of my bug bears for a while but I haven't come across as many of those person from the past novels recently I absolutely love that that's great you have to do your parody parody novels and one final question and it has to be I'm afraid a really quick answer so if you could give the title and a sentence why and your favorite Christy novel and why and Sophie I'll start with you I'm going to go for Murder on the Orient Express because I believe it has the cleverest misleading the reader and then solution in all of crime fiction and the scene it's a short story that she wrote the adventure of the Egyptian tomb and I think it was filmed with David and I love that because Quaro gets to go to Egypt and fool around with the tombs and I have a huge love for Egyptology Rachel and then there were none people on an island very creative ways of killing them and then that ending oh my god that ending Vasim Sophie Rachel thank you ever so much for your time thank you thank you for joining us from wherever you may be for this evening's event we hope that it's deep in your enjoyment and appreciation of Agatha Christy it certainly has for us please do let us know 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