Agatha Christie is a writing and publishing phenomenon. Her play The Mousetrap still draws in audiences 73 years after its premiere. Nearly 50 years since her death, her books are still selling by the truckload in dozens of different languages. TV and film adaptations of her work are still made, remade and rerun.

Even those who have never read her stories and managed to avoid seeing actors balancing big moustaches on their upper lips or delivering lines from behind a mass of fluffy knitting can recognise the names Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple.

Those who haven’t delved very deep into Christie’s fictitious criminal world might assume it is all picturesque villages, stiff upper lips and tea with the vicar – the tea almost certainly laced with arsenic. Even the corpses cluttering

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