After 39 years, Hercule Poirot is back in a new novel. Here Kate Weinberg looks at how the First World War shaped his creator
The elegant drawing rooms and grand country houses of Agatha Christie’s novels might seem a world away from the mud and horror of the trenches, but they are closer than you might think.
For Agatha Christie, both as a person and as a novelist, was forged in the fires of the First World War.
Sophie Hannah, inset, the bestselling novelist who has picked up the baton and is launching the first new Poirot novel in 39 years at the Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay today, agrees. More