![]() ![]() ![]() Making Christie the hero of your novel is a bit like making Shakespeare the main character in your play: it’s either very brave or utterly foolhardy. The only writer to have created two great recurring detective characters, Poirot and Jane Marple, she was also the only woman ever to have had three plays running simultaneously in the West End. Agatha Christie was working as a pharmacist in 1920 when she was challenged by her sister, Madge, to come up with a detective story, which she duly did, featuring a 5ft4in retired Belgian police officer – and she remains the bestselling novelist of all time. Thank God A Talent for Murder is good, because Wilson is certainly playing for high stakes. ![]() But no one to date, to my knowledge, has successfully cast the queen of crime herself as the lead character in a crime novel – until now, that is. There are of course some fine examples of the genre: Drood (2009) by Dan Simmons, featuring Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and a number of novels by Matthew Pearl, who specialises in this kind of thing. You may perhaps have read those books in which Jane Austen is a detective, or the Brontës come back as ghosts: fan fiction in which a writer’s enthusiasm for their literary hero leads them towards a reimagining of the hero’s life. T he biographer of Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath and Alexander McQueen, Andrew Wilson has written fiction before, but A Talent for Murder is an entirely different kind of beast. ![]()
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