Twelve months with Agatha

Share my plague year spent reading history’s best-selling novelist, trying to write a detective story of my own set at the time she first published, thinking about how much has changed since and yet how much still seems very familiar. Rather like Jane Marple on a coach tour, I mark the centenary with travelling curiously from Styles to Curtain by way of side-turnings and digressions, old anecdotes and half-forgotten clues and the odd sad recollection, trying to make sense of the long ago in the here and now.
It’s about Agatha Christie, and about me; about writing and reading and telling stories and the shadows of the past, and the irony that she isn’t ‘cosy’ at all, but she will keep you sane when everything goes to pieces.