Hercule Poirot, as portrayed by David Suchet.
His front-page obituary in the New York Times notwithstanding, Hercule Poirot lives.
British novelist Sophie Hannah, whose books include “The Wrong Mother,” “Little Face” and “The Dead Lie Down,” has been chosen by the Agatha Christie estate to write a new novel featuring Christie’s most famous detective.
The novel, as yet untitled, is scheduled to be published in September 2014.
In a statement published on the Agatha Christie website (
tulsaworld.com/agathachristie) Hannah said, “Agatha Christie was the writer who made me fall in love with mystery fiction, at the age of 13. I read and collected all her novels within a year, and have been a passionately – some might even say obsessively – devoted fan ever since. It was Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple who, between them, made me want to devote my working life to crime fiction, and it was Christie's brilliant plotting and deep understanding of the human psyche that shaped my identity as a crime writer.”
Hannah added, “I hope to create a puzzle that will confound and frustrate the incomparable Hercule Poirot for at least a good few chapters.”
Hannah’s own novels are psychological thrillers that have been acclaimed for their intricate plotting and surprising twists.
Matthew Pritchard, chairman of Agatha Christie Limited and Christie’s grandson, said in the statement: “It was pure serendipity that led to Sophie Hannah being commissioned to write this book. Her agent happened to approach HarperCollins in exactly the same week that my colleagues and I had started discussing a new Christie book. Her idea for a plot line was so compelling and her passion for my grandmother’s work so strong, that we felt that the time was right for a new Christie to be written.”
Christie created the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot for her first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” published in 1920. When Christie published “Curtain,” a novel she had written in the 1940s in which Poirot dies, in 1975, it prompted the New York Times to write an obituary that appeared on the paper’s front page on Aug. 6, 1975. (“Curtain” will also be the final film in the series of TV adaptations of the Poirot stories starring David Suchet, which will be broadcast in the United States in 2014.)
Poirot is also the latest in a series of classic figures from crime fiction (Nero Wolfe, James Bond, Lord Peter Wimsey) to be resurrected after their creators’ deaths.
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