a talent for murder a novel andrew wilson

And this is all Wilson needs for his own act of invention. Even now her disappearance remains shrouded in mystery – no one knows quite what happened or why.

Most impressive of all is the subtly shifting point of view, which moves from one centre of consciousness to another, involving the reader entirely in the plot a trick one suspects Wilson may have picked up not from Christie but from Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels.Īs for the story: Wilson’s book begins in 1926, with Christie’s realisation that her husband, Archie, is having an affair with a younger woman, which fans will already know is what prompted her notorious flight to Harrogate, where she holed up in a hotel under an assumed name. But these are only the most obviously pleasing aspects of the novel.

There are multiple unexpected twists, and at least one entirely unexpected murder. Most daringly, there is a strong puzzle element in his book, as there is in much of Christie’s work (though the crime writer Michael Dibdin claimed that her plots were “all basically the same” and Raymond Chandler famously remarked that a Poirot mystery was “guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop” as “only a half-wit could guess it”). 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.

A talent for murder a novel andrew wilson