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      After the Funeral: An Introduction by Sophie Hannah

      In a poll conducted by the Crime Writers’ Association in November 2013 to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, Agatha Christie was voted ‘Best Ever Author’. Any other result would, frankly, have been rather a joke. Christie’s novels have sold more than two billion copies in 109 languages (and probably more). Her play The Mousetrap has been delighting audiences in the West End for over 60 years. It would be fair to say, I think, that no other crime novelist comes close to matching her achievement. For me, as a psychological thriller writer, Agatha Christie is and will always be the gold standard—a lifelong inspiration whose every inventive tale demonstrates exactly how it should be done. It was Christie who made me fall in love with mystery stories at the age of twelve and, rereading her work now at the age of 42, I still believe that she cranks up the excitement and the intellectual puzzlement like no other.

      In the ‘Best Ever Novel’ category of the Crime Writers’ Association poll, Christie won again, with a story that many of her fans believe to be her best: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Indeed, it is a deserving winner for the boldness of its solution. Interestingly, the most popular Christie novels tend to be the ones with the high-concept seemingly-impossible- yet-possible solutions, the ones that take your breath away: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express. It’s easy to see why this might be. Christie, when conceiving these stories, gave her readers exactly what they wanted: the best story possible, the one most likely to elicit gasps of shock and astonishment when the genius solution is revealed at the end.

      Sensibly, Christie didn’t give a damn about the tedious consideration of ‘Come on, how likely is this to happen, really?’ So long as it could happen in theory—as long as no law of science made it impossible—then she quite rightly deemed it to be plausible, and therefore acceptable fodder for fiction. She would, I suspect, have little sympathy for those contemporary readers who determinedly misunderstand the word ‘plausible’ and use it as if it were synonymous with ‘commonplace’, ‘everyday’ or ‘has happened to several people I know personally’.

      I say ‘contemporary readers’ because I think our expectations of novels have changed. While Christie was alive and writing, my impression is that most readers of crime fiction shared her philosophy of ‘above all else, tell the most exciting story that you can’. Now, however, a far greater value is placed upon what many insist on calling ‘plausibility’ but what is in fact a worrying lack of imagination seeking to curtail the imaginations of others. Many, for example, might feel uncomfortable with a super-clever detective like Hercule Poirot, who always gets the right answer and proves himself over and over again to be a man of unparalleled genius. Some—having met no unparalleled geniuses themselves and therefore finding them impossible to believe in—might say, ‘No, this is not realistic—can’t you have the detective being a bit more ordinary in his capabilities, and maybe solving the case by… oh, I don’t know, maybe putting some fingerprints into the database and finding a match?’

      Let’s imagine for a second that infallibly brilliant detectives like Poirot and Miss Marple could never exist in real life. Wouldn’t it then be all the more important to invent them? To use fiction as a way of enlarging life—making it bigger, better, more interesting, and—crucially—more satisfactory? Of course there has to be a Hercule Poirot! Isn’t it precisely the job of fiction to offer us what real life cannot, while at the same time enlightening us with regard to real life? If so, then this is exactly what Agatha Christie does. Her novels are packed with wisdom and experience and psychological insight. She understood that sometimes the best way to illuminate an important truth about reality was to frame it in a startlingly unusual way,

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