Sophie Hannah Talks About Rebooting Agatha Christie’s Poirot
— September 9, 2014 1 0Sophie Hannah Talks About Rebooting Agatha Christie’s Poirot
By ALEXANDRA ALTER / The New York Times
Literary reboots can be tricky. Many, like William Boyd’s James Bond novel and Joanna Trollope’s modern take on Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” have received lukewarm reviews. Some are met with indignation bordering on outrage. “Worse than bad fan fiction” was what one reviewer called Sebastian Faulks’s attempt to channel P.G. Wodehouse in a new Jeeves and Wooster novel.
Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s fastidious Belgian detective, is the latest character to be resurrected. Poirot appears in Sophie Hannah’s new mystery, “The Monogram Murders,” the first new Poirot story since Christie’s death in 1976. The novel opens in London in 1929 as Poirot teams up with a Scotland Yard policeman, Edward Catchpool, to investigate a triple murder at a swanky hotel. Elaborate clues are sprinkled throughout the story, which concludes in classic Christie fashion, with a long monologue in which Poirot neatly lays out the solution to the mystery.
Ms. Hannah, whose novel was authorized by Christie’s literary estate, says she took care to create a version of Poirot that Christie fans would appreciate and recognize. Her Poirot obsesses about his mustache, sprinkles French phrases into conversations and gathers his suspects in a room before he delivers his verdict.
Reviewers in Britain disagree on how well Ms. Hannah captures the detective. A critic for The Telegraph wrote that “Poirot is here exactly as Christie created him, with a vitality that recalls her very best novels.” A review in The Guardian, meanwhile, grumbled that Ms. Hannah’s Poirot is “oddly lifeless.”
Below are excerpts from an interview with Ms. Hannah.
Q. You write your own style of crime fiction, mostly psychological thrillers. Was it difficult to set aside your own voice and step into another writer’s shoes?
A. I was determined to not copy Agatha’s style. When a writer tries to copy another writer, it’s doomed to fail. Only Agatha Christie can write like Agatha Christie. So what I did was, I invented a new character, a first person narrator, and it was a narrator who’s never been in a Christie novel. So if the book and the narrator seem slightly different from Agatha Christie’s novels, there’s an explanation for why. That felt like a sensible way of approaching it.
Q. Was it important to you that Poirot be closely modeled on Christie’s version?
A. Poirot himself is absolutely the Poirot we all know and love from Agatha’s books. Everything from the superficial things, like he’s very tidy, he’s very well dressed, he’s obsessed with his mustache, he loves fine wine and fine food, the fact that his eyes turn greener when he’s closer to solving a mystery. Also his more important characteristics: he’s very wise, he’s compassionate, he’s never gleefully punitive about capturing a murderer.
Q. How involved were Christie’s descendants and literary estate in shaping this novel?
A. We had a meeting and I told the family and the people from Agatha Christie Limited my idea for a plot, and they really liked it. The next stage was I submitted an outline of the complete plot. They made one or two suggestions about the plan; that was the opportunity for the structural edit.
Q. Were you an Agatha Christie fan growing up?
A. I’ve been a fan since I was 12, when I first read her. My father bought me a book of hers and I got really hooked on her and over the next two or three years, I read everything she’d ever written.
I didn’t reread them until I was in my early 20s, and I then didn’t reread them again until last year when I found out that this book was going to happen. I’d forgotten the solution to the mysteries.
Q. How many Poirot novels did you reread while you were working on this project?
A. Thirty-three.
Q. Some authors who have undertaken similar projects have been accused of hubris by literary critics and received awful reviews. Are you concerned about that?
A. It would be impossible to write a book like this and remain ignorant of the fact that a lot of people disapprove of this kind of project.
For me, writing this book is my way of writing a love letter to Agatha Christie and Poirot. I can understand readers who say, ‘Agatha Christie’s the author I like,’ but I can’t understand active disapproval. Agatha Christie and Poirot are totally unharmed by this. Whatever I do, Agatha’s Poirot novels are totally unaffected. Agatha’s the best-selling author that ever lived. I don’t have any power to effect Agatha’s legacy at all. Maybe they think I might take liberties with Poirot and turn him into a gambling jazz musician.
Reference: The New York Times
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OK, what you think will be next ?