Detective fiction

Celebrating Miss Marple, expert on the wickedness of village life

14 December 2024 9:00 am

The elderly spinster with a fine sense of evil was a creation Agatha Christie never tired of – unlike the ‘tiresome, egocentric’ Hercule Poirot

The lady vanishes

12 March 2022 9:00 am

How to review a book that pokes fun at critics? When the protagonist of María Gainza’s Portrait of an Unknown…

The cowboy and the cop

23 January 2021 9:00 am

Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is back. This is a York novel, or rather a Yorkshire crime novel. The LNER railway…

Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot

The death of cosy Christie

4 November 2017 9:00 am

This is not Midsomer Murders. The new film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is thick with…

Nasty piece of work

6 June 2015 9:00 am

Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled…