Who should her detective be? How could she make him distinctive, unique, and interesting? Eventually, a small colony of Belgian refugees caught Christie’s imagination, and after some deliberation, Hercule Poirot was born. One by one, Christie filled her roster of characters, though one person was by far the most difficult to create. A woman Christie overheard on a tram also sparked the flames of creativity. A neighbour with a distinctive physical appearance soon provided the corporeal description for a pivotal character, though the fictional creation’s personality was purely Christie’s own invention. With the genesis for the plot in her mind, Christie started looking around her for inspiration. The whole point of a good detective story was that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would then find that it was not obvious… An Autobiography, Agatha Christie I could, of course, have a very unusual kind of murder for a very unusual motive, but that did not appeal to me artistically. I returned to thoughts of my other characters. Not like Sherlock Holmes, of course: I must invent one of my own, and he would also have a friend as a kind of butt or stooge–that would not be too difficult. At that date I was well steeped in the Sherlock Holmes tradition. There would naturally have to be a detective. It would have to be very much of an intime murder, owing to the particular way it was done it would have to be all in the family, so to speak. Who should be poisoned? Who would poison him or her? When? Where? How? Why? And all the rest of it. I toyed with the idea, liked it, and finally accepted it. I settled on one fact which seemed to me to have possibilities. Since I was surrounded by poisons, perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method I selected.

I began considering what kind of a detective story I could write.

The agatha christie affair