Agatha Christie's sleuth Poirot to be revived in new novel

Best-selling British crime novelist Sophie Hannah will revive Agatha Christie's fictional detective Hercule Poirot in a new novel due out next year.

When Hannah's agent told her he had suggested to publisher HarperCollins that they ask her to write a continuation novel, an idea she had been trying to turn into a novel for years suddenly took shape, the author said.

"As soon as he said 'Agatha Christie novel' I thought actually that idea would work perfectly as a story set in the 1920s," said Hannah, a lifelong Christie devotee.

When she met the Christie family, the decision on whether it would be Poirot or her other famous character, Miss Marple, was still up in the air. "The Poirot novels were the first ones that I've read. I've read all of them, I've seen them all on TV," she said. "From my point of view, the particular plot idea that I had, I could just see it as a Poirot."

The Christie family readily agreed.

"Her idea for a plot line was so compelling and her passion for my grandmother's work so strong that we felt that the time was right for a new Christie to be written," Agatha Christie Ltd chairman and grandson of the famous novelist, Mathew Prichard, said.

Hannah's story will be set in the interwar "golden age", but the dapper Belgian sleuth who Christie introduced in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 will have to make do without his usual sidekicks Hastings and Inspector Japp. "I think we all felt that if Hastings and Japp were in it, it would be too much like trying to write an Agatha Christie novel," she said.