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Christie News
Here you'll find updates from film sets, broadcast dates, publishing news and other announcements from the world of Agatha Christie ...
ITV have this week announced the cast of the latest Marple - The Pale Horse. Julia McKenzie returns as Miss Marple but also appearing are:
Neil Pearson (All the Small Things, Clapham Junction), Pauline Collins (What we did on our Holiday, Upstairs Downstairs, Shirley Valentine), Sarah Alexander (Stardust, Green Wing, Coupling), Holly Valance (Prison Break, Entourage, Taken), Nicholas Parsons OBE (Sale of the Century), JJ Feild (Northanger Abbey, The Secret Life of Mrs Beeton), Lynda Baron (Rome, Colour Me Kubrick, Open All Hours), Nigel Planer (The Colour of Magic, The Young Ones), Bill Paterson (The Forgotten Fallen, Law & Order UK), Jason ...
- Posted 25 February 2010 at 10:45a.m. GMT
- 1 comment
Julia McKenzie has begun filming alongside a star studded cast for the first Miss Marple short story to be adapted for television, The Blue Geranium.
The film stars Sharon Small (Murderland, Inspector Lynley, Mistresses), Toby Stephens (Robin Hood, Jane Eyre), Kevin R. McNally (Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Wuthering Heights, Valkyrie), Joanna Page (Gavin and Stacey, Love Actually), Claudie Blakley (Cranford, Lark Rise to Candleford), Claire Rushbrook (Collision, Whitechapel), Caroline Catz (Doc Martin, The Vice), Patrick Baladi (Bodies), Paul Rhys (The Queen, Beethoven), Donald Sinden (Judge John Deed) and David Calder (Red Riding, The Last Enemy).
As ...
- Posted 21 January 2010 at 4:55p.m. GMT
- 7 comments
Today we unveil the newest Agatha Christie computer game. Dead Man's Folly is the latest of Christie's titles to be adapted as a seek and find game. Fans of the story can play the game for one hour free, by clicking here.
The process of adapting Christie for the PC is a complex one and we thought fans would be interested in hearing from the game developers:
JANE JENSEN – Creative Director, Dead Man’s Folly
• As an award winning game designer, what is it about Agatha Christie stories that make you such a fan?"I've always loved ...
- Posted 14 October 2009 at 2:57p.m. GMT
- 2 comments
Our friends at AudioFile have given us some more reviews for us to share with you. If you like the sound (no pun intended) of what you read, then head on over to their site where you can also download a free Christie short story The Case of the Missing Will (if you are based in the US) and listen to an interview with Hugh Fraser and Rosalind Ayres (everyone).
THE ABC MURDERS, by Agatha Christie, read by Hugh Fraser will be familiar to listeners from the excellent PBS “Mystery” adaptations of Hercule Poirot novels in which he played the ...
- Posted 18 September 2009 at 2:51p.m. GMT
- 2 comments
If you're a fan of Agatha Christie, you've probably read most, if not all, of her stories. But have you tried listening to them? Audiobooks add a new dimension and allow listeners to experience classic Christie stories in new ways. AudioFile, the American magazine dedicated to all things audiobooks, is observing Christie Week by highlighting the best of Agatha Christie audiobooks. To give Christie readers a chance to experience the audio for themselves, we are giving away a free audiobook download of THE CASE OF THE MISSING WILL, read by David Suchet, for the duration of Christie Week ...
- Posted 11 September 2009 at 2:40p.m. GMT
- 0 comments
Those who have been following my account of Agatha Christie’s Notebooks have been asking me what I think is the most interesting element of this treasure trove, and what will I be revealing in my new book?
Amongst the most fascinating entries in the Notebooks are, without doubt, those that contain what I have called the ‘Unused Ideas’. These can be as little as a sentence (Stored blood idea, wrong blood or something added to it [35]) or as much as a dozen pages. There are different murderers from those we know sketched in for many novels, and many ...
- Posted 20 August 2009 at 9:38a.m. GMT
- 12 comments
Since my last blog, people have asked me to explain a little more about Agatha Christie’s Notebooks, which I have been deciphering for my new book, published in September. The most common question has been, How many Notebooks are there?
There are over 70 Notebooks of all sizes, descriptions, colours and number of pages. For what they contain they are remarkably unimpressive…until you open and begin to read. Considering their uniqueness, I was reluctant to work straight from them and decided that photocopying the pages was the better option. This had to be undertaken carefully due to the ...
- Posted 27 July 2009 at 9:47a.m. GMT
- 10 comments
‘Wouldn’t it be good if Agatha Christie could break another world record?’ It was one of those mornings. Our monthly meeting to discuss sales figures and forward plans with Agatha Christie Limited is usually eventful enough, as there’s always something interesting going on, but today Mathew Prichard was in attendance and there was an air of excitement in the room.
Agatha Christie has held two world records for many years now. As the best-selling novelist of all time, having sold two billion books worldwide in over 45 languages, and as the author of the longest-running play, The Mousetrap ...
- Posted 19 May 2009 at 10:29a.m. GMT
- 7 comments
As some of you may already know, my silence of late on the Website is due to my commitments to things Christiean elsewhere. In short, I am writing a book about Agatha Christie, specifically Agatha Christie and her plotting Notebooks. This is probably the last aspect of Agatha Christie that has not already been discussed in a book. We have had books on her life, her literary output, her husband, her disappearance; we have bought quiz books, travel books, film books, Mousetrap books; books about her poisons, her characters, her cover designs, her garden; biographies of Poirot and Miss Marple ...
- Posted 3 April 2009 at 11:41a.m. GMT
- 5 comments
On Sunday afternoon at the British Film Institute on London’s Southbank, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple held court. The clue to understanding this most unlikely event lies in the location – David Suchet and Julia McKenzie, the new Miss Marple, were in conversation with Mathew Billington from The Guardian. In a small theatre filled with Christie fans, we’d just watched a glorious Christie double bill on the big screen – two brand new films: the very exotic Appointment with Death followed by the faithfully adapted A Pocket Full of Rye. Poirot’s moustache and Miss Marple’s hat had never ...
- Posted 10 March 2009 at 9:34a.m. GMT
- 7 comments
Tomorrow, Greenway House, Agatha Christie’s Summer home, opens to the public for the first time. Those lucky enough to be able to make the trip to Devon will be able to see the house (and gardens) Dame Agatha described as “the loveliest place in the world”. I had the honour of a sneak preview on Tuesday and thought I would share some highlights with you.
The National Trust’s restoration/conservation has been very sensitive – there are no ropes cordoning off cupboards and rooms and for a fan, while one can’t quite have a good poke around, it ...
- Posted 27 February 2009 at 4:50p.m. GMT
- 6 comments
Agatha Christie has always been very popular in France. I worry sometimes that maybe the French must think that the English all live in sleepy villages secretly plotting to kill one other and then relying on faintly absurd foreigners to do our detective work for us. But the Gallic passion for Agatha Christie has over the years translated itself – if you forgive the pun – into an array of imaginative ways of publishing and re-publishing Agatha’s books, from omnibuses and editions for younger readers to potentially one of the most controversial – the bande dessinée, or what Wikipedia describes as ...
- Posted 14 January 2009 at 11:37a.m. GMT
- 7 comments
Those of you who have been alert to news reports in various places, including this site, will be aware that the UK’s ITV Network have asked for another eight Christie films – four Marple films and four Poirot films. Great news, of course. And, yes, of course, you’ll all be wanting to know which titles we’re going to be making. Well, sorry to disappoint you, but the answer is that, as yet, we just don’t know which stories will be in next year’s package – so anyone posting a definitive list on this site or anywhere else ...
- Posted 14 November 2008 at 11:57a.m. GMT
- 58 comments
As the editor who has ‘looked after’ the Agatha Christie list at HarperCollins for the last decade, I am continually being asked if there aren’t any more ‘unpublished’ Agatha Christie books. What a daft question!
You see, every few years, authors whose books have survived long enough to remain in print – and still sell in profitable numbers – inevitably get the ‘repackaging’ treatment, where we rejacket their backlist as a way of keeping the books looking fresh and relevant alongside the innumerable new titles that are unleashed on us all. But despite all the effort, energy, imagination and (dare we ...
- Posted 3 November 2008 at 10:34a.m. GMT
- 2 comments
It’s slightly disturbing to realize that it was a year ago that we embarked on one of the most intensive and demanding projects imaginable: eight ninety-minute television films (four Poirots and four Marples) started production on October 1st 2007, with Mrs McGinty’s Dead filming exteriors in a bleak and blustery autumnal landscape, and actors and crew alike muttering grimly ‘whatever happened to the summer?’ … and here we are, having just started shooting the final film, They Do It With Mirrors, with (predominantly) the same crew making the same complaints about the same weather. Plus ca change …
Except, of ...
- Posted 22 September 2008 at 11:29a.m. GMT
- 15 comments