Commentary In one respect, French law is greatly superior to British or American: It doesn’t allow publishers to alter a text once its author has died. For good or evil, a written work remains the author’s unchanging legacy forever, and if a publisher doesn’t like or is offended by it, that’s tough. The publisher either…
Theater Review: ‘Murder on the Orient Express’: Agatha Christie’s Famous Mystery Comes Alive
OAKBROOK TERRACE, Ill.—When Agatha Christie’s first novel was accepted by a publisher, he signed her to an exploitive five-novel deal for a pittance. The publisher believed that Christie was good for only a few books and thought after the five-book deal nothing would be heard from her again. It was the biggest publishing mistake in…
Take a Tour of Agatha Christie’s Greenway Estate
By Carl Larsen You might call Agatha Christie’s Greenway Estate the scene of the crime — well, many crimes, that is. Acclaimed as the world’s best-selling author, Christie spent a large part of her career writing those spellbinding mysteries at her Greenway retreat overlooking the River Dart, a few miles from Torquay, where she was…
Theater Review: ‘A Fine Feathered Murder: A Miss Marbled Mystery’
CHICAGO—Miss Marple, a fictional character in many of Agatha Christie’s novels, is an elderly sleuth with inquisitive nature whom some might call a busybody. She also has an instinctive ability to connect casual comments (which no one else notices) to murder, as well as a talent for connecting the dots of a past event to…
Film Review: ‘Death on the Nile’: Director Kenneth Branagh Murders Christie. Again
Shot in 2019 and originally scheduled for a December 2020 release, director and leading man Kenneth Branagh’s “Death on the Nile” finally hits theaters with an underwhelming air of “who cares?” A bookend of sorts to Branagh’s 2017 “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Death” is also based on a novel by Agatha Christie, both of…
Landscapes, Legends, and Literature
A sense of place affects us throughout our lives—or at least it should. Think of walking on a sunny warm day, vivid in its optimism, and then seeing someone skulking down an alley—furtive darkness amongst the light. Does a story begin to form in the recesses of your mind? Or were you so engrossed in…
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