Endless Night

"The book is about three young people; my grandmother was well into her 70s when she wrote it. As a young person myself in the early 1960s, I saw more of my grandmother than at any other time because I was studying at Oxford, not far from where she lived and worked at the time. I used to take my friends to see her, often for Sunday lunch, and I think I even took my first girlfriend. She didn’t seem like an old person at all. She was always interested in what we were doing and fascinated by our relationships with each other. She never judged us. There are, fortunately, no characters in Endless Night that she ‘copied’. But she does say somewhere in the book that it’s all about relationships. To me, it’s an astonishingly modern and human book. To write about people 50 years younger than herself was a tour de force. And that’s quite apart from the plot. It also illustrates her belief in evil as a force in the world. Yes, though you could say that about many of her books. I would have chosen more than five if you wanted all the ones with wonderful plots. It’s one of the reasons her books have stood the test of time. My wife died five or six years ago and I’m now married to someone much younger, with nephews in their early teens. They love Agatha Christie books, and it’s not just because I’ve entered their lives vicariously."