A Murder is Announced

"I’ve chosen this because it’s a great Miss Marple . It features my favourite murderer. He or she—I’m not going to reveal the plot—behaves predictably one moment and unpredictably the next. The setting is an English country house in a village: classic Miss Marple territory. It’s got what all good books have: a wonderful ending and a wonderful beginning. Film producers have rung up and said: ‘We’d like to buy the rights to A Murder is Announced .’ But when it comes down to it, all they really want is the beginning and to go away and write their own stories. Of course, we don’t allow that. An advertisement appears in the local newspaper: ‘A murder is announced and will take place at 6.30pm at Little Paddocks’. She must have seen a quirky little notice like that and thought: ‘If I just changed it a little, it would make a wonderful beginning to a story.’"

"I think this might be the first Agatha Christie I read, and it might have the greatest premise I’ve ever heard in my entire life. I like to think about how the idea came to her. It would have been terrifying: how are you going to plot this, how are you going to live up to the concept? The concept is this: somebody puts an advert in the paper: “A murder is announced.” They say what time this murder is going to happen, in what place in the village and at what time. Then, unsurprisingly, everybody turns up looking to see if this murder is going to happen. And she pulls it off! She absolutely nails it. It’s not just a gimmick. She fully explores the concept and how people react to it. She uses it to explore psychology, to explore how people react to tragedy and imminent tragedy. You know – people just turn up to watch. It’s grotesque. She’s always fascinated by that, and this is the book where you see the idea absolutely coalesce: she turns murder into a spectator sport, and that is fantastic. When I was 23, I was killing time in Perth, Australia, and I went to the maritime museum, where I read about a real-life shipwreck called the Batavia, which was wrecked in 1629. It’s a terrible story – really gruesome and sad and brutal – but basically, the ship gets wrecked, and the survivors get put on this island. The captain leaves to go get help in Jakarta, which is 30 days away. He sails off in a little row boat, but he’s left them in the hands of a psychopath. And the psychopath proceeds to murder, maim, torture and rape his way through the survivors. It’s a sordid, brutal tale. But within it is all this great stuff – the captain of the ship sailed for help in uncharted waters, using celestial navigations, for a month. He couldn’t possibly know where he was going, yet somehow he got there and then managed to return with help. That’s incredible. There was a soldier on the island who was fighting and winning battles with improvised weapons. There was basically a cult on the island… there were all these little stories within it, and it stuck with me like a splinter. I never forgot that story. My book’s set in 1634. It’s basically a haunted house at sea. It’s an isolated boat, they don’t know where they’re going to, they don’t know what’s coming next. It immediately felt a very Sherlock Holmesian setting, more than a Christie setting. I didn’t mean to write my take on Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but it just felt immediately fitting. So that’s what I did. It took ages to work out that it was a much more interesting mystery if I locked my Holmes character up – took the focus off him and put it on the sidekick. After that it just flowed."