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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…