Magpie Murders

He’d come up with an anagram.

But an anagram of what?

An hour later, the train pulled into Paddington and I still hadn’t seen it

Names have a way of stamping themselves on our consciousness. Peter Pan, Luke Skywalker, Jack Reacher, Fagin, Shylock, Moriarty … can we imagine them as anything else?

one sweep of the pen and literary history was made.

I suddenly got the feeling that it wouldn’t end well for him. It was a curious thought but perhaps he had needed Alan Conway in much the same way as James Fraser had needed Atticus Pünd. There was no other place for him in the story.

They knew how he worked.

‘Alan always said there would be nine books. He’d decided that from the very start. There was something about that number that was important to him.’

‘Did you know that he thought up the title years ago?’

‘I didn’t. How do you know?’

In fact Mathew Prichard had overheard Alan telling him exactly that. ‘I think he mentioned it to me once,’ I lied.

Not for the first time, I got the sense that he had been trying to tell me something, that he hadn’t just written the Atticus Pünd mysteries to entertain people. He had created them for a purpose that was slowly becoming clear.

that Christie used many times. She liked children’s verse. One Two Buckle my Shoe, Five Little Pigs, Ten Little Indians (And Then There Were None as it later became), Hickory Dickory Dock – all of them appear in her work.

I’m not having the—”’

‘The what?’ I asked