Agatha Christie plotted for her stand-out character to survive her if necessary, writing in the early 1940s a final Hercule Poirot adventure, which was locked in her publisher’s safe to give the detective a neat career even if his creator were suddenly interrupted. As it turned out, Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case eventually appeared in 1975, a year before Dame Agatha’s death.
But although Christie had a cunning mind she had not foreseen the international publishing plot to keep celebrated fictional characters alive. Ian Fleming wrote a dozen novels about James Bond, but three times that number have been licensed posthumously by his heirs, including, most recently, William Boyd’s Solo. This year, John Banville, under his crime-fiction pseudonym Benjamin Black, was hired by the Raymond Chandler estate to write The Black-Eyed Blonde, rescuing the private eye Philip Marlowe from his creator’s big sleep.
Content from our partners
