Agatha Christie: world’s first historical whodunnit was inspired by 4,000 year-old letters
May 22, 2018 4.38am EDT
Agatha Christie Trust
Author
Nicky Nielsen
When the ancient Egyptian priest and landowner Heqanakhte wrote a series of rather acerbic letters to his extended family sometime during the 12th Dynasty (1991-1802BC), he could not have known that he was creating the framework around which the British crime writer Agatha Christie (1890-1976) would, some 4,000 years later, weave one of the world’s first historical crime novels.
Death Comes as the End (1944) is the only one of Christie’s novels not to be set in the 20th century and not to feature any European characters. The death of a priest’s concubine sets off a series of murders within the family and, as in Christie’s more familiar 20th-century whodunnits, the scene is soon littered with bodies. The book is due to be adapted for the screen by the BBC in 2019.
https://theconversation.com/agatha-christie-worlds-first-historical-whodunnit-was-inspired-by-4-000-year-old-letters-96949
