Since it was announced last September that I was to write a new novel [The Monogram Murders, reviewed on p. 83] starring Agatha Christie's famous detective Hercule Poirot, I have been asked the same question hundreds of times, though the wording has varied: "How are you going to change him? What will you do with him? Are you going to give him a love life/a pet donkey/a Taiwanese girlfriend?" No. Or, as Poirot would say, Non. I can see why people ask, of course. Many people, understandably, can't work out why any writer would want to write a novel about another author's character unless they were able to bring something new to the proceedings-and this is precisely where the misconception creeps in. Yes, of course I want to be inventive, creative, exciting-I very much wanted my Poirot novel to be all those things, and I set out determinedly to ensure that it was. The question, though, is: How do you create, and in what area? What kind of innovation does Poirot need, ideally? What kind would he want? (And, yes, perhaps it is crazy to ask this last question, but I love Poirot so much, and he's so real to me, that this was the question uppermost in my mind, closely followed by "What would Agatha approve of?")
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