Paddle steamers, luxury trains, archaeological digs, to name but a few. Agatha Christie’s settings have become almost as iconic as her plots. Settings play a key role in detective fiction, something the authors on our Super Panel know all about. Their varied and exciting settings include a 1920s trans-Atlantic liner, a psychiatric unit and a remote Cornish village. In our first Super Panel event, bestselling authors, Tom Hindle, Alex Michaelides and C.B. Everett, discuss the importance of settings in Agatha Christie’s books and the influence it has on their own crime novels.
Tom Hindle was born and raised in Yorkshire and now lives in Oxfordshire with his wife, daughter, a cat and two surprisingly cunning tortoises. A Fatal Crossing, Tom’s hugely successful debut novel, was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month. He is also the author of The Murder Game, a Waterstones Paperback of the Year in 2023, and Murder on Lake Garda is Tom’s third, and bestselling, novel. He is hard at work on his next murder mystery, and continues to be inspired by masters of the crime genre including Agatha Christie and Anthony Horowitz.
Alex Michaelides was born in Cyprus to an English mother and a Greek-Cypriot father. He has an M.A. in English from Trinity College, Cambridge University, and an M.A. in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. The Silent Patient, his first novel, was a Sunday Times bestseller, and debuted at no. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and has sold more than 7.5 million copies worldwide. The rights have been sold in a record-breaking 50 countries and it has been optioned for film by Plan B. His second novel, The Maidens, was an instant Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller and has been optioned for television by Miramax Television and Stone Village. The Fury was also an instant Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller.
C.B. Everett is the pen name for author Martyn Waites. He trained at the Birmingham School of Speech and Drama and worked as an actor for many years before becoming a writer. His novels include the critically acclaimed Joe Donovan series, The Old Religion, and The White Room. In 2013, he was chosen to write Angel of Death, the official sequel to Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, and in 2014 won the Grand Prix Roman Etranger for Born Under Punches. He has been nominated for every major British and French crime fiction award, and has also enjoyed international commercial success with eight novels written under the name Tania Carver.
