A new Hercule Poirot novel will be published next year, nearly 40 years after the publication of the final book featuring Agatha Christie‘s famous detective.
Sophie Hannah (pictured, via) will write the fully-authorized Poirot novel, and William Morrow will publish the “diabolically clever murder mystery” September 2014. Here’s more about the multiple players involved in the deal, from the release:
The deal for World English rights was negotiated by Daniel Mallory, VP, Executive Editor at William Morrow, and David Brawn, Estates Publisher at HarperCollins UK with Hilary Strong, Managing Director at Christie rights manager Acorn Productions Ltd/Agatha Christie Ltd, the UK based rights holding production arm of RLJ Entertainment, Inc (NASDAQ: RLJE) and Hannah’s agent Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge & White.
Over at Project Gutenberg, you can download two free digital books by Christie. The first is The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the book that introduced Poirot in 1921.
The other book is called The Secret Adversary.
Here’s more abouut the crime writer who will write the new book:
Hannah is an internationally bestselling writer of psychological crime fiction, published in 24 countries. Her novels have been shortlisted for several awards, including, most recently, Kind of Cruel’sshortlisting for the 2012 Specsavers National Book Awards Crime Thriller of the Year. Two of Sophie’s crime novels, The Point of Rescue and The Other Half Lives, have been adapted for television and appeared on ITV1 under the series title Case Sensitive in 2011 and 2012.