Agatha Christie up to the last chapter, then decided who the most unlikely suspect was, after which she would go back and make the necessary changes to "frame" that person. However, John Curran's "Agatha Christie: The Secret Notebooks" describes different working methods for every book in Christie's bibliography, contradicting the claim by Aldiss. Christie's mature novels, from 1940 onwards, often have titles drawn from literature. Four are from Shakespeare: Three are from the Bible: Another six are from other works of literature: In such cases, the original context of the title is usually printed as an epigraph. Similarly, the title of Christie's
Agatha Christie However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and the public liked Poirot. She did marry off Poirot's companion Captain Hastings in an attempt to trim her cast commitments. In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. However, the Belgian detective's titles outnumber the Marple titles more than two to one. This is largely because Christie wrote numerous Poirot novels early in her career, while "The Murder at the Vicarage" remained the sole Marple novel