Closed Casket (novel)

Lady Athelinda Playford, author of a popular series of children's mystery novels, summons her children, lawyers, and Poirot and Edward Catchpool, Scotland Yard detective, to her home in Clonakilty, Ireland, where she plans to announce a change to her will that may shock those closest to her: she intends to leave everything to her secretary, a man with only weeks to live due to a terminal illness, cutting out her son and daughter completely.[2]

Poirot begins to suspect that he and Catchpool have been invited to prevent a murder, but despite their efforts one of the party is killed, and not the one they were expecting. It is revealed gradually that nothing is well within the family. Lady Playford's son is mentally slow and has a wife who is constantly worrying about their future. She has no filter on what she says. Lady Playford's daughter is a mean girl who resents her mother from even before she made changes in the will, probaly because her mother gave more importance to her writint than to her daughter. She also has an admirer Doctor Randall Kimpton who shares the same tongue as his paramour. There's the secretary Scotcher who is nice to everyone but is that only a facade ? There's a nurse Sophie who loves Joseph. One of Lady Playford's lawyers, Orville Wolfe and the house butler Hatton, who is reluctant to utter a single word provides comic relief in between. In such a setting, Poirot and Catchpool must disentangle the truth from a rat's nest of bitter family resentments, in a family where almost everyone seems to despise each other.

Good Housekeeping wrote about the novel: "Closed Casket is deviously plotted, deeply satisfying and does the grande dame of crime proud."

Sunday Times wrote: "Sparkling second outing for Hannah's re-imagined Poirot. The setting (posh Irish country house), the characters (country lawyers, creepy male secretary, stroppy flapper, etc) and the period vocabulary are all spot on, but it's the utter fiendish unpredictability of the plot that makes Sophie the new Agatha."

Returning in this novel is Hannah's own creation, Scotland Yard inspector Edward Catchpool, who serves a similar function to Poirot's original sidekick, Arthur Hastings. The story of Closed Casket takes place mere months after The Monogram Murders, in which Catchpool made his debut. This suggests that, like that novel, this one is sandwiched chronologically between The Mystery of the Blue Train (published 1928) and Peril at End House (1932), the latter of which featured Hastings, who before then had not appeared since the novel immediately preceding Blue Train, The Big Four (1927).

Closed Casket features elements popular among Christie and her contemporaries during the golden age of detective fiction, including a blueprint sketch of the house where the murder takes place, an armchair detective's guide featured in Christie and Poirot's debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

This is the second novel by Hannah to feature Christie's popular hero, Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian policeman turned private investigator. Its predecessor is 2014's The Monogram Murders, which was the first novel using one of Christie's original characters to be authorised by her estate in the thirty-eight years since her death (excluding novelisations of Christie's plays by Charles Osborne).

The last Poirot novel Christie wrote, Elephants Can Remember, was published in 1972, while the swansong she wrote for the character during the 1940s, Curtain, was published in 1976.

A major inspiration for key plot elements and characters seems to have been Dan Mallory, the editor of Sophie Hannah.[3] She was reportedly sceptical of his various claims, hired a private investigator and seems to have integrated many elements from real life into her novel.

• Closed Casket on the official Sophie Hannah website
• Closed Casket on the official Agatha Christie website