Festival to host cookery demonstration with poisonous twist

zainab quadri

June 17, 2015 1:03 PM

French author to recreate recipes from the Queen of Crime’s books particularly suitable for concealing poison as part of September festival.

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A unique cookery demonstration is to be held to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the birth of Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime. It will be in Christie’s own Devon kitchen, and guests are advised to treat samples with extreme caution.

The French writer Anne Martinetti will be recreating recipes from Christie’s books, singling out those particularly suitable for concealing poison as an extra ingredient. As any devotee of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot knows, the great detectives only have to show up for a morning coffee, light luncheon or afternoon tea party for one of the guests to topple over the table clutching their throat and turning blue.

Martinetti will be speaking and cooking at Christie’s beloved holiday house, Greenway – the home she called “the most beautiful place in the world” – now in the care of the National Trust.

However, the organisers are worried that people might think the festival was offering a how-to manual. “But, I cannot stress too highly, with modern forensic techniques you absolutely definitely will now be caught and convicted and spend the rest of your life in prison.”

Despite recent million-sellers including JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the apparently innumerable Shades of Grey of EL James, Christie remains the world’s bestselling author, according to David Brawn of her publisher HarperCollins.

“The figure often quoted, which we believe is about right, is 2bn copies, a billion in English and a billion in other world languages, still selling at the rate of 4m to 5m copies a year. That 2bn figure was arrived at by Unesco about 10 years ago so it will have risen since then – but really, after the first billion or so, who’s counting?”

The 125th anniversary International Agatha Christie festival will be held in Torquay, Devon, where she was born on 15 September 1890. The event is part of the Agatha Christie festival that would hold from 11-20 September 2015.

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