Shedunnit – how Agatha Christie became cinema hot property

With his new film Knives Out, Rian Johnson has rescued the crime writer from cosy evening telly and recast her for the here and nowA housekeeper finds the body of her multimillionaire boss in the study, his throat slit, a knife having dripped blood all over the white sheepskin rug.

“Shit!” she says.

It was unlike Agatha Christie to open a novel with a swearword.

But this is not one of her books.

It’s the first line of Knives Out, the outrageously fun homage to the queen of crime from Rian Johnson, the director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Knives Out stars Daniel Craig as a hot Poirot, the world-famous Louisiana private detective Benoit Blanc, hired to investigate the death of bestselling crime writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer).The police believe the case is an open-and-shut suicide; Blanc thinks otherwise.

“I suspect foul play,” he says with a hokey deep-fried southern drawl.

Read full article