Did you know that many of Agatha Christie’s best-selling detective stories have their basis in reality? ‘Who killed Charles Bravo and why?’ asks retired Superintendent Spence in Elephants Can Remember. He refers to an unsolved Victorian murder mystery, one of many allusions to real life crime and criminals in Agatha Christie’s fiction. The infamous Dr Crippen, Jack the Ripper, John George Haigh, and many other real killers, fraudsters and spies, figure prominently in her plots, both explicitly and implicitly. Many of these cases belong to British criminal history, others originate...