Month: May 2025

AI-gatha Christie Is a Crime

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In response to the article mentioned in my last post about the AI-powered service available from the BBC consisting of digital tutorials by famous writers like Agatha Christie, there is the article below which thoroughly trashes the idea. This article was published on the 3rd of May in the Telegraph and was written by Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Ruth Dudley Edwards (born 24 May 1944) is an Irish Unionist historian and writer, with published work in the fields of history, biography and crime fiction, and a number of awards won. Born in Dublin, Ireland, she has lived in England since 1965, and describes herself as British-Irish. Her revisionist approach to Irish history and her views have sometimes generated controversy or ridicule. She has been a columnist with the Irish Sunday Independent, the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph, and The News Letter.

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ms Edwards said, “I try to be positive, so in my frequent Luddite moments I call upon my inner Pollyanna and remind myself of the many blessings of technology. Yet the news that the BBC has added to Maestro, its educational streaming platform, a course of 11 short online videos in which a recreated Agatha Christie tells you how to write crime fiction made me feel appropriately murderous.

Indeed, it’s given me inspiration for another short story deriding and killing publishers. But I won’t be asking AI for help. It’s likely to be the nuclear weapon employed by Big Brother to destroy original thought.

Yes, James Pritchard – who through Agatha Christie Ltd is the custodian of her legacy – has insisted that all writing advice given in 11 videos by his great-grandmother’s recreated voice and face be drawn wholly from her own words.

But after a lifetime of reading crime novels and more than four decades writing them, I think the whole idea of a disembodied voice mouthing the words selected by a team of academics is a horrid and dangerous way to go.

Agatha – which as a fellow member of the Detection Club I feel entitled to call her even though she died 20 years before I was elected – was a genius. She became the world’s best selling author because of her innate gifts when it came to plotting and her rare, unsentimental understanding of human nature and good and evil.

I read all her books in my youth, sneered at her writing in my pretentious years at university and during a bad bout of flu in my early 30s reread her and repented. I imbibed from her and others of her contemporaries like G K Chesterton and Edmund Crispin a love of the genre, especially when humour was added to the pot.

And then, unexpectedly, I was invited to write a crime novel, joined the Crime Writers’ Association and discovered a world of fun and friendship and very varied lives, for our members included cops and ex-convicts, doctors and nurses, musicians, bureaucrats and publicans. We would swap stories of how an episode in our lives had inspired us to have a go at telling a story from an improbable viewpoint. No subject was off-limits.

I’ve had several occupations, including in academia, public service and journalism, and have never come across such a congenial and sociable bunch as crime writers and readers. There’s a humility about them that I love and found rarely among academics and the literati. You couldn’t get from an algorithm or from lectures what I’ve learnt from my lovely, irreverent, self-deprecating and sometimes mad companions in that world.

You learn how to write primarily through reading. I don’t believe it can be taught, though I admit some people benefit from good editing, and there’s nothing wrong with handy hints. Indeed, I was a contributor to the highly entertaining Howdunit – published in honour of the 90th anniversary of the Detection Club – in which 90 of the living and some dead members muse on our trade. We collaborate on books occasionally, our planning meetings are hilarious and we donate the proceeds toward subsidising the next communal dinner.

My passion is free speech, and my blood freezes at the thought of how AI will be used by Big Brother. I bet all the casual racism and other kinds of wrongthink expressed in throwaway lines in the work of Agatha and her generation will not survive the first algorithmic sanitising.

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” Orwell taught us.

AI can see off originality, courage, and truth in no time.”

Agatha Christie a Writing Teacher?

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This article by Benji Wilson was in the April 30th issue of the Telegraph.

Benji Wilson

Benji Wilson is a journalist based in London. He is a feature writer and interviewer for The Sunday Times, TV critic for The Telegraph and a columnist and critic for Private Eye. He is also the London correspondent for Emmy magazine as well as writing for USA Today and the Sydney Morning Herald. is the world’s best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she’s the first person you’d ask.

Benji says, “Agatha Christie is the world’s best-selling author, so if you wanted to learn how to write a crime novel she’s the first person you’d ask. Unfortunately, she died in 1976. But in the age of AI, with a plot twist that would assuredly have had Christie herself itching to incorporate it in a book, death need not be the end. A new BBC Maestro course of online video lessons, made in conjunction with Christie’s estate, brings the queen of crime back to life.

“First and foremost, for me, this project is about looking at her process as a writer and paying homage to that,” says James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and the Chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Limited. “One of the things I am proudest of that has happened over the last however many years is how seriously Agatha Christie is taken, which I don’t think was always the case. She is now held in the regard and esteem that she should be as a writer.”

It’s that esteem that will encourage wannabe Christies – in this case, myself – to pay their £120 for a Maestro subscription (which gets you a year’s access to all manner of courses from Stephen Bartlett to JoJo Moyes to Jo Malone). The new Agatha series is a short lecture course given by a recreation of the writer herself, with Christie’s face and voice somehow grafted on to a (brilliant) performance from the actor Vivien Keene. Delivered across 11 videos, all of less than 20 minutes, you sit and are spoken to – nothing interactive here – as Agatha takes you through plotting, structure, detectives and satisfying resolutions.

The difference to all the other BBC Maestro courses is that Christie’s writing advice is only sort-of delivered by Christie. But the message does come from the horse’s mouth, so to speak – it was one of the stipulations of the Christie estate that every one of the words that Keene speaks should have come from Christie’s pen.

“It had to be her lessons; it couldn’t be some made up thing,” says Prichard. “So we had a team of academics under Dr Mark Aldridge [an acknowledged Christie expert] to see to that.”

In order to fit with the BBC Maestro credo – ‘Let the greatest be your teacher’ – “It had to look and sound like her,” says Prichard. “And what they have done is extraordinary. The final thing was that it had to be of value to both aspiring writers and fans. And I think it does that. All I can say is I was speaking to my father on Friday and both of us agreed that we’d learned a hell of a lot from her that we didn’t know.”

If AI-gatha’s Maestro course could teach her own relatives a thing or two – Prichard said that he learned from the course that Christie’s books work because “they’re actually about people, and people never really change” — then surely it could help me? I was lucky enough to get an early view of the Christie course and can report that watching Agatha, or ‘Agatha,’ dole out aperçus on story structure, cast creation, plot twists, red herrings, and the art of suspense, was most of all… unnerving. A half-smiling Christie-bot stares barrel-straight down the camera with schoolmarm-ish supremacy. She seemed to sense my self-doubt, my daft plot ideas, my general unease.

There is also some mild unease at having AI involved at all. To authors, AI is perceived as a threat more than a boon.

“I’d be lying if I said there weren’t worries [about using AI],” says James Prichard. “But I believe and I hope that this is using AI in both a helpful and ethical way. The AI model of Agatha doesn’t work without the performance of Vivien Keene. This was not written by AI. It is a leading academic unearthing everything that she said about writing. And I believe that what we are delivering here in terms of her message is better presented and will reach more people as a result of being presented, if I can use inverted commas, ‘by her.’”

What kind of tutor is AI-gatha? The course shows that Christie plainly studied her craft and while she opens up saying, “I don’t feel I have any particular method when it comes to writing,” which is disappointing, she does in fact adhere to a broad methodology founded in meticulous planning.

“And I take it seriously,” she says, looking serious.

The importance of saying something – not preaching but there being some form of moral backbone to your story — is emphasised throughout. Readers like to see justice served, she says.

“I write to entertain but there is a dash of the old morality play in my work – hunting down the guilty to protect the innocent.”

But where to even start? That’s my problem. Agatha recommends – glory be! – idleness (but not sloth) as a fallow field where ideas can take seed. She encourages eavesdropping on conversations on buses as a source of characters and dialogue, and so I head to that virtual bus that is the Internet.”

Benji finds that Telegraph readers are keen on air fryers and he concocts a short, very silly story about people being murdered by exploding air fryers.

Are You an Imposter?

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Harry Bingham of Jericho Writers sent an email today about how writers are vulnerable to Imposter Syndrome.

Imposter Syndrome

He says: “Writers are hopelessly vulnerable to Impostor Syndrome.

That might be part of our psychological make-up (dreamy, introverted, bookish) – but I don’t think it’s mostly that. Perhaps it isn’t that at all.

If I were a stone-walling guy, I’d drop my tools in the late afternoon and look at my day’s work and think, ‘Yes, I just built that.’

If I were a drainage-contractor or a chimney-sweep, I could count my accomplishment in yards of drain unblocked, or so many vertical feet of chimney cleared. (I once cleaned my own chimneys, then set the house on fire, but it was only a little fire, and the fire brigade came, not once but three times, and the kids were all at home with friends, and got to watch everything, and the firemen let the kids try on their helmets and climb around the fire engine, and everyone had a very nice time.)

And, OK, lots of white-collar jobs can’t be measured by the yard, but there’s still a rhythm of feedback: client meetings, reports, ad campaigns, emails. What’s unusual about the job of novelist is that you have essentially two ways to measure accomplishment, the first of which is phoney and stupid and you know it to be those things. So, novelists can measure accomplishment, via:

  1. Word Counts. Which gives you a sort of feedback, the way a dry stone wall gives you feedback as you build it, but if the words are sh*te, then the feedback is meaningless. And because you know that, you don’t trust the feedback. And because first drafts are first drafty, the words probably are sh*te, so you are right to be suspicious.
  2. Book deals. And yes, a book deal comes with an actual contract, signed by a serious and moneyed counterpart. And there’s money. And there’s the whole hoop-la of publication. So this is serious, meaningful feedback. Same thing with self-pub: you don’t achieve meaningful sales unless your work has been good, so sales is also a metric that matters. But book deals come along once in a blue moon. I mean, if you produce a book a year and work with a standard two-book deal, then you only get confirmation that you’re not an idiot once every two years. That’s a very long time.

So authors get regular meaningless feedback (word counts) and very, very infrequent feedback that matters (book deal, or successful book launch.)

And a lot of what we do involves creating a bad first draft so we can then turn it slowly into a good final draft.

The result? Impostor Syndrome is endemic among writers. It’s endemic among proper published authors too. I know plenty of top 10 bestselling novelists who are pretty much guaranteed to feel like their work is hopeless before they (once again) do what they do and produce an excellent book.

The solution? There ain’t no solution, except to recognise the problem. You will feel that your work is inadequate, because – right now – it is inadequate. And that’s fine. That’s a stage we clamber through to get to adequate and then excellent.

The ladder from rubbish to excellent is editing. It’s self-editing to start with and – even if you’re wise enough to get a professional manuscript assessment – it’s still self-editing after that, because it’s still you that has to choose how to react to your editor’s comments. So. Write, Edit, Publish, Repeat. You may only get meaningful feedback on your output about once a year. That’s just the way it is. Other indicators may not be accurate. You are not an impostor. You’re a writer.”