Christie wrote the book, Curtain, during the Second World War because she was afraid that she might die, but her publishers persuaded her to place it in a bank vault. He dies after refusing to take his medicine, thereby concealing the identity of the murderer in his final mystery. The Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie and famous for his "little grey cells". However, Holmes returned in The Adventure of the Empty House, explaining to Dr Watson that he had beaten Moriarty by wrestling him over the edge of the falls.
His creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, finished off his hero because no one took his other fiction seriously. The deerstalker-wearing detective originally died in a cliff top fight with arch enemy Professor Moriarty. "Had he pursued a healthier lifestyle," it said in a statement, "he could have continued to be the scourge of the criminal element for many years to come."ĭETECTIVE DEPARTURES: THOSE WHO WENT BEFORE The British Diabetic Association last night used it for a new publicity campaign.
"With the body count in books and on TV risen to almost 80, Oxford has become the murder capital of the UK, and the time has come to put an end to this."Īs for Morse's death, it is an ill wind.
He has lived with me now for more than a quarter of a century. "I'm naturally saddened," he said, "to take leave of the melancholy, sensitive, vulnerable, independent, ungracious, mean-pocketed Morse. He is undergoing a trauma that even the king of detective thriller writers cannot solve - contractual difficulties with ITV, which could even keep him out of the final Morse television film, when the new novel is filmed next year.ĭexter, though, was on form and needed little help in addressing his hero's demise. But Lewis, or rather the actor Kevin Whately, was absent. Morse's television persona, John Thaw, was at the novelist's side.
At yesterday's press conference in London, Lewis was yet again not there to hear what was being said. But the nurse does not hear him properly.Īrt mirrors life. In the next chapter his condition is "critical but stable" and, shortly after a glass of whisky, he tells the nurse "thank Lewis for me". He contemplates death while being ferried to hospital in the ambulance and wakes to find his long-suffering colleague Lewis by his bed.