How to write a crime thriller – with help from AI-gatha Christie

Telegraph

30-04-2025

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 and find that Telegraph readers are particularly interested in Air Fryers (see below). I open with a blood-spattered, Grand Guignol set piece, only to remember that Agatha 'doesn't like violence;' she likes puzzles with realistic characters in well-defined settings. And so I concoct a well-defined village and open up with what I hope is a well-defined, air-fryer related teaser.
Most of all, she says, in a computer-generated voice that somehow defies all dissent, you 'must play fair' with your reader. Set that puzzle, ask the questions, but don't expect them to use their own little grey cells to unpick mysteries that can't be unpicked. So I make sure to introduce the detective, a sidekick (the reader's eyes and ears) and the murderer in the first few pages.
And so with all that in mind, I present to you my first attempt at a crime thriller. No AI was involved in its writing. Perhaps that would have helped…
For more details on BBC Maestro's Agatha Christie course, see here
The Air Fryer Cracked From Side to Side
By a student of AI-gatha Christie
The air fryer started shaking on the worktop. The chicken wings within were crisp and crumbly, cooked at least 33 seconds quicker than they would have been in a conventional oven, but that meant nothing to Mrs Veronica Dime. She just stood there, staring at the silicon-lined basket, mouthing, 'Surely…'
She didn't have time to add, 'not.' The air fryer exploded, sending chicken wings to the ceiling and Mrs Veronica Dime to the floor. As the first flames danced down the kitchen island, there she remained. Baked to perfection.
'Hold on, just a minute, I'm coming!' said Roger Cairns as he ran down the hall. Packages, deliveries, sorry we missed you… this was the scourge of so-called convenience. Everything the next day, but never a moment's rest (now that his wife Penelope had discovered Amazon Prime).
He looked through the peephole to see a man in a motorcycle helmet holding a large cardboard box. It wasn't the usual delivery man, but then these days there was no usual delivery man – anyone and everyone could turn up unannounced with a 'parcel for you.' Roger opened the door, said hello and reached for the package. The man seemed reluctant to hand it over.
'Are you Roger Cairns?' he said, voice muffled through his visor. He didn't have a motorbike parked outside like they normally did.
'Why yes I am. How are you today?' said Roger.
The delivery man didn't answer. He handed over the package and scurried off, leaving Roger on the doorstep. The parcel was addressed to him, but he didn't recall ordering it. Dodging a Labrador and the umbrella rack on his way back to the kitchen – why was the godforsaken umbrella rack always in the way? – he set to the packing tape with a kitchen knife. It was an 'Air Fryer,' whatever that was, and it came with an anonymous note:
'This is for you.'
'To lose one parish councillor to a freak air fryer explosion may be regarded as misfortune,' said Lt Col. Bennett. 'To lose two looks like carelessness. I think it was Richard Osman who first said that.'
Monique Van Dingus put down her cello. 'Don't tell the police. They won't know what to do and anyway, there's nothing to tell yet.'
Bennett poured the tea.
'But don't you think it's strange – two new air fryers, both delivered when no one actually ordered them, to people who wouldn't know an air fryer from a kumquat, both of whom are now dead?'
'It's only strange if you think guilt is strange, or greed, or retribution,' said Monique.
'Are you saying what I think you're saying?
'What do you think I'm saying?'
'I don't know. I was hoping you'd say it and then I wouldn't have to ask.'
'Well then yes. This looks like murder.'
Bennett had known Van Dingus long enough to know that she would not say such a thing lightly. Ever since she had moved in to Chiply Wensdale, taking the old railwayman's cottage that had once belonged to Roger and Penelope Cairns' errant son Wrongun, she had brought energy and no little gumption to the proceedings of the Parish Council. She was, Bennett had come to learn, the daughter of a once-famed German detective who had grown up in the suburbs of Aachen — to her, there were no mysteries, just an absence of evidence. That of course never explained the mystery of why she had come to Chiply in the first place. Some said she had arrived to start up a garden business called, 'Convenient Plotting.'
But even Van Dingus confessed that she had never seen anything like the Air Fryer Murders. No one had. They were in many ways, Van Dingus would come to say years later, the perfect crime. Everyone was buying Air Fryers. They were just so convenient and took up remarkably little space on the worktop. So the sight of a Ninja Foodie XL Two-Tier being delivered to a Chiply Wensdale front door had become part of village life. No more remarkable, you might say, than Roger Cairns popping round to Veronica Dime's each Wednesday morning. Where if you looked at the upstairs window, shortly afterwards the bedroom curtains would be hurriedly closed…