Agatha Christie not only knew how to describe and resolve a crime, the world's most famous crime writer also had the ambition to prevent evil under the sun - at least as far as her own work was concerned. So at the age of 65 - age does not protect against sagacity - she founded a recycling company for her work in London, and this company (Agatha Christie Ltd.) has been ensuring a continuous flow of money since 1955 and now well beyond the author's death The current majority owner (the American film production company RLJ Entertainment) and at least 36 percent of the descendants of Agatha Christie, including her great-grandson James Pritchard, to whom the fortunes of the company and thus the secrets of the gold mine are entrusted.
But a murder is announced, the knives are already sharpened, and the perpetrator has been identified: the British state itself figures as fate in person.
It limits the validity of copyright to seventy years after death, and since Agatha Christie faded in 1976, all of her texts will go into the public domain on January 1, 2047.
Mr Pritchard is already worried about this, as the British daily newspaper The Times reports: The market will be oversaturated with Christie crime novels and film adaptations from the most obscure (and above all not gushing for Agatha Christie Ltd.) sources in twenty-six years' time, and one can only welcome the fact that Pritchard warns of this at a time that allows time for appropriate legislative initiatives before the cat arrives in the dovecote.
But you're also stuck in the mousetrap: while crime novels are still global bestsellers, believing that the classics of the genre will endure eternal life could prove to be a deadly mistake.
The excesses of Swedish thrillers have long since replaced cultivated murder on the golf course, and instead of exoticisms such as death on the Nile or murder on the Orient Express, readers who prefer regional misdeeds are interested in water corpses on Hiddensee or blood baths in Bilbao.
The missing link in the chain does not concern the recovery, but the appreciation.
The dead person in the library is Agatha Christie herself. Rest rudely.