Jeremy Black Interviewed by Triona Adams

Historian Professor Jeremy Black explains how Agatha Christie’s detective character Hercule Poirot is inseparable from the turbulent age in which the author lived.

Black finds significant social commentary in Christie’s novels. He says that the golden age of the detective novel was more than the triumph of a literary genre. It was also about how the challenge to address the problem of evil was accepted.

Black is emeritus professor of history at the University of Exeter and author of books on British, European, and American political, diplomatic, and military history including most recently George III: Madness and Majesty and England in the Age of Shakespeare. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Here he talks to Triona Adams, director of the festival’s crime fiction programme.