Some trite words belong only to certain types of fiction.Like "Bad Baron Bald" in a melodrama, "Corpse in the Library" in a detective story.Over the years I've tried to make appropriate variations on well-known themes. I set conditions for myself: the library described in the book had to be of the very orthodox, traditional kind, and the corpse had to be haunted and terrifying. Following these principles, only a few lines of text appeared in notebooks over the years.Later, during my summer days at a trendy big hotel by the sea, I noticed a family at a restaurant table: a crippled elderly man in a wheelchair surrounded by a group of his young offspring.Luckily they left the next day and I was able to let my imagination run wild.

When someone asks me "are the characters in your book real?" the answer is that I can't possibly write about someone I know, or talk to, or even hear about!For some reason they seem bloodless to me, yet I can ascribe all sorts of attributes and fantasies to a human being who has nothing to do with me. So an elderly lame man becomes the center of the story, and my old friends of Miss Marple's, the Colonel and Mrs Bantry, happen to have just that kind of library.I added the following ingredients to my story like a recipe: a professional tennis player, a young dancer, an artist, a girl scout, a dancer leader, etc., and ended up putting them all in Miss Marple's à la carte Way to give to everyone.

Agatha Christie