My daughter has discovered Agatha Christie, and I am thrilled at the joy she has in store

As a Poirot and Marple devotee, Will Gore recalls the pleasure of reading Christie’s creepy mysteries for the first time

(Getty Images)

I am not as well-read as I would like to be. I love books intensely, but I am not wildly adventurous and weeks can slide by without me reading anything new. I blame a lack of time; but other busy people seem to manage, so maybe it’s a question of priorities (or more accurately, distractions).

For a brief period in my childhood, I was a moderately advanced reader. I remember startling an English teacher when for a book review exercise at the age of 11, I chose to write about HE Bates’s Fair Stood the Wind for France. But truthfully, my childhood passions were fairly prosaic: the Swallows & Amazons series; anything football related, probably by Martin Waddell or Michael Hardcastle; then Boy’s Own tales about the Second World War.

It was only towards the end of my teens that I began to realise I had fallen behind, especially when I got to university and became painfully aware that many of my contemporaries had a breadth of cultural knowledge I sorely lacked.

All this may explain why I have been encouraging to the point of irritation about my own children’s reading habits. Every parent, to a greater of lesser degree, lives (or relives) vicariously through their kids, but there is a fine line between enjoying their achievements and foisting your own ambitions upon them. I have probably crossed it once or twice.

My daughter in particular has been a voracious bookworm even before she could read. At the age of three she astonished us by “reading” Beatrix Potter’s Tale of Peter Rabbit word-perfectly – our view of her genius only slightly diminished when we realised it was done from memory rather than by understanding the written words.

It wasn’t too long before she wanted us to stop reading to her aloud because we were always a few sentences behind where she had reached in her head. Yet despite my joy at her pleasure in reading, occasionally over the years I felt frustrated at her book choices – both when she turned up her nose at books I’d loved (most of Arthur Ransome’s), or loved stories I regarded as trash (Twilight).

This month my daughter started secondary school. Ahead of term beginning, a letter arrived from the headteacher, highlighting the importance of reading for fun and suggesting some things that the new Year 7 intake might like to try: everything from Animal Farm and Jane Eyre to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I wondered whether my daughter would be prepared to leave her comfort zone of Harry Potter. That she has done so with aplomb has inevitably led to a surge of parental pride.

There is, after all, no greater mystery writer than Christie: no other detective novelist whose plotlines are so compelling and whose reveals are so consistently humdingers

The pride became genuine thrill this week, when she came home from school with a copy of Agatha Christie’s ABC Murders, borrowed from the library. By teatime she had finished it; by bedtime she had polished off another Poirot, Peril at End House.

Having fallen hard for Christie several years later than my daughter, I feared for a moment that she might be frightened by the tales of grim murder. I remembered how completely creeped out I had been when I read And Then There Were None at the age of about 16. But when I realised that she was not scared so much as in thrall, I felt a sense of absolute delight – tinged with envy – at knowing what treats lay in store for her.

There is, after all, no greater mystery writer than Christie, and no other detective novelist whose plotlines are so compelling and whose reveals are so consistently humdingers. The only danger my daughter faces is the prospect of getting through the books too quickly: thank goodness Christie was so prolific.

My son, at six, still has some way to go before we point him in the direction Poirot and Marple. But he loved Thomas the Tank Engine, so it’s probably only a short hop to Murder on the Orient Express.