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

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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.