Hallowe'en Party

Hercule Poirot is the effete, efficient Belgian detective created by mystery writer Dame Agatha Christie. With his signature moustache carfully... trimmed and waxed, Poirot uses his "little gray cells" to solve the most baffling crimes. Despite some disappointing earlier attempts to bring the character to the screen, the all-star film of "Murder On The Orient Express" became a hit with Albert Finney as Poirot. A subsequent seires of films and made-for-TV films featured Peter Ustinov. Among Christie fans, however, David Suchet, who played the part in a successful Brititsh TV series is considered the definitive Poirot.
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Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalises crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from... mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred. It has several sub-genres, including detective fiction , legal thriller, courtroom drama and hard-boiled fiction. While the archetype for a murder mystery dates back to "The Three Apples" in the One Thousand and One Nights, crime fiction began to be considered as a serious genre only around 1900. The earliest known crime novel is "The Rector of Veilbye" by the Danish author Steen Steensen Blicher, published in 1829. Better known are the earlier dark works of Edgar Allan Poe , " The Mystery of Marie Roget " , and "The Purloined Letter" . Wilkie Collins' epistolary novel The Woman in White was published in 1860, while The Moonstone is often thought to be his masterpiece. French author Émile Gaboriau's Monsieur Lecoq laid the groundwork for the methodical, scientifically minded detective.
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