EXCLUSIVE: A mysterious society of famous crime writers whose members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and G.K. Chesterton is about to become far less mysterious.
Deadline can reveal that iconic authors like Christie and Sayers are to be brought to life in a TV series titled The Detection Club from the BBC and BritBox International.
Produced by BBC Studios Drama Productions, the show is understood to be taking a ‘mystery-of-the-week’ style approach with fictional versions of Christie, Sayers and Chesterton set as the main characters solving crimes each episode. We are told locations in the UK’s West Midlands region are currently being scouted with a view to shooting next summer.
Formed nearly 100 years ago, the elusive and exclusive Detection Club met regularly as its members dined and helped each other with technical aspects of their writing. As well as meeting, they also adhered to Knox’s Commandments, which instructed that a reader of their books must always be given a fair chance at guessing the guilty party.
Led by Christie, whose Poirot and Marple books have sold the world over and been adapted into countless TV series and movies, the 1930s era is considered a golden age for detective fiction. Sayers penned popular novels featuring amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey including Strong Poison and Whose Body?. In a somewhat meta twist, Chesterton, who was the first president of the Detection Club, is the author of the Father Brown books, which have already been made into a long-running series by the BBC, BritBox and BBC Studios featuring Harry Potter star Mark Williams as the titular crime-solving Roman Catholic priest.
Attention of course will now turn to who could play Christie, whose works have been adapted dozens of times for the big and small screen. In April, however, BBC Studios revealed it was reimagining the author via artificial intelligence to forge a writing course for its BBC Maestro platform. BBC Maestro teamed with Christie’s estate, a professional actress and VFX artists to recreate her voice and likeness using AI-enhanced tech and restored audio recordings.
Last month, we revealed that Christie’s crime-fighting couple Tommy and Tuppence are being adapted for the modern day via a different BritBox series.
The BBC, BritBox International and BBC Studios all declined comment on The Detection Club.
