Poirot rises from the dead

If you read one book this week

Disappeared, by Anthony Quinn (Head of Zeus) R180

Quinn's haunting debut, set in Northern Ireland, introduces Belfast police inspector Celcius Daly, a man, we learn, who is ''laden with flawed judgment and misplaced loyalties". In other words, he is the only Catholic detective in a Protestant cop shop. Here, dressed up as a routine whodunnit, is a beautifully written account, full of betrayal, ferocity and compassion, of ''The Troubles". It is not exactly a new book - critics praised it as one of the best crime novels of 2012 - but it is worth hunting down as the second Daly adventure, Border Angels, has just been published. These things make better sense in sequence.

The issue

In the years since Ian Fleming's death a number of authors - the most prominent being Kingsley Amis, John Gardner, Raymond Benson, Sebastian Faulks, Jeffrey Deaver and William Boyd - have had a crack at churning out novels detailing the continuing adventures of James Bond. And why not? If the 007 franchise is to continue apace, then bring on the fresh blood. But what if Fleming had actually killed off Bond in, let us say, a last novel to bring the series to a close? How then would readers react to a resurrected Bond?

The question arises because, despite the fact that he is quite dead - having passed away from complications of a heart condition - the world's most famous Belgian detective is back with us in Sophie Hannah's The Monogram Murders: The New Agatha Christie Hercule Poirot Mystery. Poirot's death - in Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (1975), Christie's 33rd novel to feature the elegant investigator - came as a huge shock to many; some newspapers even published the detective's fictional obituary.

But, as Alexander McCall-Smith recently noted in the New York Times, the demise of a hero, and of the author, no longer means the story has ended.

"The purists, of course, shake their heads in disapproval, arguing that fictional characters are the product of a particular imagination and should not be endlessly reimagined by later generations of authors," he wrote.

''Others, while not objecting in principle, believe writers should concoct something new rather than reheat old dishes. That might seem a bit stuffy. If we like fictional characters, why should we not have more of them?"

For the record, McCall-Smith gives Hannah's handling of Poirot an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

''The plot is as tricky as anything written by Agatha Christie. Nothing is obvious or predictable in this very difficult Soduko of a novel. The Monogram Murders has a life and freshness of its own. Poirot is still Poirot. Poirot is back."

Bottom line

''The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal democracy does not mean it remains so in perpetuity." - Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)