Other writers using AC titles

shana

On a different website offering e-books I came across a book titled Crooked House written by one Joe Mckinney. It comes under the genre of "horror". Can be viewed on Amazon where it is being offered for 0,99 U$. Is borrowing a title from a welknown author by another writer allowed??

And even if it is allowed by law, what do you Avid AC readers think about it?

S_Sigerson

There is a nursery rhyme from the 19th cenutury that goes... There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile. He found a crooked sixpence upon a crooked stile. He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse, And they all lived together in a little crooked house. Christie liked nursery rhymes and appropriated/incorporated them into the titles of several of her books. Is it wrong (morally or otherwise) for Christie to borrow from another person's work? Titles are not copyrighted. There is another book...a thrille/mystery or suspense called The Crooked House by Christobel Kent published either in 2014 or 2015 that has gotten good reviews. Also Mark Gatiss wrote an excellent suspense/thriller called Crooked House that was filmed by the BBC? In 2008 starring Lee Ingleby from Harry Potter and more recently he has been in the George Gentle mysteries with Martin Shaw.

shana

@ S_Sigerson: so it's all right what you"re saying? Please elaborate on the reasons if that is your point.

On the nursery rhymes: aren't those also not copyrighted? Though  AC never tried to pass off the nursery rhymes she used in her work as her own thinking , so even if it was, it was sufficientlly made public that she borrowed from the nursery rhyme in question isn"t it?.

S_Sigerson

I assume something from the 19th is now in the public domain. I would also guess taking a part of a nursery rhyme and using it for a title would not violate a copyright law even if it was under copyright...fair use or something like that, but I'm not 100% sure. And like I said I'm pretty sure you cannot copyright a tile of a book, at least not in the US or the UK, so someone else could use the same title. I just mentioned in passing that Christie herself borrowed/appropriated/incorporated...whatever word you want to use...part of someone else's work into her own. Now did Christie do anything wrong? I don't believe so. She also got the title for Taken at the flood from Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. Inspiration comes from many different sources.

GKCfan

Christie loved to use quotes in her book titles.  There's nothing wrong with using a quote from a classic nursery rhyme in a title, or a line from a play.  It's O.K. to use the same title as someone else if you're writing a very different book, but it's often not a good idea because people might get confused, and that might hurt sales.  

Something along these lines happened with Christie's last novel.  She originally planned for her last Miss Marple novel to be published posthumously under the title Cover Her Face.  Before that book could be published, however, a then-obscure writer named P.D. James published a mystery novel with the same title.  That's why, when Christie's last Miss Marple novel was published in 1976, it was printed under the title Sleeping Murder.

shana

Inspiration and cashing in on the success of another author by borrowing a well-known title are two different things. Because I was tempted to have a look at his novel merely because of the familiar title. Otherwise I would not have bothered to read the synopsis of the story of Mr. McKinney.

S_Sigerson

In the book Gwenda has a flashback while attending a production of the Duchess of Malfi, a Jacobean tragedy written by John Webster. This is where Christie got the original title for the book, which really is a much better title than Sleeping Murder....at least it sounds more dramatic. They should've gone with the Christie's original title. P.D. James' novel was published in 1962. Sleeping Murder wasn't published until 1976. I think enough time had elapsed between the two books. On further reflection, by 1976 James did have five Adam Dalgliesh mysteries and one Cordelia Grey novel under her belt, so I'm not sure how obscure she was by the point. Given the fact she was probably well known, as well as being a respected mystery writer (well deserved I might add) by this time, it might've made sense to change the title. Still even though there is a murder and the murder method is the same in both books they really are two totally different stories. I would have gone with Christies original title.

Tommy_A_Jones

The Quote From The Duchess of Malfi is also in The Old Fox Deceiv'd by Maud Grimes

Griselda

What I like about AC using quotes is it shows her adherence to the notion that people make lateral links between ideas, and that the subconscious harbours memories and shunts them into the conscious mind when the brain says there is something significant about that fact. The whole modus operendi of AC novels, I think, is that the police and Poirot will interview people and see what they have to say. There is a fair chance that they will say something slightly different each time you re-question them. Something that their unconscious mind filed as important will enter their conversation because un-known to them on the surface, they have found something suspicious all along. There was even that Christie short story about a woman SPOILER ALERT who suspected her husband's secretary of killing him and when under hypnosis remembered a detail her conscious mind had suppressed. (This is the story about someone hiding behind a curtain in a tower).

The police, naturally, will tend to focus in on facts, but only Poirot will look for the important detail that they did not know was important. He'll want to see the culprit give themselves away mentioning something because it is linked subconsciously to what they have done. Miss Marple will chatter inconsequentially to obtain similar information.

I would say that this device of having the special  detective question people to see what more they might say, what little detail they might remember a second time that they think isn't important is a hall mark of Agatha Christie. To write a Christie style novel, you'd have to do it. In Evil Under the Sun there was the detail SPOILER ALERT of the bath being run at noon.

In Murder on the Orient Express there is the subconscious lateral association of names to direct the culprits choice of name. Miss Debenham, and things the Countess said.