Guy Cuthbertson

I'll let him explain further.

Agatha Christie was once a great admirer of D.H.

Lawrence's work, according to the autobiography that she wrote towards the end of her life.

All those years later, she recalled how Lawrence influenced her first attempts to write stories.

She was not alone in that.

Lawrence was an influence on many writers, especially when they were young.

Born in 1885, only five years before Christie, and publishing his first novels before the First World War and then through the 1920s until his death in 1930, Lawrence was a new and influential voice in fiction at the time of the Golden Age.

and references to his work do appear in Golden Age detective fiction.

Cecil Day-Lewis is an example.

He refers to Lady Chatterley's lover several times in the detective stories he wrote as Nicholas Blake.

In A Question of Proof, in 1935, a character called Gadsby is looking for a book in the lockers in the common room at a school, and another character called Tiverton tells him to keep his nose out of his locker.

So Gadsby replies, got Lady Chatterley tucked away in there, have you?

In There's Trouble Brewing, two years later, there's a character called Miss Mellors,

Later, Day-Lewis would name a character Charles Blair Chatterley in End of Chapter in 1957 and also use the name of the Chatterley home, Ragby, in his Christmas story The Sad Variety in 1964, which is about a Professor Alfred Ragby whose daughter is kidnapped.

Day-Lewis was a witness at the famous Chatterley trial in London in 1960, where a variety of famous writers were called upon to defend the book with the result that the publishers Penguin were able to publish the unexpurgated edition.

Day-Lewis reportedly caused some excitement when he admitted to the court that yes, he was also Nicholas Blake, the writer of detective stories.

Agatha Christie was not a witness at the trial, and in her autobiography she didn't say that she admired Lady Chatterley's lover specifically, but she mentions the plumed serpent, sons and lovers, and the white peacock.

It's odd that Christie mentions The Plumed Serpent, which was published in 1926, not long before Lady Chatterley's Lover and some time after Christie's own career had begun.

The Plumed Serpent is a controversial, and not especially popular, book of sex and paganism.

Lawrence was, you could say, sex-obsessed.