Agatha Christie: Security Threat

Christie's most worrying book?

Lovely story on Daily Telegraph website about the security services being worried that Agatha Christie might have breached security when she published a 1941 novel that featured a 'Major Bletchley' who 'knew everything about what was really going on in the war'.

Apparently, Christie was a friend of Dilly Knox, who headed the code-breaking at Bletchley Park.  There's a more prosaic, and amusing explanation.   Read on...

Knox came from an interesting family.  His father was Edmund Knox, the evangelical Bishop of Manchester and opponent of Ritualism in the Church of England.  His brothers were E.V. Knox, a satirist who wrote as 'Evoe' and was editor of Punch (and was father of the Booker Prize winner Penelope Fitzgerald); Wilfred was a High Churchman and became an Anglican monk; the youngest was Mgr Ronnie Knox, who converted, was a well-known Roman Catholic apologist, broadcaster and crime writer.  Both sisters, Ethel and Winifred (Lady Peck), were novelists.