Sophie Hannah is a bestselling crime writer and poet whose poetry is studied at GCSE, A-level and at universities across the UK. She lives in Cambridge, where she is a fellow commoner at Lucy Cavendish College.

Is the church in the story real?

Yes – when I lived in Yorkshire there was a huge church on a roundabout near my house with a massive board outside, which had a succession of cheesy posters on it, including the ones in the story and many, many more with the most groan-inducing puns.

I take it you’re not a church-goer yourself?

No not at all. I’m a heathen like my detective, Charlie.

When did you first know you were going to be a writer?

From the age of about five or six, writing was my main hobby and pretty much the only thing I was interested in doing. I never wanted to do any of my school work. Stories and poems were what I wanted to do instead.

What drew you to crime and psychological thrillers?

As a child I discovered Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven novels and absolutely fell in love with them. From that moment on, and increasingly so as I went on to discover Ruth Rendell and Agatha Christie and other writers of that ilk, I just never changed my mind about the fact that mystery stories were my favourite kind.

Many crime writers feel underrated and ghettoised by the literary establishment. Do you?

There is still a great deal of snobbery about crime and thriller writing. There are people who think a crime novel can’t be proper literature, mainly because they are prejudiced against genre fiction and writing that is plot-based. Whether one ought to care about this, I’m not sure. Personally, I’ve always thought crime fiction is the best kind of literature. Done well and properly, there is no better kind of fiction. If other people can’t see that, then I think that’s a shame for them but I am not going to get angry about it.

Does being a poet feed the crime writing or vice versa? Or do you feel the two hats don’t even belong on the same hatstand?

I think the themes that I am interested in writing about are similar in my crime fiction and in my poetry. I want to write about people, the way they behave, their psychology, the whole gamut of relationships – romantic partnerships, family, friendships. Even formally, I think poetry and crime fiction have a lot in common. In a tightly plotted crime novel and a highly metrical poem, for instance, structure is crucially important. Every single element has to be in the right balance and proportion to everything else. I am a real structure freak and I think that’s one of the reasons both poetry and crime fiction appeal to me.

Was there a particular poet or book of poems that inspired you when you were a child?

When I was very young, I read a lot of Doctor Seuss. I also remember reading a massive collection of poetry called The Mother Goose Treasury and I think that is probably what got me hooked on rhyming poetry. By the time I was a teenager, I’d studied a lot of poetry – by people like Ezra Pound and TS Eliot – which had really put me off. It was all about trees and hawks and that wasn’t what I was preoccupied with at all. Then I discovered Edna St Vincent Millais and my mum [the author Adèle Geras] gave me a copy of Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis by Wendy Cope and I thought, aha, maybe poetry can really be fun and interesting. They were writing about people and relationships, and they were funny and wrote poetry that rhymed, which is the kind of poetry I wanted to write too.

You recently brought Hercule Poirot back from the dead in The Monogram Murders and – unlike many other literary “revivals” – the critics loved it. How did you pull it off?

There’s no other writer I could have done that with. Agatha Christie was my first favourite grownup writer. I got hooked on her books when I was about 12 and I had read all of them by the time I was 14. I think I internalised the Agatha Christie model of what the perfect crime novel should be and do, and when I came to write my own novels, even though they are very different in tone from hers, I used her writing as a blueprint. So when I came to consider writing a Poirot novel, I thought, I can do this because I’ve sort of been doing it for years anyway, and now I can just do it more openly.

Would you return to Poirot?

I am writing another one right now! I’m two chapters away from the end. It’s called Closed Casket and it’s going to be published next September, on the 100th anniversary of the first Poirot novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

What are you going to be reading at Christmas?

Funnily enough, I am going to be rereading some Agatha Christie, in preparation for editing Closed Casket in the new year.

A Game for All the Family by Sophie Hannah is published by Hodder in paperback on 31 December, £7.99. Click here to order a copy for £6.39.