Like most readers, the writers I regard as my favourites can change from year to year. In my early twenties I read almost everything by Somerset Maugham, which has certainly influenced my approach to writing prose. Agatha Christie is a writer I have repeatedly returned to ever since first reading her as a teenager. Last month I decided to read Sleeping Murder, one of the few Marple books I hadn’t yet read.

I was surprised when a character called Walter Fane was introduced. In the story, he is a lawyer who once proposed to Helen, the murder victim. She had accepted before changing her mind. Is this, we are made to wonder, a motive for murder? Here is the strange thing: Walter Fane is also a main character in Somerset Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil. Maugham’s novel was published in 1925, around fifteen years before Christie wrote Sleeping Murder. The Painted Veil is the story of an unhappily married British physician living in Hong Kong. His wife regrets her hasty decision to marry him. When she is unfaithful to him, he decides they should move to a village where there has been a cholera outbreak, a potentially perilous decision for them both.

The two Walter Fanes are not dissimilar. Both are colonial types – one in Hong Kong and the other in India. They are both buttoned-up men who are not emotionally forthcoming. One proposes marriage to a free-spirited woman who says yes and then changes her mind; the other proposes marriage to a free-spirited woman, who replies “I suppose so,” but finds the marriage dull. In other words, both Walter Fanes inspire tepid responses from their love interests. In Christie’s book this makes the character a good suspect; in Maugham’s it makes him out-of-step with his vivacious wife. Maugham was good with character names. ‘Fane’ has connotations of weakness. I remember another Maugham character called McPhail, the homonym of ‘fail’ being an appropriate connotation for the character.

The question is this: Why did Agatha Christie use the name Walter Fane? Christie was well read and in touch with the literary and theatrical landscape of the first half of the twentieth century. Maugham was a playwright as well as a novelist. In fact, in their day, Maugham and Christie were two of the most popular playrights in the West End. Maugham bowed out of writing for theatre at about the time Christie started.

There are several references in Christie’s books to other writers, sometimes introduced with subtlety. In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas the butler talks about the experience of deja vu, the feeling that you have lived something before. He mentions a play in London that was about that subject (but does not name it). The play is likely to be J.B. Priestley’s ‘I Have Been Here Before’, which opened in London in 1937, a year before Christie published Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. I imagine Christie had seen the play, and its theme was fresh in her mind as she wrote Poirot’s Christmas mystery.

This brings us to the subject of the mind. As a writer myself, I know that sometimes I have to make up something on the spot, dive into my mind for some fabricated detail. It is plausible that when Christie did this as she was writing Sleeping Murder, she came up with a name which had been stored in some unconscious part of her mind. Walter Fane sounded like a good name for an emotionally repressed Englishman living in a British colonial outpost…because it already was the name of such a character. The fact that they are similar characters may have been a factor. I certainly doubt that there was anything intentional about it.

For the prolific writer, names are always an issue. Christie’s books often contain large casts (remember the twelve suspects on the Orient Express?), and with eighty or so novels, we can speculate (we won’t actually calculate) that Christie invented over a thousand names. On this occasion, a name slipped through from a book she had read a few years before. Sleeping Murder was written in the 1940s, but not published until after her death in the 1970s. I wonder whether, had it been published in the time when it was written, an editor might have pointed out to her the coincidence? By the time readers had the chance to read Sleeping Murder, Agatha Christie had died.

There is a further intrigue: Maugham’s Walter Fane was meant to be called Walter Lane, until legal trouble from a couple by the name of Lane living in Hong Kong forced the change. The change from Lane to Fane was an obligation.

Of course, this takes nothing away from the great lady herself. Of the two novelists, Maugham’s Fane came first, but Christie’s Fane is likely to be around for a lot longer.

Finally, I would like to recommend two brilliant biographies of each of these writers: Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley, and The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham by Selina Hastings.