Audiences left hungry for more suspense after the nail-biting Celebrity Traitors finale should visit the ultimate murder mystery, The Mousetrap, its new director has suggested.

Ola Ince has taken charge of Agatha Christie’s indomitable whodunnit, the world’s longest-running play, which is in its 73rd year in London’s West End. The director, acclaimed for her bracing takes on Shakespeare, said Christie’s drama about a group of strangers snowed in at a remote guesthouse with a killer at large is “juicier” than she had previously imagined.

“In life we all fancy ourselves as detectives,” said Ince. “She creates such nuanced and quirky characters that you want to get to know them and figure out whodunnit. It’s full of intrigue and mischief, funny as well as thrilling. Shows like The Traitors and Only Murders in the Building are really popular right now. This is the original for people who want to lock in and see the real deal.”

Ince, 36, said that when she directs a classic play such as Othello, Romeo and Juliet or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, all of which she staged for Shakespeare’s Globe, “what I’m contending with is tradition and what you inherit from a show. This feels similar – this show is older than me and audiences really feel like they know exactly what it is. I’m coming along and not taking it for granted. Before I worked on the show, I thought I knew exactly what kind of evening it was.”

She discovered, instead, that Christie was a deft and perhaps overlooked commentator on postwar class structure. “With John Osborne, everyone spoke about how radical it was having working-class people on stage doing mundane things like ironing [in Look Back in Anger, which premiered in London a few years after The Mousetrap]. But at the top of Act 1 Scene 2 she’s got [proprietor of the guesthouse] Mollie Ralston hoovering. That was pretty radical too! It’s easy to forget that she’s commenting on changes that are happening hierarchically. The upper classes are falling away and there’s this want for equity … the play says a lot about injustice and the change that needed to happen.”

When The Mousetrap opened in 1952, the West End cast included Richard Attenborough as the detective alongside the actor’s wife, Sheila Sim, as Mollie. The first director was Peter Cotes. Later directors included David Turner who worked on the show in different capacities for 30 years. Ince has taken over from Philip Franks. The Mousetrap also has an overseeing artistic director, Denise Silvey, who played the role of Miss Casewell in 1994 and 2001.

A new cast begins performances under Ince’s direction on Monday night. Among the changes that Ince has introduced to “heighten what already exists” is a sound design by Max Perryment “to enhance the psychology of the play and the thrill of it”. The production accordingly has new speakers, the furniture has been rearranged and Ince has returned to Christie’s original manuscript and author’s notes. Balancing the comic with the serious is one of the main challenges, said its new director.

The Mousetrap has been overwhelmingly directed by men although Phyllida Lloyd staged a 60th anniversary gala. “She’s my theatre mum,” said Ince with a laugh. Ince was the international associate director on the Tina Turner musical directed by Lloyd in the West End. “We’ve had some nice chats about The Mousetrap.”

The show has clocked up more than 30,000 performances since its premiere, its run temporarily halted only by Covid-19. Like many of Christie’s novels, which have had offensive language around gender and race removed by sensitivity readers, the script has been revised over the years. “I’ve come into a version of the play that omits some of the more hostile language, some old-fashioned sexism. But at the same time I’m cautious of erasing too much because it’s true of the time,” said Ince. “I don’t want to offend an audience but if you make everyone a bit squeaky clean then you’re avoiding that maybe someone’s an arsehole and that’s interesting – or that can be a red herring. You’ve got to be careful that you’re not making it all a bit bland.”

Since 2017, a production of Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution has run in a courtroom setting inside County Hall in London. But people still classify Christie primarily as a novelist, said Ince. “I’d love people to celebrate her more as a playwright.” At times, over The Mousetrap’s extraordinary run, it has been the only play by a female playwright in the West End. She’s still in a minority now although Kate Trefry has had a hit with Stranger Things: The First Shadow and Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia is coming soon. “I think there are peaks and troughs when it feels like the world is a bit spicier because there’s more diversity,” said Ince. “Then it kind of dissipates because they’ve done that for a season. It’s amazing that Agatha has been strong for so long but sad that we’re still not really achieving [greater equality] now – or doing it in dribs and drabs.”

The Mousetrap’s producer, Brian Fenty, said he was “thrilled” about Ince directing the show, which has run at St Martin’s theatre since 1974 (it was previously at the Ambassadors next door). “Ola is a force of nature – a director who understands what it means to be both a steward of history and a challenger of complacency. Her creative instinct is first-class, and her care and love for Agatha Christie’s world is as heartening as it is inspiring.”

Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, is set to publish a new book in November about the Erin Patterson mushroom murder trial.

The book follows the story of Patterson, an Australian woman convicted in July of murdering three of her former in-laws and attempting to murder a fourth by serving them a beef wellington contaminated with death cap mushrooms in 2023. The case, which played out in an Australian court earlier this year, attracted global attention.

The Mushroom Tapes, written with fellow Australian authors Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, will be published by W&N on 20 November. The case has already inspired a television special, a forthcoming ABC drama series and several documentaries.

Prosecutors alleged that Patterson, a mother and self-described true crime enthusiast, invited her estranged husband’s parents, Gail and Don Patterson, and Gail’s sister and brother-in-law, Heather and Ian Wilkinson, to lunch at her Victoria home in July 2023. Within days, three of the guests were dead and the fourth lay in a coma.

Patterson, 51, denied any intent to harm them, claiming she had bought the mushrooms from a grocer and discarded a food dehydrator that later tested positive for deadly toxins only out of panic. After an 11-week trial, a jury found her guilty of three counts of murder and one of attempted murder. She was sentenced in September to life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 33 years.

Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein were among the many writers, journalists and documentary teams who attended the trial. According to the publisher, The Mushroom Tapes emerged from their shared experience of “long days immersed in the case’s themes: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.” The book is described as a “true crime study like no other” and an exploration of both the crime and the public’s obsession with it.

Helen Garner’s work has often intertwined literature and the law. Her debut novel, Monkey Grip (1977), became an instant classic, while her later nonfiction – The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief – cemented her reputation as a chronicler of Australia’s most fascinating court cases.

Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock knew the power of a meal gone fatally wrong. From poisoned tarts to deadly dinner parties, their murder mysteries had the knack of transforming the domestic into the diabolical.

Now, real life has delivered its own gothic culinary thriller – and the literary and entertainment worlds are eating it up.

The conviction of Erin Patterson, the Victorian woman found guilty of murdering three members of her estranged husband’s family – and attempting to murder a fourth – with a homemade beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms, has created an international media maelstrom. Publishing houses, streaming platforms, film studios and podcast producers are circling the story like salivating wolves closing in to make a killing.

Even before the jury delivered its guilty verdict on Monday, Australia’s national public broadcaster, the ABC, confirmed it was turning the Patterson poisoning into a TV drama. Its co-creator Tony Ayres (The Survivors, Clickbait) told Deadline that Toxic would “go beyond the surface – to reveal, not just sensationalise”, and he was working closely with the ABC journalist Rachael Brown, co-podcaster of Mushroom Case Daily, the ABC’s most successful podcast in a decade.

It is one of some half a dozen podcasts that covered the murder trial daily, with reporters from around the world flocking to the Latrobe Valley law courts.

These podcast series are now expected to delve deeper into the forensic science behind mushroom toxicity, the ethics of food preparation, and the cultural fascination with domestic crime.

This Sunday, Seven is promising a Spotlight Special, with a criminal barrister, a forensic psychologist, a former detective, and journalists dissecting the trial and the convicted poisoner’s motives.

And Nine has confirmed a deal with its streaming platform Stan for Death Cap, a documentary that Screen Australia promises will showcase “exclusive access into the investigation and trial” and examine “how one lethal lunch can shatter the myth of small-town security in Australia”.

Comparisons to the 2004 Netflix hit The Staircase, based on the true case of Michael Peterson, an American novelist accused of murdering his wife who was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their North Carolina home in 2001, abound.

Toni Collette who played the victim in The Staircase, is being touted on social media as an ideal actor to play Patterson.

New Idea threw local names Magda Szubanski, Mandy McElhinney and Jacki Weaver into the mix, along with Hollywood heavyweights Melissa McCarthy and Kathy Bates, and Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning.

With one of Australia’s most lauded novelists Helen Garner spotted in the Morwell court public gallery, there has been speculation that another gripping work of nonfiction, along the lines of This House of Grief, her 2014 work about the trial of Robert Farquharson, convicted of crashing his car into a dam and killing his three sons, is in the works.

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And Allen & Unwin has already announced it will publish The Mushroom Murders, a nonfiction work by the Underbelly creator Greg Haddrick – “with details not previously published” – in November. On Wednesday, Hachette Australia announced it had acquired world rights for Recipe for Murder, authored by Duncan McNab.

With global media outlets including CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera covering the verdict, the story’s reach has been unprecedented for an Australian criminal case.

“It resonated with an audience all over the world,” the UK Daily Mail journalist Caroline Cheetham, who gained a cult following with her The Trial Of Erin Patterson podcast, told the ABC.

“It just feels so totally off the wall, bizarre, crazy, bonkers.”

With so many spin-off projects already confirmed, the Erin Patterson saga may now become one of the most dramatised true crime stories in recent memory.

Whether ethical questions, about how the tragic deaths of Gail and Don Patterson and Heather Wilkinson have become entertainment fodder, will be examined remains to be seen.