"Parody is the greatest compliment to the original" By definition, parody is a comic imitation of a piece of writing. The essence of parody is the treatment of a light theme in the style appropriate to a serious work In parody, the theme and the characters are greatly modified or completely changed, but the style of the original is closely followed in those peculiarities that easily lend themselves to ridicule. There can be no doubt …showed first 75 words of 1644 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1644 total…famous play but a spoof on crime fiction in general. Stoppard attempts to do so meant he had to utilised those very writer's tool and ingredients which Christie and others used to construct crime fiction genre. It could be reasonably argued therefore, that the real literary success of 'The Real inspector Hound" is surely that in the end it successfully complimented rather than undermined or ridiculed the very literary style it's author sought to parody.