Agatha Christie: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Pages 327-8: In the last stages of Miss Marple’s life, once she’s detached from St Mary Mead, she develops more and more common ground with her creator: she travels to Barbados, as Agatha fif in 1956; she stays in a luxurious hotel (something Agatha had long enjoyed) and finally, in Nemesis, she becomes rich. I had read that her final novels revealed the possibility of dementia and this author repeats the reasons for this speculation. If you are interested in learning more about her, then this book is an excellent resource and the audiobook is exceptional. The bad ones have a Mad Libs quality: feeble prose studded with blank spots into which you can picture the prolific Christie plugging a random “BODY PART” or “WEAPON.

A superlative biography of the Queen of Crime, Worsley's page-turning volume is a fitting tribute to Christie's extraordinary life. Much like her BBC specials, she takes a casual tone in educating her audience with interjecting perspectives on her subject that the modern readers find relatable whilst learning.Worsley is Joint Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces but is best known as a presenter of BBC Television series on historical topics, including Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency (2011), Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls (2012), The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain (2014), A Very British Romance (2015), Lucy Worsley: Mozart’s London Odyssey (2016), and Six Wives with Lucy Worsley (2016). To me (and I am by no means an expert) a good biography is an honest and stark depiction of the subject matter. She had a long and eventful life, filled with more happiness than tribulation, and died quickly and quietly.

Page 300: Max once described his wife as combining ‘outer diffidence with a massive inner confidence’, and there are sometimes hints that her public ‘shyness’ was less a genuine character trait than a weapon. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Fans will admire Worsley’s identification of real-life people, places and phrases that Christie upcycled into her fiction. A line in the preface sets an ominous tone, warning that Christie’s work “contains views on race and class that are unacceptable today” — a common refrain in recent biographies but totally unnecessary for readers whose knowledge of history extends more than five minutes. All this doesn't make the book terrible; if you haven't read a biography of Christie then this is perfectly adequate.

Page 316: One of the advantages of being seventy is that you really don’t care any longer what anyone says about you. Born in 1890, she spent her early childhood in a luxurious late Victorian household and her transformative adolescence in the Edwardian age. In a 1971 study of English crime fiction, Colin Watson snickered that Christie “seems to have been well aware that intelligence and readership-potential are quite unrelated. Janet Morgan’s official biography of 1984 and Laura Thompson’s equally detailed but ultimately more impressionistic portrait of 2007 have both been updated and reissued; and there are numerous other analyses that try to understand how the woman who routinely described herself as a housewife became Britain’s bestselling novelist of all time.

Her characters, especially Miss Marple and Poirot, live alongside iconic detective fiction figures like Poe’s Dupin and ACD’s Sherlock Holmes.Page 294: Suddenly, she explained, she was enjoying working on her play, ‘that wonderful moment in writing which does not usually last long, but which carries one on with a terrific verve as a large wave carries you to shore . She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. An introvert who was uncomfortable with the spotlight, she was also reluctant naming herself as an author, no doubt due to her Victorian upbringing, when women of her station were not supposed to work for a living. Having seen the Lucy Worsley TV series I had gained knowledge of facets her life that I was not aware and I am also a great lover of the Christie films and TV series. Je me suis précipité sur cette nouvelle autobiographie en espérant trouver de nouvelles informations ou photos sur Agatha Christie, mais mon attente a été relativement déçue.