Agatha Christie: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Here I would give guided tours, occasionally feed the llamas, and look for important pieces of paper that my boss Anthony had lost. Worsley offers close readings of Christie’s work and presents a careful reframe of the novelist’s famous 1926 disappearance.

So I say…read the autobiography, which is truthfully more revelatory and amusing than Worsley’s pull quotes. It’s astonishing,’ she wrote of non-detective fiction, ‘how one always wants to do something that isnt quite one’s work. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Loved that she presented AC and her times in 3D and did not pussyfoot around possible sensitive subjects (like Christie's appatent antisemitism in her novels even after WWII, her attitude to motherhood, or the weak quality of her later books).With great affection, Worsley masterfully maneuvers her way through Christie's life and prolific oeuvre. Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't?

However, the breadth of what Agatha Christie experienced in a lifetime was astonishing to me to see it all displayed. It happened that you and I just fitted together: now and again two sould meet that fit, not because they are alike, but because they are counterparts. By nature they are less fantastical, less suspenseful and (yes) sometimes that means they can be "boring". Lucy Worsley is simply unparalleled as a biographer who couples historical insight with riveting storytelling. Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern.In 1984, she allowed author Janet Morgan to publish a biography of Agatha Christie that was thorough, fair, and scrupulous. There will not now need to be another biography of the queen of the detective story written for decades. As a long-time fan of Lucy Worsley’s documentaries on the Tudors, Austen, mysteries, and romance novels, I squee-ed when I heard she was writing a biography of Christie. Just a few days ago, it was the anniversary of one of the most bestselling authors of all time, Dame Agatha Christie, birthday in 1890. The second part is Worsley’s explanation of Christie’s breakdown and disappearance after a suicide attempt.

The analysis of the books themselves is also thin-there are spoilers yet no deep analysis of the style and voice, and Christie’s later output is wholly dismissed as inferior, despite such wonderful books as Endless Night. Page 316: One of the advantages of being seventy is that you really don’t care any longer what anyone says about you. Christie would have hated it, as she would have hated all biographies, but even so she might have saluted the skill of an author who shares her gift for supreme readability. She had a long and eventful life, filled with more happiness than tribulation, and died quickly and quietly.It was narrated by the author, Lucy Worsley and if you know of Lucy Worsley, you know she is a wonderful, dramatic speaker. In recent years, she has become the subject of a number of books, all based on her 11 day disappearance in 1926. Drawing on personal letters and modern criticism, Worsley manages to make her subject feel fresh and new. She has accessed letters and papers rarely before uncovered and analyzed them with one central question in mind: what was the real Agatha Christie like?

Page 102: ‘I don’t like describing people or places,’ she once admitted, ‘I just want to get on with the dialogue. Working in her bedroom, in odd corners, she was as unlike the conventional idea of the anguished author as possible. If that's true, she was waiting for the perfect biographer to bring her back to life, and she has found her in Dr. All this doesn't make the book terrible; if you haven't read a biography of Christie then this is perfectly adequate.They will delight in seeing photographs of the author surfing in Hawaii, or learning that her favorite drink was a glass of neat cream. Having read her books on Austen and Queen Victoria I knew this would be a well written, interesting, often lighthearted look at the life of an extraordinary woman. The most interesting piece of information that I gleaned was that despite what we may see as a successful career, Christie struggled with finances and taxes her entire adult life. What makes this biography so fascinating is the way Worsley demonstrates how "everything Agatha experienced became copy". Lucy Worsley's biography of Agatha Christie is as unputdownable as any of the novels by the Queen of Crime herself.