Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life
Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life is a relatively new release and yet it reads like a biography from the 1970’s or 1980’s. There’s a lot of fat shaming. The Edwardian period is heavily sentimentalized. Several parts of the story are imagined in a dreamy, poetic manner. The author sides with Christie on all fronts, minimizing her racism and anti-Semitism (as was typical of her era, Christie disliked Italians as well, which is also minimized) and justifying some of her more selfish actions.
However, this biography is quite comprehensive and weirdly addictive. Christie was in many ways very conventional in her attitudes and yet she did a lot of amazing things. In WWI she was a nurse who assisted with surgeries and became very matter-of-fact about cleaning up (including tossing amputated parts into the incinerator). In WWII she worked in a pharmacy and pestered her boss for information about poisons. She was in London during the Blitz. She went on a round-the-world tour with her first husband and learned to surf, and accompanied her second husband on his archeological digs in Egypt and the Middle East. She also disappeared for two weeks, creating a real-life mystery and uproar. The author tries to imagine what might have been going on in Christie’s head and it makes about as much sense as anyone else’s guess.
I would only recommend this to die-hard Christie fans, and I’m curious if any readers can recommend a better bio of this flawed but extremely entertaining and influential author.
– Carrie S
It has been one hundred years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. A brilliant and award winning biographer, Laura Thompson now turns her sharp eye to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, Christie’s books still sell over four million copies each year—more than thirty years after her death—and it shows no signs of slowing.
But who was the woman behind these mystifying, yet eternally pleasing, puzzlers? Thompson reveals the Edwardian world in which Christie grew up, explores her relationships, including those with her two husbands and daughter, and investigates the many mysteries still surrounding Christie’s life, most notably, her eleven-day disappearance in 1926.
Agatha Christie is as mysterious as the stories she penned, and writing about her is a detection job in itself. With unprecedented access to all of Christie’s letters, papers, and notebooks, as well as fresh and insightful interviews with her grandson, daughter, son-in-law and their living relations, Thompson is able to unravel not only the detailed workings of Christie’s detective fiction, but the truth behind this mysterious woman.
Nonfiction
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
The most insightful book on Agatha Christie’s early life, including her disappearance, is a book she wrote, “Unfinished Portrait” as Mary Westmacott, published in 1934, which is a thinly disguised autobiographical work, about a women who marries, has a daughter and a husband who eventually leaves her for another women. She writes from the point of view of the divorced woman, sharing her deepest feelings during that period of her life. It provides far more insight than her actual autobiography written much later, although it is very interesting.
In general, her books written as Mary Westmacott, while very different from her mysteries, do show a lot of psychological insight into various troubled men and women.