Product Description

Agatha Christie was the author of over 100 plays, short story collections and novels which have been translated into 103 languages; she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. There have been many attempts to capture her personality on paper, to discover her motivations or the reasons for her popularity. Charles Osborne, a lifelong student of Agatha Christie, has approached this most private of persons above all through her books, and the result is a companion to her life and work. This life of Agatha Christie provides information on each book's provenance, on the work itself and on its contemporary critical reception set against the background of the major events in the author's life. Illustrated with photographs, this comprehensive guide to the world of Agatha Christie has been fully updated to include details of all the publications, films and TV adaptations.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #701890 in Books
• Published on: 1999-07-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 416 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Agatha Christie's career spanned over 50 years and 80 books; given that she also wrote plays, poems and fragments of memoir, it is at times hard to see how she managed to pay so much attention to the fine details through which her detective stories both inform and misdirect. Charles Osborne's at times almost devotional biography does not obscure some of the problems--Christie persisted in a snide anti-Semitism until the end of her life and her politics were both naive and reactionary; and yet, he demonstrates time and time again, there is an emotional honesty in the best of her work that is rare in the purely puzzle-oriented detective story. Osborne devotes considerable ingenuity to telling us as much as possible about each and every one of her books and plays without giving endings away; he is knowledgeable and thoughtful about even the most obscure of her short stories. The main threads of the non-writing life are here too--the disastrous first marriage, the disappearance with almost certainly fake amnesia, the travels with the archaeologist who made her happy. This is a book which stresses the lively intelligence of its subject, and shares it. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author
Charles Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects. He is addicted to crime fiction and recently adapted Agatha Christie's play Black Coffee into a novel.

Customer Reviews

Ideal for the Christie fan
This book is full of useful information. The book is a chronological account of Agatha Christie's life, discussing every book she ever wrote. The entries for each book are very clear - there's information about the writing of each book, alternative titles, a brief plot summary and reviews from both Charles Osborne and the newspapers of the day. What makes this book particularly good is that it NEVER gives away the killer. Therefore, you can find out what a particular book is about, without having the ending spoiled for you. This has been invaluable as a reference book, and as a guide to making Agatha Christie purchases.

Informative and interesting for Christie fans
A cleverly written book that manages to avoid spoiling any of the whodunnit plots. It is well-researched, and has plenty of intriguing trivia. I give it a 4 not a 5 due to Osborne's weird obsession with Christie's "anti-semitism". There are plenty of comments and remarks in Christie's work - about many different nationalities and ethnicities - that we may cringe at in the more enlightened, politically correct world of today. But Osborne fails to comment on any except those related to Jewish people. Christie does make some stereotyped comments about Jewish people in her works, but she also portrays several Jewish characters in a very sympathetic light. Either way, anti-semitism is not a major theme in her work, and Osborne reveals more about his own paranoia than Christie's prejudice by dwelling on it so extensively.