Product Description

A passionate and accomplished writer, Laura Thompson now turns her highly acclaimed biographical skills to Agatha Christie. Arguably the greatest crime writer in the world, thirty years after her death Christie's books still sell over four million copies worldwide a year.
Thompson describes the Edwardian world in which she grew up, explores the relationships she had, including those with her two husbands and daughter, and investigates the mysteries still surrounding Christie's life - including her disappearance in 1926.
Agatha Christie is a mystery and writing about her is a detection job in itself. But, with access to all of Christie's letters, papers and writing notebooks, as well as interviews with her grandson, daughter, son-in-law and their living relations, Thompson is able to unravel not only the detailed workings of Christies detective fiction, but the truth behind her private life as well.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69766 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 534 pages

A N Wilson, The Daily Mail, August 2007
'this new book by Laura Thompson is a triumphant success. She has true sympathy for her subject, she loves the books and she has managed in some intuitive way to make a completely convincing portrait of Agatha Christie the inner woman'

Review

A triumphant success

(A. N. Wilson, Daily Mail )

Highly accomplished

(Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday )

‘Thompson does a fabulous job of getting inside her head’

(Rachel Cooke, Observer )

‘A superlative and rapturously written biography’

(Roger Lewis, Daily Express )

‘The most definitive biography so far’

(Andrea Mullaney, Scotland on Sunday )

‘The last word on Agatha Christie... superb’

(Charles Osborne, Literary Review )

'An excellent biography'

(Jake Kerridge, Telegraph Review )

'Outstanding'

(Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth )

‘Laura Thompson brings Christie's life, thoughts and creative identity to life in fascinating and painstaking detail.’

(Sophie Hannah, The Week )

About the Author
A writer and freelance journalist, Laura Thompson won the Somerset Maugham award for her first book, THE DOGS, and is also the author of the critically acclaimed biography of Nancy Mitford, LIFE IN A COLD CLIMATE.

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Customer Reviews

stunningly insightful
what a joy to read a biography that gets inside the head of its subject, and makes the reader feel what THEY felt! I really understood Agatha Christie reading this book. It went behind her image and gave us a three-dimensional human being, a woman who was complex and vulnerable and not always very nice. Some biographies are just facts and figures. This one is like a novel in its insight. I found it gripping and moving and I can't stop thinking about Agatha now ...

An interesting life
This is a long and interesting biography of Agatha Christie, which discusses her life in some detail. having read Agatha Christie's won fascinating autobiography many times, I found in this book much interesting supplementary information. Things that are not discussed in the autobiography are gone over here in more detail.

Of course, there is a lengthy chapter about the famous episode when she disappeared just after her husband told her he wanted a divorce. There is much specualtion about Agatha Christie's state of mind, her reasons for doing it etc, but these can only remain speculation, since Mrs Christie never discussed the subject herself.

One theme that persists through the book is Agatha Christie's unattractiveness. She had, so Laura Thompson gives us to understand, become so unattractive that it was hardly surprising that Archie Christie should have looked elsewhere. One feels that the author believes that Mrs Christie would have done better to divert some of her energies from writing into keeping herself lovely, perhaps having face-lifts or something. Naturally, Ms Thomspon cannot bring herself to believe that Max Mallowan could possibly have found Agatha Christie attractive, there must have been other reasons why he wanted to marry her. The age difference between them is harped on constantly as if it was forty years instead of fourteen, and Agatha Christie's lack of attractiveness is mentioned so frequently that you cannot help wondering why Laura Thompson is so peculiarly obsessed with this subject, and why she considers Mrs Christie to have been so repulsive.

She is generally quite interesting when discussing the books, and one of the parts I enjoyed most was her favourable comparison of Mrs Christie with the other well-known detective writers of her era. She is staunch in her defense of Agatha Christie as a fine writer.

She has a slightly trying habit of quoting from Agatha Christie's 'Mary Westmacott' novels as if they are straightforward autobiography, which I found somewhat irritating, the books may indeed have a lot of autobiographical detail in the, but they were not written as autobiography, and I found it a bit annoying that she constantly quotes from them as if they are.

Throughout the book, Laura Thompson freely reveals the identity of the murderer in many of the stories, so if you happen not to have read all of Agatha Christie's mysteries, you may need to be wary of this.

An interesting book, I didn't agree with everything the author had to say, but that only made it more enjoyable to read, there's nothing like having something to disagree with!

If you haven't already done so, I would recommend reading Mrs Christie's own fascinating autobiography before you read this.

Alpha Plus
Exceptionally well written and better than the Janet Morgan biography. I found the analysis of the books excellent --with the possible exception of what Miss Thompsons writes about Nemesis and Passenger to Frankfurt. Miss Thompson considers them both good, which they are not -- like some of Christie's later books they are rambling and poorly structured. (They are certainly revealing about Christie's opinions.) The insights into the Mallowans' marriage on the other hand are absolutely fascinating. It was aslo extremely gratifying to read Miss Thompson's criticism of practically all recent TV adaptation -- all of them appalling.