Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life

by Laura Thompson

Overview

AN EDGAR ALLAN POE AWARD FINALIST

The author of the New York Times bestselling The Six now turns her formidable biographical skills to the greatest crime writer in the world, Agatha Christie.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681776538
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	03/06/2018
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	231,298
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.70(d)

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 Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, and Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life, also available from Pegasus Books.

Table of Contents

The Villa at Torquay 1

The Young Miss Miller 39

The Husband 72

The Child 110

The Secret Adversary 147

The Quarry 186

The Second Husband 259

War 306

English Murder 356

The Late Years 409

God's Mark 458

The Works of Agatha Christie 486

Endnotes 490

Index 521

Acknowledgements 533

Editorial Reviews

10/16/2017
Though Christie once declared, “I think people should be interested in books and not their authors,” she might have changed her mind after reading this sympathetic and insightful biography. Thompson (The Six) skillfully creates a portrait of the detective-novel doyenne as an imaginative, intelligent woman who loved life but yearned for the security she experienced during her childhood. The creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple grew up in a book-filled house in genteel Torquay, a coastal English town, in thrall to her perceptive, loving mother. Thompson makes the convincing argument that much of Christie’s story hinges on her mysterious 11-day disappearance in 1926, when, already famous, she left home in reaction to her first husband’s adulterous affair. Although she left letters behind indicating where she’d be staying—a hotel in Bath—her abandoned car and abrupt departure led to a massive police hunt and resulting media circus. Thompson locates the scandal’s lasting effects in Christie’s lingering sense of insecurity and aversion to publicity. In her later years, some of her happiest times would be spent on her second husband’s Middle Eastern archeological digs, where she could escape being the center of attention. Thompson makes cogent arguments for the craft and depth of Christie’s writing that will surely lead new readers to her books—exactly where she would have wanted the focus. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"A triumph. No other biography of Christie that I've read so powerfully summons up the atmosphere of Christie's own writing: that singular blend of menace and the mundane."

NPR's 'Fresh Air

"Thompson mines this trove for clues not only to the writer’s inner life but also to her fiction’s recurring themes and enduring appeal. The woman who emerges in this elegant biography—shrewd, elusive, practical, romantic—cannot be defined by the era she immortalized. The queen of the cozy may be, in Thompson’s words, ‘stuck for all eternity at a tea-party in a country vicarage, sticking a fork into her seedcake as the bank manager’s wife chokes on a strychnine sandwich,’ but the lasting image here is poignant and fittingly chimerical."

The Wall Street Journal

"Thompson shows how Christie infused her stories with experiences and incidents drawn from her own life, including her disappearance. This ambitious, thorough biography will delight fans of the author and her iconic detective characters, Poirot and Miss Marple."

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine

"A splendid biography. Laura Thompson offers an excellent analysis and defense of Christie’s work."

Popular Culture Association

"An intimate and astute exploration of the woman and her work. What fundamentally informs this biography is the perception [Thompson] brings to her famous but cryptic subject. Her prose, blessed by British eloquence and unencumbered by excessive British reticence, enhances her shrewd conclusions about Agatha’s life. Thompson, with a sure talent for biographical detection, invests this engrossing and intensely personal study with passion and admiration."

Richmond Times-Dispatch

"A deep, reverential glide through the quiet life of one of the great writers of the 20th century. This rhapsodic biography is an account of Christie’s real life with passages from her fiction artfully interwoven, illustrating how the very private Christie really felt about things."

Book Reporter

"Fascinating. Thompson is a sympathetic and objective biographer. Thompson covers the disappearance uniquely, writing in a voice that Christie might have had while experiencing that strange time. In the end, Agatha Christie is portrayed here as a driven, at times vulnerable, woman who found what she wanted and needed to do with her life. For that, and for Laura Thompson’s new biography, we are all richer."

The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Agatha Christie is a subject of fascination. Thompson narrates the episode [of Christie’s disappearance] from Christie's perspective, so that the interlude takes on a dreamlike quality. ‘No life is a code to be deciphered,’ Thompson writes. ‘Omniscience is for Hercule Poirot. Real life knows less; it has the beauty of mystery.’ Christie captured that mystery brilliantly in her books, and Thompson explores the mysteries of author's life."

Shelf Awareness

"A splendid biography. Thompson artfully demonstrates how Christie revealed in the Westmacott novels her pain about her collapsed first marriage, her difficult relationship with Rosalind and her overwhelming love for her mother. Christie, in essence, was the Elena Ferrante of her day [and] Christie’s flame burns extra bright in the present."

Washington Post

2017-11-26
A generous and meticulous biography of the legendary crime writer.In a book originally published in England in 2008 as Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, Somerset Maugham Award winner Thompson (The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, 2016, etc.) offers an affectionate take on the beloved British mystery writer. Thompson calls Agatha Christie (1890-1976) an "entirely private person" who loved to write. As a young girl living a privileged life with servants on the English coast, she published a poem in a local newspaper and never stopped. Her output was prodigious. She wrote her first mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (in which Hercule Poirot—"unreal, unbelievable, yet mysteriously alive"—makes his first appearance) in 1916, after her sister said, "I bet you couldn't." After it was published in 1920, Christie published novels, plays, and stories, including the "obviously autobiographical," pseudonymous Mary Westmacott books, virtually every year. Thompson writes that Christie became a better writer "by degrees. By intelligence; by instinct; by confidence; by courage." The author is unquestionably a fan of Christie's works, which she knows intimately, discussing them in a somewhat reverential tone, but she also admits that Christie wasn't always "at her best." Christie's "dazzling" and "elegantly" structured novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is "exquisite." Five Little Pigs (1942) is a "masterly piece of writing." Thompson has a penchant for mixing the biography with the works, quoting extensively from them to help reinforce her discussions of events in Christie's life. She is excellent with her almost novelistic, day-by-day accounting of Christie's famous disappearance in 1926 when she was distraught after learning about her first husband's affair with another woman. She made the reporters covering the story "look silly. Now she would suffer for it." Thompson admits Christie "probably was something of a snob" and a "writer first, mother second."Christie lovers will revel in this comprehensive, authoritative book.

Kirkus Reviews

A splendid biography. Thompson artfully demonstrates how Christie revealed in the Westmacott novels her pain about her collapsed first marriage, her difficult relationship with Rosalind and her overwhelming love for her mother. Christie, in essence, was the Elena Ferrante of her day [and] Christie’s flame burns extra bright in the present.

Washington Post

A fine writer. One can't help admire the way Thompson breathes new life into an intriguing tale.

The London Review of Books

This book is a gem: fresh, intelligent, and assured.

The Sunday Times (London)

This splendid account of Christie's life and work is unlikely to be bettered.

The Evening Standard

Affectionate, admiring, perceptive, and absolutely convincing.

The Sunday Telegraph

Laura Thompson has certainly written the last word on Agatha Christie. Her book is a superb piece of history.

The Literary Review

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