The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A biographical companion to the works of Agatha Christie Book

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 KaveneyRead More