Agatha Christie: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Page 294: Suddenly, she explained, she was enjoying working on her play, ‘that wonderful moment in writing which does not usually last long, but which carries one on with a terrific verve as a large wave carries you to shore . It all feels a bit try-hard as if trying to separate this from more sober biographies or assessments of Christie. I learned lots of facts about Agatha Christie and enjoyed the almost novel-like feel if this biography.

Morgan described her own impression of Christie as ‘strange, manipulative, fertile in thinking of ways to murder and trick,’ but a closer acquaintance with the evidence changed her mind. Fans will admire Worsley’s identification of real-life people, places and phrases that Christie upcycled into her fiction. So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure? I had read that her final novels revealed the possibility of dementia and this author repeats the reasons for this speculation. I've been dying to get my hands on this audio version of Lucy Worsley's latest in depth look into a famous female.In her most creative period, before and after the warm it’s almost illegible, as if the ideas come spilling out too fast to be captured in a way that would make sense to anyone else. She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. Having been a reader of Agatha Christie books for 50 years this book by Lucy Worsley was a must read for me.

Sorry to be the party-pooper, but up until the chapter on the 1926 disappearance I found this to be quite a flimsy affair.

While I did learn her attempt to crash her car was more serious than I knew before, the fact that a woman might be distraught after her husband left her for her friend…well, I guess I’ve never found it that shocking.

This feels like a stop-start narrative - it races along in jolly Lucy fashion until it gets bogged down in describing a house or a Christie relative, and then pulls itself out and goes bounding off again. They will delight in seeing photographs of the author surfing in Hawaii, or learning that her favorite drink was a glass of neat cream. Page 295: Perhaps Gregg’s real beef was that Agatha didn’t feel a strong need to be liked: as Cotes admitted, ‘she wished at all times to relieve herself of spare talk and theatrical chitter-chatter.

Lucy Worsley is simply unparalleled as a biographer who couples historical insight with riveting storytelling. Page 299: But apart from the misery of being watched and judged, there was a kind of freedom in not being thin.

Agatha Christie was a fascinating woman, living life on her terms (after the end of her first marriage), and building a circle of friends and relations she loved to socialize with and rely on, and also dictating terms of how her books were to be published.What is not unexpected is the disdain levelled at her by male critics and directors*, who could not countenance a successful, forthright woman who enjoyed enormous, worldwide popularity for her writing. This is full of open spoilers from Christie's books so if you haven't read them yet, you might want to avoid this.