Agatha Christie: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Still writing during the 1950's-1970's, her writing showed hints of evolving with the times and also steadfastly not evolving in terms of racial and social terminology used. I have also read Christie's autobiography and wondered what she omitted and what she massaged to make it look better. The author references a lot of characters and plot lines from Christie’s novels which if you haven't read a great deal of her work may make for tedious reading.

Novels are plotted across multiple volumes, apparently according to whichever one happened to be to hand. 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. The disappearance is well-covered - although (like the book as a whole) I'm not sure how much is new - and it picks up after that.

Dr Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, and other historic places. Worsley offers close readings of Christie’s work and presents a careful reframe of the novelist’s famous 1926 disappearance. She revisits Christie's mysterious disappearance in a straightforward way that emphasizes the way that the media has continued to spin out a mystery that really isn't a mystery - in fact, Christie explained what happened. Detective novels are games, and require a different method of evaluation (and construction) than works of capital-L Literature.

Page 97: If you want to know how strongly the highbrows felt middlebrow culture was second-rate and distressingly commercial, let Virginia Woolf step forth. I was born in Reading (not great, but it could have been Slough), studied Ancient and Modern History at New College, Oxford, and I've got a PhD in art history from the University of Sussex.Her "murders of quiet, domestic interest" employing domestic objects found in the home, appealed to her readership. With great affection, Worsley masterfully maneuvers her way through Christie's life and prolific oeuvre.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley’s biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Agatha Christie was elusive, Worsley argues, because she 'deliberately played upon the fact that she seemed so ordinary.

Agatha Christie was a modernist, an iconoclast, and a groundbreaker, according to this excellent biography from historian Worsley. I departed for English Heritage in 1997, first as an Assistant Inspector and then as an Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings; Bolsover Castle, Hardwick Old Hall, and Kirby Hall were my favourite properties there. Sorry to be the party-pooper, but up until the chapter on the 1926 disappearance I found this to be quite a flimsy affair.