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

Osborne, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002570335 ISBN 13: 9780002570336

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1999

Synopsis

A biographical companion to the works of Agatha Christie – revised and updated edition.

Agatha Christie was the author of over 100 plays, short story collections and novels which have been translated into 103 languages; she is outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Many have tried to copy her but none has succeeded. Attempts to capture her personality on paper, to discover her motivations or the reasons for her popularity, have usually failed. Charles Osborne, a lifelong student of Agatha Christie, has approached this most private of persons above all through her books, and the result is a fascinating companion to her life and work.

This ‘professional life’ of Agatha Christie provides authoritative information on each book’s provenance, on the work itself and on its contemporary critical reception set against the background of the major events in the author’s life. Illustrated with many rare photographs, this comprehensive guide to the world of Agatha Christie has been fully updated to include details of all the publications, films and TV adaptations in the 25 years since her death.

About this title

Review:

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 Kaveney

Review:

‘Charles Osborne deserves a medal – his own writing slips down a treat, and I was surprised to find (this book) a pleasure’
– Sunday Telegraph

‘A delightful bedside companion’
– The Tablet

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0002570335
• ISBN 13: 9780002570336
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 432