Agatha Christie: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Christie lovers should read this biography for the same reason they read her novels: they "address dark, uncomfortable feelings. So why - despite all the evidence to the contrary - did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure? Agatha Christie is amongst my favourite authors of all time, so a book dedicated to her life was always going to appeal. Lucy Worsley's biography of Agatha Christie is as unputdownable as any of the novels by the Queen of Crime herself.

I have also read Christie's autobiography and wondered what she omitted and what she massaged to make it look better. It is quite interesting to read of the real story of a very complex woman born during a very different age. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

And the title of this final book, taken from Greek myth, rightly suggests that Miss Marple has also become superhuman, a modern equivalent of the ancient goddess Nemesis, pre-patriarchal, inexorable. Just a few days ago, it was the anniversary of one of the most bestselling authors of all time, Dame Agatha Christie, birthday in 1890. This doesn’t quite amount to the claims made in one eyebrow-raising passage in the biography, in which Worsley appears to argue that Christie has common ground with the modernists whose defining moment came as her first novels were published: “What if the middlebrow and the modernist could actually be the same thing? 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. Enter historian Lucy Worsley, whose declared intention is to rescue Christie, who died in 1976 at the age of 85, from the misperceptions that cling to her life and her works of fiction.

Notebook 31, for example, has pages dated 1955,1965, then back to 1963, then ‘1965 Cont’ and then on to 1972. Of course, she wrote great books and of course she sustained the quality of output for a lengthy career but LW gives us more - showing the determination and surprising difficulties that AC experienced.

Page 352: Eventually Rosalind decided a controlled glimpse of her mother’s archive might help reshape the narrative. I've got a spotty memory so odds are, I'll have forgotten what the spoilers Worsley reveals are by the time I get to reading all the Christie novels.

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. At best synthesizes what others have written about Agatha Christie much more intelligently and much more interestingly. You can treat your "subject" with respect without whitewashing their actions/traits or "sterilising" them to boring non-humans. Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t?Just a few chapters in and I had an urge to start reading some of the original mysteries with Lucy Worsley having reignited my enthusiasm. Worsley not only makes you want to reread them all over again, she actually makes you love the talented yet tormented woman who wrote them.