Agatha Christie: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Where Worsley excels is in her descriptions of Christie’s day-to-day life; we hear virtually nothing of her political opinions as she lives through two world wars, for example, but we do glean a sense of her exceptionalism in the news that she consistently ignored air-raid sirens and simply turned over in bed. Annoyingly glib, pop-trendy, staggeringly superficial, sensationalist, fanciful and frequently silly. Page 352: Eventually Rosalind decided a controlled glimpse of her mother’s archive might help reshape the narrative.

The stat that only Shakespeare and the Bible have sold more than the Queen of Crime just shows her enduring appeal. It’s astonishing,’ she wrote of non-detective fiction, ‘how one always wants to do something that isnt quite one’s work. 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. Throughout life, we tend to lose ourselves for varying reasons and have to go find the person we were.I found her endearing, slightly problematic at moments, fascinating, relatable, and ultimately maintaining a bit of mystery still.

Someone once said that the greatest character Agatha Christie ever invented was Agatha Christie herself.Fans will admire Worsley’s identification of real-life people, places and phrases that Christie upcycled into her fiction. It’s also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. I'm not usually a big fan of biography, but Lucy Worsley brings such a delightful energy to her work that I couldn't resist. Worsley points out that during the timeframe coinciding with sales of Christie's novels in which she wrote about people's homes and their meanings with a "peculiarly homely brand of death", the magazines Good Housekeeping and Woman and Home were launched targeting the new middle class female reader focused on her home. 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.

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. Worsley's sparkling biography brings a fresh eye to Christie's life and work, firmly busting the myth that she, or her novels, were cosy. The most interesting piece of information that I gleaned was that despite what we may see as a successful career, Christie struggled with finances and taxes her entire adult life. Born in 1890, she spent her early childhood in a luxurious late Victorian household and her transformative adolescence in the Edwardian age. 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.I treated myself and listened to the wonderful Lucy read her own work and who better to present her findings. There will not now need to be another biography of the queen of the detective story written for decades.

The author has a lovely way to her writing that is soft and engaging so a reader feels as though they are part of a conversation. This may be the first biography I’ve read where my attention was genuinely piqued by the discussion of the subject’s tax affairs. Agatha's described "Plutocratic Period" : After the dramatic aftermath of the 1926 disappearance and her subsequent divorce. As a long-time fan of Lucy Worsley’s documentaries on the Tudors, Austen, mysteries, and romance novels, I squee-ed when I heard she was writing a biography of Christie.

Perhaps counterintuitively, Worsley’s plummy-chummy tone bolsters rather than detracts from the seriousness with which she has evidently taken her task, as if she’s attempting to translate the sensibilities of a bygone era and mindset to contemporary life. Worsley seemed set on depicting Agatha Christie as a modern woman, she made a lot of assumptions about Agatha's motivations and true intentions -- some that starkly contrasted Christie's own words and actions. Lucy Worsley, OBE (born 18 December 1973) is an English historian, author, curator, and television presenter. 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.