I was gifted this book a couple of Christmases ago and when going through my shelves discovered it.

It isn’t a quick read as there are quite a few footnotes and references to Christie’s books.

Laura Thompson had access to Christie’s personal papers — notebooks, letters, photographs and the like. She also interviewed Christie’s daughter, son-in-law and grandson and was able to get a more personal look into Christie’s life.

Starting with Christie’s upbringing in a middle-to-upper class family in Torquay during Edwardian times, a period of time she always remembered and cherished. A place she enjoyed returning to in her mind. Thompson continues on to Christie’s two marriages, parenthood, her writing career; times that were challenging and not what she initially expected. Of the three events, it was her second marriage to a younger man that was the most pleasurable.

Christie was not one to give interviews or commentary, but was a more shy and private person. Accessibility to Christie’s papers allowed Thompson a look into Christie’s books and find relationships between story lines and actual events in Christie’s life.
It is an interesting read and sheds a new light on Dame Agatha Christie. ( )

In this biography of Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976), Laura Thompson gives us a detailed account of Christie’s life events and relationships with her family and friends – including the events about the 11 days of Christie’s disappearance -, but also with her publishers and what Christie thought about the adaptations of her works to theater or film.

The book shows a deep and well done research, with the author showing us excerpts from conversations she took with the family and those that knew Agatha Christie, as well as letters to and from Christie, which makes a valuable information to anyone who wants to know more about the context of the described events. The use of these primary sources would be enough for me to recommend this biography.

That being said, I did find Thompson relies too much in the Christie’s fictional books trying to connected them with real life events, which makes it a little bit difficult to go through the more than 500 pages. I confess I skipped part of the excerpts cited. However, I did find interesting the excerpt of “Snow Upon Desert”, the first novel written by Christie and never published (and maybe because of that), and I concede the citations can be useful for some readers to discover Agatha Christie’s books they didn’t know about before.

Review @ https://paulasimoesblog.wordpress.com/2021/07/03/agathachristie-an-english-myste... ( )

This book was all over the place for me. It was also repetitive as anything, if you want to read countless comments made about how Christie was beautiful once, got fat, and also left her first husband alone too much (i.e. it's her fault he had an affair and left her) well then this book is for you.

Thompson does tell Christie's life story from beginning (birth) to end (death). However, there seems to be a wall between Thompson and the reader. I wanted to know more about Christie, not Thompson's reading between the lines of all of Christie's works in order to show how Christie really feels about things.

For example:

"In her detective novel Three Act Tragedy she has the young ‘Egg’ Lytton-Gore in love with a much older man: ‘Girls were always attracted to middle-aged men with interesting pasts.’ The relationship is all about hero-worship on one side, youth-worship on the other, but this does not mean it would be more difficult to sustain than a marriage between apparent equals, or one that is apparently without illusions. ‘Lady Mary, you wouldn’t like your girl to marry a man twice her own age,’ a character says to Egg’s mother. ‘Her answer surprised him. “It might be safer so . . . At that age a man’s follies and sins are definitely behind him; they are not – still to come . . . "

Thompson uses this as an example of Christie being okay with her marriage to her first husband Archibald Christie.

"The Secret Adversary had the quality peculiar to almost everything that Agatha ever wrote: readability. The hero and heroine may send some readers for a metaphorical shotgun but Agatha’s delight in them is evident. She especially loved her ex-VAD Tuppence, every bit Tommy’s match in courage and resourcefulness, although the feminist angle would not have occurred to her creator. Tuppence is a sunny-natured little pragmatist – as was Agatha, at times – with a childlike greed for both food and money. Money, indeed, is the real theme of the book."

Once again she uses one of Christie's works as a way to diagnose her. She does this repeatedly throughout the book and it gets old.

There are quotes from Christie's autobiography in this book which I wish I had just read. It seems ten times more interesting than this book.

I was curious about Christie leaving her only child Rosalind behind so much. Thompson makes comments making it seem as if Rosalind blamed Christie for leaving her father alone too much and also didn't much care for her second husband Max, however, at the same time she brings up how protective Rosalind was of Agatha. This book does not do much to answer those questions for me. Instead Thompson just brings up enough points on both sides to make you wonder about the relationship between mother and daughter.

Thompson also does it regarding Christie's first marriage and her second marriage. She either loved Archibald Christie until his/her death or she got over it. She was okay with her second husband being 14 years her junior or she was not. She knew about him cheating on her or maybe she didn't.

I was also turned off by Thompson defending Christie's racism that showed up in her works (see the original title to "And Then There Were None" and the constant comments about Jewish people in her works). She tries to make a stab at saying that Christie was too above labels or some such thing and I felt annoyed that Thompson at least who wrote this back in 2007 would not grasp why it's not okay to use the "N" word or always describing Jewish characters in a negative fashion.

The writing is so boring. Probably because of the quotes included and the commentary about Christie's books included in what is supposed to be a biography of Christie. The flow was awful. I realized at one point that we didn't even get to when Christie meets her second husband until page 310. There is a lot that could have been trimmed out of this 544 page book. The only thing I really enjoyed was looking at the pictures that Thompson included at the end. ( )

I think I'm going to give this a 3.5?

I don't like feeling this conflicted about a book and being so torn about how to rate it. There's a lot to appreciate here--the research that went into it was clearly exhaustive, and you can find everything you ever wanted to know about Agatha Christie in this book. Thompson traces the whole course of her life in great detail and I really felt that I got to know her. In addition, I found Thompson's prose style very easy to read and also enjoyable.

But goodness, she wants to editorialize. Too much. She adds these very weird personal insights to things, making sweeping judgments about ideas or attitudes. Why am I supposed to care about her own personal feelings on things? I'm here for Agatha Christie, not Laura Thompson.

In addition, she makes specious ties between Christie's personal life and her fiction. Perhaps because Thompson is a writer of nonfiction and not fiction, she seems unable to understand that everything a fiction writer writes is not necessarily reflective of her own life. In practically every paragraph, Thompson compares some fact of Christie's life to some quote or scene from one of her books. A little of this might be fine, even effective, but Thompson takes it too far. Sometimes writers of fiction make things up. Sometimes they write things that have nothing to do with their own lives. Many of her comparisons seem a stretch, not to mention that the book as a whole could have been at least a hundred pages shorter if she didn't do this all the time. As a writer of fiction, the idea that someone might think that I'm constantly writing about my own life in my fiction when I'm not is horrifying to me. I can only imagine how Christie would feel about it if she knew.

She also attributes thoughts or feelings to Christie and other people that I'm not sure she could possibly know. Maybe she did indeed read them in letters or diaries, but they don't come across as paraphrased quotes but as pure invention or at least learned guesses. Sometimes she quotes without an endnote, and I can't tell if the quote is from a Christie letter/diary/other paper or from her fiction.

As is usual with my complaints about nonfiction books, most if not all of the book's problems could have been fixed by a good editor. Why do editors give in so much to their writers' self-indulgences? A good editor is a rare thing, apparently, but they make a great contribution.

So: excellent information, enjoyable prose, lots of extraneous editorializing. Your level of enjoyment will depend on how much you can put up with the latter. ( )