Agatha Christie: The Sunday Times Bestseller

There's no doubt that Lucy Worsley has a great enthusiasm for Dame Agatha, and this makes the book very endearing. She also covers the notorious 1926 disappearance from a more nuanced, modern perspective, away from the harsher, more masculine 20th century viewpoints we've largely had up until now. I had never appreciated that with her Harrogate persona of Teresa Neele that Agatha was creating a more colourful and fun image of herself, away from that of the bereaved daughter and rejected wife she had become in her real life. We also get to know more about Agatha's second husband, Max, who all too often doesn't come across very strongly in profiles of Agatha. They were clearly very passionate about each other, and were born soul mates.The author isn't blind to Agatha's faults though. She picks out the streak of anti-semitism in the books, and makes a valid point that Agatha still insisted on putting these remarks in even after 1945, when it was becoming more frowned upon. It is hard to understand what on earth possessed her. Likewise we have the often harsh, frightening, steely nature of Miss Marple, who in the books was often a long way from the fun, cuddly image that Margaret Rutherford had invented on the big screen.Ultimately I found the book a bit unsatisfying though. By the end it had a superficial, skimmy feel to it. There's a lack of magic in the writing here. Things are often just glossed over, and the post-WW2 stuff feels rushed. I can't help feeling you'd be better off reading Agatha's autobiography, in spite of all the criticism that it had when it was first published.

I really loved this book. It was beautifully written with the same energy and tone that the author uses in her fabulous television programmes. It helps us understand Agatha Christie‘s life in the context of today - simply the best book I have read in a very long time.

When I was growing up, there was no concept of Young Adult fiction, so I progressed from Enid Blyton to whatever my mum was reading, which included (thankfully for my future career!) Georgette Heyer, Barbara Cartland (something she still denies), Mary Stewart and crime, which meant primarily Agatha Christie. In fact, in my late teens and early twenties, I devoured almost every book Agatha Christie had ever written, including those she published as Mary Westmacott. Me and my mum would swap them between us, vying to discover whodunnit first, and endlessly dissecting the plots. Then I got a bit up myself reading-wise, and went into my ‘literary’ phase and didn’t read any Christie for decades.The first-class BBC adaptations of some of the stand-alone Christie books sent me back to a selective reading, but I have not read Poirot or Marple in a very long time – and I’ve never been fond of any of the tv or film adaptations of them. More recently, I have been re-reading Lord Peter Wimsey and remembering my early love of crime from the golden age, so when Lucy Worsley brought out a biography of Agatha Christie, I had it on pre-order – not least because Worsley is one of my auto-buy historians.I think I’d call this a revisionist bio, in that it sets out to revise and review some of the myths that have grown up about Christie’s life, partly because access to her archive has been closely managed by her family, but more importantly because it takes a very different view on the ‘big’ event of Christie’s life – her disappearance. Worsley, as you would expect, has consulted every source she could get her hands on, and very importantly, has been given access to the extensive archive of letters, notebooks, photos etc. She is a first-class historian with a painstaking approach to sources, to cross-checking, to questioning and re-investigating, and as a result does indeed come up with quite a different Agatha Christie than the one that we have come to accept. Is it the real one? Lucy Worsley concludes that we’ll never know the real one – that Christie was a master of deceit and deception in her private life as well as in her writings. How she reaches that conclusion makes for a highly readable and entertaining biography, so I’m not going to spoil it!I loved this – of course I did! I particularly enjoyed the insights and connections that Worsley makes between Christie’s books and her personal life. Why did Jane Marple come into her life so late, and why did her initially acerbic, rather unlikeable character soften? And Poirot? He served so many purposes in his long career, at times slick, at times troubled, at times on the verge of badly written, but all of this is put in a fascinating context that made me jump onto Amazon and download two of the books – which I’ve nearly finished. So too with Miss Marple. I’m not sure about Tommy and Tuppence, but there were so many stand-alone books mentioned in passing that I am sure I’ll be re-reading Christie on and off for the foreseeable.Whether you want a new take on Christie’s life or a better understanding of her books, or if you are new to both, I highly recommend this.

Does not come across very well as a book. Lucy is much better at acting out the history of Agatha's life and works. Ought to have been presented as a TV production much as her historical summaries on the BBC. Lucy comes across more vividly as a person in the TV genre. Worsley is not at her best as a writer.Writing is jumbled across time. This is not a chronological summary nor a biography. If you want a biography there are many on Agatha Christie.I bought the book because Lucy wrote it.Finished reading. Found several spelling mistakes. Example: "Welch" instead of "Welsh".

This moderately pleasant and inessential biography has a glib, superficial quality to it. It's as if Worsley wrote it in a rush because she was confident of getting a television programme out of it. Some parts of it feel distinctly under written and under researched. A fairly forget hybrid that fails to linger in the memory, it's as if the author is relying on her reputation as a broadcaster to sell it. Maybe it's because she's traversing fields already ploughed more thoroughly by others.