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Agatha christie novels read online

Books to read if you like agatha christie. Best order to read agatha christie novels. Agatha christie novels read online free. Best agatha christie books to read. Best novels by agatha christie.Born in Torquay in 1890, Agatha Christie began writing during the First World War and wrote over 100 novels, plays and short story collections. She was still writing to great acclaim until her death, and her books have now sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in over 100 foreign languages. Yet Agatha Christie was always a veryprivate person, and though Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple became household names, the Queen of Crime was a complete enigma to all but her closest friends. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman. By Lucy Worsley. Pegasus Crime; 432 pages; 29.95. Published in Britain as “Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman”; Hodder & Stoughton; 25On fridaydecember 3rd 1926 Agatha Christie left her husband and young daughter and went missing for 11 days. Using detective work befitting one of Christie’s novels, Lucy Worsley puts this mysterious disappearance at the heart of her colourful new biography, piecing together what really happened that winter.Listen to this story. Enjoy more audio andpodcasts on iOS or Android.Your browser does not support the element.Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAccording to Christie’s own account of those 11 days, she lost her memory after crashing her car in a half-hearted suicide attempt. But her comments on the matter were misreported by the press, inflicting lastingdamage on her reputation. Dismissive of her testimony as a female writer, the papers preferred the more salacious story that she had framed her adulterous husband for murder.Ms Worsley’s version of events hews closer to Christie’s and is far more convincing. The novelist was seriously ill from a combination of depression and “dissociative fugue”(or stress-induced amnesia). The pain of her mother’s death, her husband’s infidelity and the possible loss of the family home did indeed culminate in a suicide bid, followed by a stay at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, under a false identity. Ms Worsley calls the press’s treatment of Christie at this time “the great injustice” of her life.A moreimpenetrable mystery is why, when she died in 1976, her estate was worth only 100,000 (in today’s money, 550,000 or 630,000). Ms Worsley describes the drain on Christie’s finances of tax bills and the upkeep of assorted properties, but is at a loss to explain how the world’s bestselling author was consistently strapped for cash. She is on firmerground in her poignant portrait of the complex relationship between Christie and her daughter, Rosalind, who was shipped off to boarding school and “internalised the fact that she was less impressive, less important, than her mother”.Family life was eccentric. Christie, a teetotaller, quaffed glasses of cream in lieu of champagne and hosted generousparties at Greenway, a house in Devon that she crammed with art and silverware. She developed an impressive ability to churn out detective fiction without her guests ever seeming to witness it. Rosalind had to compete hard for her mother’s attention, yet was among the few people who could reassure her that she was a bona fide novelist. As MsWorsley notes, Christie suffered from a lifelong case of impostor syndrome: even in her 80s she remarked that she didn’t truly feel like an author, preferring to present herself as a regular housewife.But as this book ably demonstrates, the little girl born into a conventional Victorian household turned out to be anything but ordinary. She lovedtravelling (and went surfing in South Africa “in a pearl necklace”), had a weakness for fast cars and embraced psychology during periods of mental illness. She became a writer at a time when women of her background were expected to marry rather than work. This book concludes that she “redefined the rules for her social class and gender”. MsWorsley herself writes engagingly, with a smattering of racy phrases (Archie Christie, that adulterous first husband, is said to have been “incredibly hot”). She combines an almost militant support for her subject with a considered analysis of her books and plays—making the case that, in her themes and formal innovation, Christie was much more thana writer of formulaic potboilers.In the end, though, why the “queen of crime” was so self-effacing is never quite clear. Much about this “elusive genius” appears destined to remain secret. She seems to have preferred it that way. If Agatha Christie remains elusive, it’s not for the want of those trying to find her. Janet Morgan’s official biography of1984 and Laura Thompson’s equally detailed but ultimately more impressionistic portrait of 2007 have both been updated and reissued; and there are numerous other analyses that try to understand how the woman who routinely described herself as a housewife became Britain’s bestselling novelist of all time. Enter historian Lucy Worsley, whosedeclared 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.In service of the former, she revisits the most notorious episode of Christie’s life: her disappearance for 11 days in December 1926, prompting blanket media coverage, an extensive police search and, aftershe had resurfaced at a hydropathic hotel in Harrogate, widespread suspicion that her tale of memory loss was an elaborate publicity stunt. In terms of the novels, Worsley’s focus is on debunking the assumption that Christie invented and epitomised what has become known as “cosy” crime fiction, pointing to the darker elements of her work, itsmodernity, and its increasing interest in psychological themes.Is she convincing? Up to a point. These ways of thinking about Christie are not entirely new or unfamiliar, and although Worsley has evidently done due diligence among her subject’s correspondence and personal records, there are no major revelations. It’s more, perhaps, that she bringsa clear-eyed empathy that allows her to acknowledge Christie’s limitations and prejudices without consigning her to the silos of mass-market populist and absentee mother.Christie in her Berkshire home, 1950. Photograph: Daily MirrorSometimes, this is a stretch. Worsley is correct to argue that dismissing the books as formulaic – algebraic, indeed –is a way of diminishing Christie’s power to graft an apparently impenetrable mystery on to an evocatively imagined and interestingly peopled setting, and to repeat the trick over and over again; such reductive ways of characterising the work of popular writers are still very much in evidence. Her gift for dialogue and for manipulating socialstereotypes, as Worsley demonstrates, was formidable, keenly attuned to the proliferating class anxieties of the 20th century; numerous characters are, interestingly, transitional or dispossessed in some way, at odds with one view of her as a writer of the country-house elite. (This approach gets only so far when it comes to discussing her reliance onracist tropes, and particularly antisemitic slurs, on which Worsley maintains that we must accept her as a product of her class and time, but also that we must squarely face the reality of what she writes and not try to excuse it. The issue here is that, fundamentally, the circle cannot be squared and rests largely on whether one believes bigotry is, atsome level, historically inescapable.)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 bethe same thing?” she writes. “A more inclusive definition of modernism might mean that you can also find it in works that don’t necessarily bludgeon you in the face with the shock of the new in the manner of Ulysses.” If you are going to rescue one writer from misunderstanding, it’s as well not to visit the same ignominy on another. And as much asThe Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s ingenuity relies on the disruption of accepted narrative convention, I don’t think it has a lot in common with Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.A Very Elusive Woman does, however, paint an intriguing picture of Christie as an upper-middle-class Victorian and Edwardian child whose life, then and later, encompassedsignificant losses and reversals of fortune, emotionally and materially. 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. Of Christie’s firsthusband, Archibald, whose adultery sparked that 1926 flight, she confides that a photograph of him impressed on her “an essential fact” that she hadn’t hitherto appreciated: “He was incredibly hot.” When Agatha is patronised by a chemist from whom she’s trying to learn about poisons, Worsley simply says: “Urgh”.Where Worsley excels is in herdescriptions 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. And she reports Christie’s almost compulsive buying of properties, her quiet,near-clandestine funding of her second husband’s archeological career and her love of rich food in a way that allows us to understand the version of home, love and stability she was trying to recreate. This may be the first biography I’ve read where my attention was genuinely piqued by the discussion of the subject’s tax affairs. Has Lucy Worsleytracked down Agatha Christie? Not quite, but her nose for diverting byways may suffice.Sign up to Inside SaturdayThe only way to get a look behind the scenes of our brand new magazine, Saturday. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend.PrivacyNotice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman is published by Hodder & Stoughton( 25). To supportthe Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.