agatha christie biography laura thompson

These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). Now she would suffer for it.” Thompson admits Christie “probably was something of a snob” and a “writer first, mother second.”Ĭhristie lovers will revel in this comprehensive, authoritative book. She made the reporters covering the story “look silly. She is excellent with her almost novelistic, day-by-day accounting of Christie’s famous disappearance in 1926 when she was distraught after learning about her first husband’s affair with another woman. By intelligence by instinct by confidence by courage.” The author is unquestionably a fan of Christie’s works, which she knows intimately, discussing them in a somewhat reverential tone, but she also admits that Christie wasn’t always “at her best.” Christie’s “dazzling” and “elegantly” structured novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) is “exquisite.” Five Little Pigs (1942) is a “masterly piece of writing.” Thompson has a penchant for mixing the biography with the works, quoting extensively from them to help reinforce her discussions of events in Christie’s life.

Thompson writes that Christie became a better writer “by degrees. She wrote her first mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (in which Hercule Poirot-“unreal, unbelievable, yet mysteriously alive”-makes his first appearance) in 1916, after her sister said, “I bet you couldn’t.” After it was published in 1920, Christie published novels, plays, and stories, including the “obviously autobiographical,” pseudonymous Mary Westmacott books, virtually every year.

As a young girl living a privileged life with servants on the English coast, she published a poem in a local newspaper and never stopped. Thompson calls Agatha Christie (1890-1976) an “entirely private person” who loved to write.

In a book originally published in England in 2008 as Agatha Christie: An English Mystery, Somerset Maugham Award winner Thompson ( The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, 2016, etc.) offers an affectionate take on the beloved British mystery writer. A generous and meticulous biography of the legendary crime writer.

Agatha christie biography laura thompson