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When it comes to Christie's disappearance, Thompson does a fabulous job of getting inside her head, imagining her racing thoughts as she abandoned her car by a North Downs chalk pit and headed on a train to Yorkshire ('In the ladies' room at the Army and Navy she washed her hands and tidied herself. Bereft of description and characterisation, even her famous puzzles seem silly now: it was Norman Gale in the 18-seater aeroplane with a blowpipe! (Death in the Clouds). As a child, I loved Christie (this, perhaps, is why I think of her stories as children's books) and as I was reading Thompson's massive volume, I dug out my old paperbacks. But go back to the novels, and you won't be any the wiser. Why? We can't look to Christie for answers: she hated interviews, and was not much given to literary introspection. A billion copies of her books have been sold in English alone. Though there are people (I'm one of them) who still love Margery Allingham and Dorothy L Sayers, Christie has outlasted and outsold both of them, the same way she did all her Golden Age contemporaries. The second is the mystery of her success. The first, and most obvious, is Christie's infamous 10-day disappearance in 1926, when police dredged ponds in search of her body and the Daily News published pictures of her as she might look in disguise, only for her to turn up in a Harrogate hotel, alive and well and wearing a lovely new georgette frock. To what 'mystery', then, does the book's subtitle refer? She died in one of her several grand homes at the age of 85. She made an unhappy marriage, had a daughter, became a successful writer, got divorced, and made a happy, if unconventional, second marriage.
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She was born in Torquay in 1890 and grew up surrounded by servants. As I read, I kept picturing Thompson in a trench coat, pacing a library in which could be found not only dusty notebooks but the body of a stout, middle-aged woman in a fox stole, graduated pearls and bucket hat.Ĭhristie, of course, did not die a violent death (though her reputation has been murdered a few times, notably by Michael Dibdin in J'Accuse on Channel 4), nor was her life especially eventful. As for its author, she is no mere writer she has turned 'detective'. Subtitled An English Mystery, its cover boasts that it was written with 'unique' access to Christie's diary, letters and family, and inside the dust jacket we're promised not a biography but a 'full-scale investigation'.
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The people at Headline have certainly gone all out to sell it. But perhaps her publisher is worried others may not agree. Thompson clearly feels that she brings a fresh eye - and a special passion - to the already thoroughly picked-over life of the world's bestselling crime writer. Emboldened by this success, Thompson has now tried the same trick again, with Agatha Christie, who was last the subject of a biography (by Janet Morgan) in 1984. Laura Thompson's previous subject was Nancy Mitford, whose biography had already been ably written by Selina Hastings, and she made a decent go of it - even if it wasn't exactly crammed with revelations, and even if her style was, at times, on the toothache-inducing side of syrupy (Nancy herself would have honked like a drain at its worst excesses). So what is the restless biographer to do? Go back, that's what: try someone who was last 'done' a couple of decades ago. Meanwhile, all the meatiest names have already been done. A few writers die every year, which is helpful, but not all of them, alas, are worthy of their own book. If you read lots of literary biographies, as I do, you can't help but feel that the available pool of subjects is distinctly puddle-sized.