Agatha Christie: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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So why - despite all the evidence to the contrary - did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure? Dr Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the charity which looks after the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, and other historic places.

I am constantly amazed by how deftly she introduces her characters, how amusing her dialogue is, and how well structured her plots are.Of Christie’s first husband, 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. The most interesting piece of information that I gleaned was that despite what we may see as a successful career, Christie struggled with finances and taxes her entire adult life. Here I would give guided tours, occasionally feed the llamas, and look for important pieces of paper that my boss Anthony had lost. Worsley offers close readings of Christie’s work and presents a careful reframe of the novelist’s famous 1926 disappearance. The author has a lovely way to her writing that is soft and engaging so a reader feels as though they are part of a conversation.

I loved listening to this highly entertaining account of Christie from Lucy Worsley on the train rides through the Alps. Her works have sold over 2 billion copies and her iconic detective characters have lasted the test of time. Soon after that I moved to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, in the lovely job for administrator of the Wind and Watermills Section.Where Worsley excels is in her descriptions 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.

Lucy Worsley portrait of Dame Agatha Christie is full of great details, and complements the autobiography I read by Christie some years ago. There will not now need to be another biography of the queen of the detective story written for decades. 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, its modernity, and its increasing interest in psychological themes.Drawing on personal letters and modern criticism, Worsley manages to make her subject feel fresh and new. Worsley shows us Christie's faults and flaws in the context of her time; she evokes her houses, clothes and the central mystery of her life in spritely sentences with a sharp ear for dialogue.

I'd say that if you've read any other biography of Christie such as Laura Thompson's Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life, you won't learn anything new.As a long-time fan of Lucy Worsley’s documentaries on the Tudors, Austen, mysteries, and romance novels, I squee-ed when I heard she was writing a biography of Christie. Her life with Max Mallowan as an amateur archaeologist was just as fulfilling but she always came back to her writing (if only to pay for all the houses, trinkets and digs). The chapter about her disappearance is probably the most interesting part, as it goes into more detail than other accounts I have read. Lucy Worsley is most certainly not as clever as she seems to think, or else she believes her readers are easy to dazzle.