Agatha Christie

I didn’t know much about Agatha Christie before picking this book up, having only read Murder on the Orient Express—but I did know (and love!) historian Lucy Worsley’s detail-oriented, narrative approach to biography thanks to her earlier explorations of Jane Austen and Queen Victoria’s lives.

In Worsley’s hands, this most British of authors emerges as an iconoclastic and, at times, problematic figure, far ahead of her time, with a deeply ambivalent relationship to her fictional detectives’ fame and an unusually independent lifestyle for a woman of her era.

Worsley is a master at presenting historical figures’ lives with… show more.

This is a fascinating biography of Agatha Christie, who emerges as truly exceptional.

She is the daughter of wealthy Edwardian parents, destined for a good marriage, but all that changes when the family's money is lost. Agatha dares to become a nurse in World War I – it's grueling work. She trains as a pharmacist, where she learns all about the poisons she would use in her books. She marries a dashing pilot who betrays her with another woman.

Despite the sadness and difficulties she encounters, Agatha makes her name as the 'Queen of Crime,’' the most famous crime writer… show more.