Agatha christie biography mystery books list
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The New York Times ran the first ever obituary for a fictional character. ‘I mean—how shall I put it—one only knows, doesn’t one, what they choose to tell you about themselves.” Miss Marple, A Caribbean Mystery
Further trips in the 1960s included a break in Upper Egypt where Max could recover from a bout of flu after finishing a book of his own on Nimrud; a visit to Belgium to see a museum named after Hercule Poirot; and a tour of the US where Max was giving a series of lectures.
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During the First World War thousands of refugees fled the fighting in Belgium to settle in England.
During the mid 1930s political tensions in Iraq were growing, and Max decided to start a fresh excavation in the Habur Valley, Syria. It was here that Agatha learnt her idiomatic but erratically-spelt French, and the trip marked the start of her lifelong love of travel.
Agatha regularly visited her grandmothers - Granny B (Clara’s mother), and ‘Auntie-Grannie’ (Clara’s aunt/Frederick’s stepmother) - in the London suburb of Ealing, and wrote a poem about the new trams that arrived there in 1901 which was published with much pride in the local magazine.
An intensely private person, made even more so by the hue and cry of the press, Agatha never spoke of this time with friends or family.
Agatha and Archie remained apart, Agatha living with Rosalind and Carlo in London and following a course of psychiatric treatment in Harley Street. Archie’s employer, who led the mission, proved the inspiration for Sir Eustace Pedlar in The Man in the Brown Suit, set in Africa.
In 1953 her adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution (from an earlier short story) debuted at Winter Gardens, and in 1954 she became the only playwright to have three productions running concurrently in the West End when Spider’s Webwas added to the mix.
In 1955, a solution to Agatha’s tax worries presented itself when Agatha Christie Limited was formed and Agatha effectively became an employee.
Her personal reflections detail her wide-eyed delight at her new experiences. Lane insisted on a couple of changes to her manuscript including a reworked final chapter – instead of a courtroom climax, Lane proposed the now familiar denouement in the library.
Following the war Agatha continued to write, experimenting with different types of thriller and murder mystery stories including The Secret Adversary, starring the adventurous young crime-solving duo Tommy and Tuppence.
In 1922, leaving Rosalind with her mother and sister, Agatha and Archie embarked on ‘the Grand Tour’, a fact-finding mission across the then British Empire to promote the Empire Exhibition of 1924.
On the banks of the River Dart, Greenway was, to Agatha, “the loveliest place in the world”, and inspired three of her novels.
1939 – 1945
The War Years
In September 1939, Agatha and Max were in the kitchen at Greenway when they heard the news everyone had been dreading: Britain was at war with Germany.
With her brother and sister away at school Agatha was used to amusing herself, inventing imaginary friends, playing with her animals and writing poems.
To finish her manuscript. While she developed an interest in fashion and clothes, French society proved a disappointment to her; much more to her tastes were the visits with her mother to the Grand Opera and excursions to Versailles, Fontainebleau and other historic places.
It was also with her mother that she would see Cairo for the first time, where she was to come out in society.
You emerge from one, seal and bolt the doors, and find yourself in another. They decided to remain at Greenway for the time being, Max volunteering for the Home Guard and Agatha once again working in the hospital dispensary in Torquay. “I think,” she later wrote, “that the book is one of the best of my ‘foreign travel’ ones.”
“Rosalie murmured: ‘I suppose we might as well go on to Egypt.
At Christmas 1931 she was travelling back to England alone on the Orient Express when a violent thunderstorm just after Istanbul delayed them by two days. At some point during the war years, she also penned the last Poirot and Miss Marple novels to be published – Curtain and Sleeping Murder respectively.
Having been recognised by members of the hotel band, who alerted the police, she did not recognise Archie when he came to meet her. When at home, Madge would often spend time with her little sister making up scenarios about frightening characters, and Agatha had a recurring nightmare about a terrifying ‘Gunman’.