THE AGATHA CHRISTIE COLLECTION
1 The Mysterious Affair at Styles
2 The Secret Adversary
3 Murder on the Links
4 The Man in the Brown Suit
5 Poirot Investigates
6 The Secret of Chimneys
7 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
8 The Big Four
9 The Mystery of the Blue Train
10 The Seven Dials Mystery
11 Partners in Crime
12 The Mysterious Mr Quin
Black Coffee
13 The Murder at the Vicarage
14 The Sittaford Mystery
15 Peril at End House
16 The Thirteen Problems
17 Lord Edgware Dies
18 The Hound of Death
19 Murder on the Orient Express
20 The Listerdale Mystery
21 Why Didnt They Ask Evans?
22 Parker Pyne Investigates
23 Three Act Tragedy
24 Death in the Clouds
25 The ABC Murders
26 Murder in Mesopotamia
27 Cards on the Table
28 Dumb Witness
29 Death on the Nile
30 Murder in the Mews
31 Appointment with Death
32 Hercule Poirots Christmas
33 Murder is Easy
34 And Then There Were None
35 Sad Cypress
36 One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
37 Evil Under the Sun
38 N or M?
39 The Body in the Library
40 Five Little Pigs
41 The Moving Finger
42 Towards Zero
43 Death Comes as the End
44 Sparkling Cyanide
45 The Hollow
46 The Labours of Hercules
47 Taken at the Flood
48 Crooked House
49 A Murder is Announced
50 They Came to Baghdad
51 Mrs McGintys Dead
52 They Do It With Mirrors
53 After the Funeral
54 A Pocket Full of Rye
55 Destination Unknown
Spiders Web
56 Hickory Dickory Dock
57 Dead Mans Folly
58 4.50 From Paddington
The Unexpected Guest
59 Ordeal By Innocence
60 Cat Among the Pigeons
61 The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
62 The Pale Horse
63 The Mirror Crackd from Side to Side
64 The Clocks
65 A Caribbean Mystery
66 At Bertrams Hotel
67 Third Girl
68 Endless Night
69 By the Pricking of My Thumbs
70 Halloween Party
71 Passenger to Frankfurt
72 Nemesis
73 Elephants Can Remember
74 Postern of Fate
75 Poirots Early Cases
76 Curtain: Poirots Last Case
77 Sleeping Murder
78 Miss Marples Final Cases
79 Problem at Pollensa Bay
80 While the Light Lasts
ADAPTED BY CHARLES OSBORNE
THE LIFE AND CRIMES
OF
AGATHA
CHRISTIE
CHARLES OSBORNE
HarperCollinsPublishers
7785 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by
William Collins Sons & Company Limited 1982
Revised and updated edition 1999
Copyright Charles Osborne 1982, 1999
Charles Osborne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006531722
Ebook Edition JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780007455508
Version: 2014-07-15
For Joe Hansen, crime novelist in the Christie mould, in Los Angeles; and Ken Thomson, his sometime accomplice in publishing, in London.
Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? was the title of an article by the American critic and novelist Edmund Wilson, who had no taste for crime fiction. It was a silly question, for millions cared.
W. H. Auden began an essay, The Guilty Vicarage, with the words For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol, and went on to confess that if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it.
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie is a book for the likes of W. H. Auden, rather than for the likes of Edmund Wilson. It examines not only the crime novels but also everything else that Agatha Christie published, including the non-fiction, the stories for children, the poetry, the plays (both those written by her and those adapted from her novels by other hands), the films based on her works, and the six novels she produced under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott.
My qualifications for writing this book are slender: (i) I began reading Agatha Christie surreptitiously during a Latin lesson at school in 1943, and I have stopped, temporarily, only because I have read everything she wrote and, blessed with a highly selective memory, have actually read several of the murder mysteries more than once over the years; (ii) I played Dr Carelli in Agatha Christies Black Coffee during a summer season of repertory in Tunbridge Wells in 1955 (Nearer the Latin temperament was Charles Osborne as the slick Dr Carelli, said the local newspaper critic, after savaging the leading lady); (iii) I once met Dame Agatha at a party given by her publishers to celebrate the publication of Passenger to Frankfurt in 1970. Suddenly and uncharacteristically nervous at finding myself momentarily alone with the eighty-year-old author whom I had admired for so many years, I found myself offering her an engagement to take part in an Arts Council Writers Tour, and address audiences in the provinces. Oh, Im afraid I couldnt do that, Dame Agatha replied immediately. I wouldnt be any good at it, and in any case, you see, the reason I began to write more than sixty years ago was in order to avoid having to talk to people.
Let me assure potential readers of this book that they may proceed in perfect safety. Nowhere in these pages do I reveal the identity of any of Agatha Christies murderers.
Unless otherwise indicated, dates given after the titles of books are those of first publication. In the majority of cases only a few weeks separate American and British publication dates. Where a title was not published in both countries, this is made clear.