Agatha Christie

'Laura Thompson's outstanding biography . . . is a pretty much perfect capturing of a life' - Kate MosseIt has been 100 years since Agatha Christie wrote her first novel and created the formidable Hercule Poirot. In this biography, Laura Thompson describes the Edwardian world in which she grew up, explores the relationships she had, including those with her two husbands and daughter, and investigates the mysteries still surrounding Christie's life - including her disappearance in 1926. Agatha Christie is a mystery and writing about her is a detection job in itself. But, with access to all of Christie's letters, papers and writing notebooks, as well as interviews with her grandson, daughter, son-in-law and their living relations, Thompson is able to unravel not only the detailed workings of Christie's detective fiction, but the truth behind her private life as well.First published in 2007 as 'Agatha Christie: An English Mystery', this is a fully updated edition with a new introduction by the author

Thompson does a superlatives job at digging beneath the surface of this public but private woman... her prose here is elegantly turned and concise - and perfectly at the service of its enigmatic subject.

Laura Thompson won the Somerset Maugham Award with her first book, The Dogs. She wrote a biographical study of Nancy Mitford, Life in a Cold Climate, and a group biography of the Mitfords, Take Six Girls, which was a New York Times bestseller. She has also written two books about real life murders: A Different Class of Murder, about the Lord Lucan case, and the CWA Dagger-nominated Rex V Edith Thompson. Her memoir of her publican grandmother, The Last Landlady, was nominated three times as a 2018 book of the year. She lives in Richmond.