The Mystery of the New Agatha Christie Biography That Isn’t

Hey Bill, what do you think of that new Agatha Christie biography reviewed in The Wall Street Journal?

Without having read it, I can tell you that it’s a good family-authorized book with all the pluses and minuses that it implies.

That’s because “Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life,” was published in 2006 as “Agatha Christie: An English Life.”

If The Wall Street Journal reviewer Anna Mundow didn’t twig that this was a reissue, it was probably because Pegasus Books chose not to reveal it. It’s not mentioned on their website, and author Laura Thompson’s page for the book shows the new title with the old book’s subtitle. They also apparently didn’t tell Publisher’s Weekly as well.

Only a single line in the author’s biography on its Amazon book page reveals the existence of the previous edition.

It was easy for me to spot the shuffling. While annotating Christie’s first two books “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” and “The Secret Adversary,” I spent a lot of time with the old girl, reading both major biographies, several minor biographies, and John Curran’s excellent two-book investigation of her notebooks. I even read Jared Cade’s “Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days,” which offers an alternative history of Christie’s disappearance over 11 days and contradicts much of what Thompson wrote in her family-authorized biography about that time of her life.

And that’s the problem with family-authorized bios. They naturally want it all their own way, but at the expense of presenting a more interesting nuanced version of the subject. Unfortunately, this means Christie will still not be taken as seriously as she deserves.