I'm a bit – just a bit – of an Agatha Christie nut; have been ever since I read
Death on the Nile at the age of nine and got the murderer entirely wrong, and shortly afterwards when I read her
Autobiography and found that she had imaginary friends, just like me. I was hooked, and equally hooked on biographies.
The problem is that none of these biographies so far have been very good. Janet Morgan's official biography dripped with officialness and "really, she was awfully like her own self-description except slightly more professional," Gillian Gill's
Agatha Christie: the Woman and her Mysteries, was considerably more insightful but limited in her access to documents and people who knew and remembered Christie; Jared Cade's
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days was a brutal slapdash job based largely on third hand gossip; leaving really only Charles Osborne's
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, which is mostly and legitimately focused on the novels. It's not bad, but it leaves a lot out, which is why I was eager to read Thompson's biography which promised a new look.
So, first, let me get some major complaints out of the way, and by major complaints, I'm talking first about the typesetting, which in this case meant that the page printed after page 86 was not, as you might think, page 87, but page 391. The book then continued from page 391 to page 438 (yes, chatting about a later period in Christie's life), then abruptly mid sentence switched back to page 135. Pages 391 to 438 were later repeated in their proper order, but pages 87-134 are nowhere in the book.
( Further complaints behind the cut! )![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}