JANET MORGAN
Agatha Christie
A Biography
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1985
First published by William Collins Sons and Co.Ltd 1984
Copyright © Janet Morgan 1984
Janet Morgan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008243951
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2017 ISBN: 9780007392995
Version: 2017-07-28
For Shiela
Contents
2 ‘In private and in your own time’
3 ‘A possession that is yours to do what you like with’
4 ‘She will have to make up her mind between them some time’
5 ‘He will change your entire life’
6 ‘This waiting is rather hard but all is ready’
7 ‘Menace and murder and sudden death’
8 ‘1st Class! Good oh! Right here’
9 ‘The next I write will be the 5th’
10 ‘I do not think she knows who she is’
12 ‘An unquestionably genuine loss of memory’
13 ‘London – Paris – Lausanne – Milan – Venice’
14 ‘An idea I’ve never ever considered’
17 ‘Things all seem to come at once’
19 ‘A certain amount of fêting’
21 ‘All the panoply and misdirection of the conjuror’s art’
22 ‘I shall go on enjoying myself’
23 ‘An onlooker and an observer’
24 ‘Like a cinema film run backwards’
25 ‘An ordinary successful hard-working author’
26 ‘It will not, I think, be long’
It was not a predictable match.
In 1981 Agatha Christie’s daughter Rosalind, Mrs Anthony Hicks, was at last persuaded to allow Collins, publisher of her mother’s books, to commission a biography, its author to have unrestricted access to family archives. For years, Mrs Hicks had resisted this; like her mother, she believed that a writer’s work