Revealed: The Mystery That Agatha Christie Was

The abiding memory of my teenage years is reading Agatha Christie.

- Karan Thapar

On holiday from school, I would spend hot summer afternoons stretched out on a sofa under a furiously whirling fan, absorbed in her murder mysteries. It was mainly Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Parker Pyne and Harley Quin, I knew nothing. But I was dimly aware that she had written 66 detective novels, which sold over 2 billion copies, an amount surpassed only by the Bible and Shakespeare and translated into over a hundred languages.

However, of Agatha Christie herself, I knew precious little. That has now been filled in by Lucy Worsley's fascinating biography, which I chanced upon recently. It is rightly subtitled A Very Elusive Woman. But once you have read it, you feel you know the author intimately.

Born to an American father, Christie was the surname she got from her first husband. Her only child, Rosalind, was from this marriage. It lasted from 1914 till 1928, when Archibald Christie's infidelity led to a painful divorce.