[.ca] Agatha Christie: A Reader's Companion (ISBN 1845132033)

Pictorial feast and read for devoted fans:
Other crime writers may come and go, but the immortal Agatha Christie, the 'Queen of Crime', maintains her enduring appeal, and for her millions of fans this book is the next best thing to a new Christie novel. The authors, avid fans themselves, have assembled a mouth-watering feast of period memorabilia - the jackets and bindings of first editions from both sides of the Atlantic, stills from films and television series, photographs of the places and buildings that Christie used as settings for her stories, contemporary reviews and magazine features - which effortlessly transport the reader back into the world that Christie and her characters inhabited. Her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) was partly inspired by a challenge from her sister and partly by her experiences during the First World War, when she served as a VAD nurse and qualified as a dispenser, which gave her a working knowledge of drugs and poisons. These were the fortuitous circumstances that provided the springboard for a writing career of unsurpassed length and brilliance. The authors discuss each of the novels in chronological order of publication, with a summary of the plot-line and, in the case of the more famous books, bibliographical data, background information on Christie's own life at the time the book was written, an account of its reception by readers and the press, and details of subsequent films and TV series. The reader is thus able to trace Christie's career as an author, and the way in which her detectives were introduced and developed, while following, in parallel, her own life and travels. The result is a unique companion to her novels which will have enormous appeal to everyone who loves her work. 224 pages, over 260 colour photographs including historic full spread first editions jackets, historic locations and English scenery and period ephemera. Chorion plc and Agatha Christie Ltd were delighted with it. Beautifully produced. Only wish there had been more time and space. Contents: The 1920s, The 1930s, The 1940s, The 1950s onwards. The response so far has been really good in the UK and the US, considering it isn't published in the US just yet.

Buying guide:
Some really nice pictures of inside spreads of the book are available from the Amazon.com site. A great companion well timed for the new Miss Marples films.