Amid rumours of marital strife (and her husband’s cheating), she vanished. Millions like me devoured the books, and interest in Christie’s personal life reached a frenzy when she disappeared for 11 days in 1926. ![]() (She was paid £25.) We appropriate her as a writer, but Christie had other lives: she was an accomplished musician and soprano, occasionally surfed and qualified as a dispenser, which is how she acquired such a handy knowledge of poisons. It's staggering to think that Christie was turned down by several publishers, and it took her five years to get The Mysterious Affair at Styles published. When I opened one, gone were the hospital bed and cellular blanket: I was off on a boat on the River Nile, or in sweltering Mesopotamia, or shadowing someone down a murky London side street. The covers are still vivid: peacock feathers ( Third Girl), a blackbird skeleton ( A Pocketful of Rye) and a strange apple/skull hybrid ( Halloween Party). So I consumed the stack of secondhand paperbacks I'd brought. ![]() Christie was a catalyst who walked me over the bridge (albeit on crutches) and into my adult life of reading.īedbound, the days dragged in the children's ward. Where next?įor me, between ditching the Secret Seven and moving on to The Pearl, there was Agatha Christie, whom I discovered during a period of immobility. Nancy Drew and the Famous Five are discreetly shoved to the back of the wardrobe and there you stand at a literary crossroads. There’s a reluctance to leave beloved books behind, but the urge to be grown-up is too intoxicating. ![]() At some point in the life of every book-loving child you run out of road.
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