RICHARD HACK
DUCHESS OF DEATH
THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF AGATHA CHRISTIE (JULY 2009)
by Richard Hack
Forget Stephenie Meyer or J.K. Rowling, the bestselling author in the world (after Shakespeare) is that revered master of the crime novel, Agatha Christie. Over two billion copies of her books have been sold, and thirty years after her death, Christie still sells over a million books a year. In Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple she created two of the world’s most beloved and imitated solvers of crime. Sixteen films have been made from her books. Many of them, including Witness for the Prosecution, And Then There were None, and Murder on the Orient Express, are cinematic classics themselves. While not very much has been written about this literary icon, who fiercely protected her privacy, her life was filled with enough intrigue, romance—and even scandal—to fill the pages of any number of her own novels.
DUCHESS OF DEATH: The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie (Phoenix Books; July 2009) by bestselling investigative writer Richard Hack, is the most probing biography yet written about the world’s favorite author. Hack, whose fourteen books include biographies of Ted Turner, Michael Jackson, J. Edgar Hoover, and the national bestseller, Hughes: The Private Diaries, Memos and Letters, was drawn to Christie as a subject because he felt earlier biographies had failed to tell much about the writer as a person. Drawing on over 5000 previously unpublished letters, notes, and documents, he paints the first complete portrait of Dame Agatha: the shy, home-schooled English girl (with an American father) who would later marry a handsome army captain, only to see that storybook romance grow sour. Divorced amidst scandal, she later married an archeologist fourteen years her junior and traveled the world with him while writing two of her peerless mystery novels every year—growing fabulously wealthy in the process.
Hack writes with a novelist’s gifts, telling Agatha Christie’s fascinating story with élan. He begins his riveting narrative with the most mysterious episode in Christie’s life, when she staged her own disappearance and for eleven days rocked the media as the police and the British public searched for her. She turned up at a spa in the north of England, registered under the name of her husband’s mistress. Christie would never fully explain her motives for the curious act, which rivaled any of her fictional plots for imagination and daring.
DUCHESS OF DEATH: The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie at last fills a longstanding void for Agatha Christie’s incalculable fans, exploring the true complexity of this beloved writer’s nature.