Like Rowling, Christie showed little promise of amounting to anything worthy of great public note as a younger person. The parallels with her life and Christies are that numerous and strong, beyond the “best selling author of her time” connection. I confess that after reading Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days I thought Rowling may have accepted the invitation to appear in Harrogate because it was the town where Christie was found hiding under her pseudonym (the same last name as her husband’s lover…). (1) Rowling-Christie Life Story Parallels: Readers of this weblog’s posts about Rowling and her Robert Galbraith pseudonym’s Cormoran Strike novels have seen repeated references to The Presence’s interview with crime writer Val McDermid at the Harrogate Festival in 2014. Join me after the jump for those eye-openers! Rowling care? Three things in this short biography of an author whose work Rowling knows well struck me as meaningful, even important. Jared Cade in his Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days demonstrates what has always been suspected, namely, that the amnesia story was a deliberate fabrication and that Christie disappeared in order to punish her husband who had just told her he wanted a divorce so he could marry his mistress, a mutual friend of theirs. She turned up in a spa at Harrogate she claimed to have suffered an attack of amnesia, a story from which she never broke in all the remaining decades of her life. One event in that life, however, that iswell known and Christie worked her whole remaining time on earth trying to downplay (it was a condition of every one of the rare interviews she granted that the topic not be raised) was her disappearance for eleven days in 1926, which vanishing act was the occasion of a national woman-hunt. Christie’s mysteries still sell millions of copies annually to readers who delight in them for their own sake.Īgatha Christie was a very private woman, however, and would be happy, I think, that the reading public today knows very little about her life.
Big Bill, much as I love the Bard, except for his place in the English canon and consequent forced readership in schools, would only be read by thespians and antiquarians. Christie is not only the ‘Queen of Crime Writers’ by common acclamation, her Poirot and Marple novels have been translated into more languages and sold more copies than any other writer of fictions in history with the possible exception of Shakespeare. Rowling’s sales, though, while unprecedented on a per volume basis at least with the Hogwarts Saga parts, fall far short of the hard to fathom book sales of two English women writers, Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie. Rowling and that Mao had help with his Little Red Book’s sales and distribution. We joke that only God and Chairman Mao have sold more books than J. Two points are in order as introduction, though, for the Harry Potter fan out there who may not know the basics about Agatha Christie. I rush to share the three things I learned from Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade.
I managed to read a book that had been on top of my pile of things to read (apart from the PhD thesis mound of ‘Must Reads’) in the first week of the twelve days of Christmas, and, as I expected, it was both a delight and a revelation. Maybe I’ll find time this weekend to put up a Greatest Hits of 2018, a very busy year indeed for Rowling Readers. Thank y’all for joining us in the past year and in advance for joining the conversation in the New Year. I’m excited about the coming year and projects on hand from the Pillar Posts and podcasts to speculation and research into the clockwork guts of Fantastic Beasts and Cormoran Strike. Happy St Basil’s Day! It’s the ‘Russian New Year’ (at least that’s what it was called in Pennsylvania years ago) and the beginning of 2019 on the Church calendar.
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