Books like The life and crimes of Agatha Christie by Charles Osborne

Agatha Christie’s 1939 mystery, first titled Ten Little Niggers, revolves around a deadly puzzle on an isolated island, where a group of millionaires is killed one by one. It was later published as And Then There Were None.

When Belgian detective Hercule Poirot returns to the English village of King's Abbot, he confronts the murder of industrialist Roger Ackroyd, unraveling a web of family secrets and hidden motives that reveal the culprit was nobody he expected.

Agatha Christie’s posthumously published autobiography traces her life from early childhood through two marriages, two World Wars, her writing career and archaeological adventures with husband Max Mallowan.

The Agatha Christie Companion offers a comprehensive catalogue of Christie’s 160 works, including novels, plays, films and television adaptations, with detailed annotations, biographical context, and critical commentary.

A 1977 essay collection offering a comprehensive, multi‑perspective portrait of Agatha Christie, featuring contributions from notable critics and authors.

An in‑depth study of Virginia Woolf’s literary contributions, drawn from her diaries, letters, and manuscripts.

Agatha Christie A to Z provides a factual, encyclopedic companion to the life and work of the 20th‑century detective novelist, covering her bibliography, relationships, disappearance, and adaptations.

"Iris Murdoch's life - like her books - was full of extraordinary passions and profound relationships with some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers, artists, writers and poets of her time. During the war she pondered Aldous Huxley's doctrine that, for a writer, 'it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters,' and she later wrote that the person who might help her better herself 'must not distinguish between me and my work'. She was sometimes portrayed as a bourgeois grandee living an unworldly, detached intellectual life, inventing a fantastical alternative world for compensation; but much that was thought to be romance in her work turns out to be reality. 'Real life is so much odder than any book,' she wrote to a friend, and her life was as exciting and improbable as her fiction. Her novels are not just stylised comedies of manners with artificial complications, but reflect passionately lived experience, albeit wonderfully transmuted. Peter Conradi's biography returns the reader to her best work, through a quest for the living flesh-and-blood creature: the Irishwoman, the Communist-bohemian, the Treasury civil servant, the worker in Austrian refugee-camps, the RCA lecturer during the 1960s, the lifelong devotee of friendship conducted at a distancce and by letter, and the Buddhist-Christian mystic. It balances the formative years before the creative confusion of youth gave way to a greater stability, with an account of her maturity."--BOOK JACKET.

Isobel Grundy is the first to examine in detail Lady Mary's family situation and social relationships, or to situate Montagu's writing life in relation to both tradition and innovation, to enlightenment circles and political agendas, and to the emerging tradition of women's writing, in which she herself was a key figure. Grundy highlights Lady Mary's adolescent longing for literary fame, her growing understanding of the pressures of class and gender imperatives on such upstart desires, her conflicted negotiations with manuscript culture and the new world of print, the punitive responses of society, the deep dissonance at every stage of her life between her actual circumstances and the constructed self of her letters and other writings. She also situates Montagu's work in the context of her exceptionally wide reading in both men's and women's texts, and her own theorizing of her social world.