Like Miss Marple, in both appearance and personality Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a sweet little old lady. It would have been wise not to underestimate her, however, as she had the skills to be a psychopath - should she so choose. As Kathryn Harkup says in her brilliant study - surely the best book yet on the Queen of Crime - the genteel, twinkling, elderly matron 'consistently displays a worryingly detailed knowledge of pharmaceuticals and poisons'.
NEW FICTION
- MUST READS The last thing Lucie's husband said was: 'You've still got your socks on'
- PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS Ellie's life is one of quiet desperation
- LITERARY FICTION You can hardly have avoided the fuss surrounding Elena Ferrante
- DEBUT FICTION: Truth, lies and a haunted house Rawblood is an isolated, old house on Dartmoor
- CLASSIC CRIME Our heart goes out to Peter Diamond
- CHICK LIT This is on an entirely different emotionally satisfying level
THIS WEEK'S PAPERBACKS
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My father's 'cure' for me being gay? Jaqueline Bisset! After all (he assured me) a similar gambit worked for Prince Charles
On New Year's Eve 1977, novelist Adam Mars-Jones told his father he was gay. He was 27 at the time, so hardly a tremulous teenager. But, still, he was full of apprehension - not least because his father, High Court judge Sir William Mars-Jones, was practically the embodiment of the hidebound, homophobic establishment.
LITERARY NEWS
- Adrian Mole author Sue Townsend, 68, dies at her home in Leicester after a stroke
- New chapter in the history of the Bronte birthplace as new owners turn it into a cafe honouring the family's literary heritage
- Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, hospitalised with lung and urinary tract infections
- You don't need sex to sell! Dan Brown's Inferno tops Amazon best-seller list for 2013 as readers look for different thrills after Fifty Shades trilogy
Britain's pottiest poet: Extraordinary life of the Bohemian bisexual who shocked his own children by breastfeeding a kitten
Can a man really breastfeed a kitten? It's not a question you expect to arise in a book about the leading literary lights of the Thirties. But towards the end of this eye-popping family narrative, the sculptor Matthew Spender - son of the poet Stephen - claims that when he was 23, his future mother-in-law rescued a half-drowned kitten from a Greek beach and insisted he suckle the creature to prevent it from becoming 'psychologically deprived'.