Agatha Christie: A biography

Agatha Christie: A biography by Janet Morgan is an official biography authorised by the Christie family. It was first published in 1984 and republished in 2017 with a new introduction.

In her introductionirst, Morgan provides the background on why the Christie family, which so strongly protected her privacy for so long should finally decide to allow a biography to be writte. The issue had to do with the continuing speculation about what happened during Christie's disappearance in 1926 such as was done in the 1979 film Agatha. An official biography was needed to set the record straight.

While this explained the origin of Morgan's work and the disappearance is treated in some detail, Morgan argues that ultimately, "in the broad sweep of Agatha Christie’s life this affair was relatively insignificant." Indeed, the rest of the book goes into exhaustive detail about every aspect of Christie's life, to the extent that one reviewer, Polly Toynbee, writing for the Guardian, comments that there is "eighty-six years of bric-a-brac, people incidents houses, places, bills and interminable contract and copyright deals; and yet, oddly, the old lady herself has slipped away, vanished like Miss Marples." Toynbee would have prefered some "racy appeal", some "speculation about the nature of [Christie's] astounding success, her readers, her world, and the attraction of her crime fantasies that have so little to do with real crime." Yet for other readers, this "bric-a-brac" of facts show how her experiences informed her story telling. They are essential background to understanding Christie's works and are, in that respect, no bad thing.