Agatha Christie
When people think of authors from the 1920s I don't think many people think of Agatha Christie because she was prolific for such a long time, her final book being published posthumously in 1976 a few months after her death. Hercule Poirot might be inseparable from the the Art Deco trappings of the 1920s but Christie herself has become timeless. Yet her first book featuring the Belgian detective, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920 and she went on to publish ten more books during this decade. From an early age it was clear Christie was a voracious reader and budding writer. Her mother, due to some whim, decided that Agatha wasn't to learn to read or write until she was eight. Agatha taught herself at age four. By age ten she had written her first poem, "The Cowslip," which is so beautiful and elegant it's hard to imagine a girl of only ten writing it. By age eleven her father died and she viewed it as the end of her childhood. What came next was marriage and war. Two things that would forever change her.
On Christmas Eve, 1914 she married Archie Christie while he was home on leave. To do her patriotic duty she worked first as a nurse and then as a dispenser, which is where she learned all about medicine, and more importantly, about poisons. No one could ever fault her writing for getting these details wrong due to her experience. During the war in 1916 she wrote her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, being inspired by her work in the dispensary and the Belgian refugees she encountered in the hospital. But before she would see it published the war would end and she would have a child. The twenties also brought about the death of her mother and her divorce, which lead to her own mysterious disappearance in 1926 that was never explained and had the country in an uproar. Whether the public thought it a publicity stunt or not, one thing was clear, they needed Agatha Christie and her books. Lucky for them she wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections in total that have sold over two billion copies, an amount surpassed only by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare.
So here we go! The blog is fully back. Or I'm hoping it is. We'll see won't we? I took a year off in an attempt to quell the chaos that my life had become. Well, I don't know how things are going for you but that didn't work out so well. I was so excited for the start of this decade, the twenties are back people! But I didn't want it to start with a pandemic like it did a hundred years ago. Just goes to show that everything has a price apparently. The pandemic had me thinking I'd scrap my return, just continue to hide out in my house grumbling about people not wearing masks or social distancing, but then I realized that now IS the time to come back. Everyone needs an escape right now and everyone needs a community to belong to, and books set in another time are a perfect panacea, and my friends, my online community, YOU are what is keeping me sane. So it's time to get Roaring Back to Reading! To delve into the decade of decadence. The Roaring Twenties, where authors became stars and were fodder for gossip columnists! I'll be talking about several celebrity authors, some, like Scott and Zelda, who embodied the zeitgeist far more than say Virginia Woolf or Agatha Christie, who were still very influential. I'll be looking at the books, the adaptations, the stories of their lives, and I hope you'll join me. What else do you have on the books?
