AGATHA

by Kathleen Tynan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1978

An imaginary solution to an authentic mystery""--why and how Agatha Christie disappeared from home in 1926 and turned up almost a fortnight later at a Yorkshire health spa. Tynan's feeble reconstruction proposes that Agatha did not have amnesia but rather--distraught over her husband's Other Woman--was arranging to commit suicide and stage the death to look like murder at the hands of the Other Woman (electrocution in the hydro-bath). To anyone aware of Christie's character, this notion is of course supremely implausible, but it might have produced an offbeat inquiry into the very Christie-an matter of Evil or, more likely, a tongue-in-cheek diversion. Unfortunately, Tynan's flavorless prose and painfully contrived plotting plods down a shallow, humorless middle course, giving Agatha an unconvincing bit of epiphany (she sees that her callow husband isn't worth all the fuss) and adding a semi-romance in the person of an American reporter who tracks Agatha down but nobly represses the story of her suicide plan. (So why did Christie fear and despise journalists the rest of her life?) Christie fans will be intrigued, especially since the Autobiography kept mum on this subject, and since there's the promise of an upcoming film version (with much-too-beautiful V. Redgrave as AC). But anyone sincerely interested in Christie's traumas would do far better by reading her highly revealing and sadly neglected ""Mary Westmacott"" novels, Absent in the Spring above all. Christie lives on, but not in Agatha.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1978

Categories: FICTION