Secrets from the Agatha Christie Archives by Jared Cade

This new book from Pen & Sword offers a great deal of bibliographic information relating to the writings of Agatha Christie. It's clearly the product of extensive research on the part of the author. Jared Cade, whom I first met at a CWA Daggers lunch many years ago, has previously written a book about Christie's famous disappearance in 1926 and he has also published detective novels.

Secrets from the Agatha Christie Archives is an enticing title, although it has to be said that anyone seeking lurid revelations will be disappointed. Instead, they will find a lot of detail, including word counts for the novels (which reinforce the point that Christie wrote very short novels by the standards of today). There is information about American editions, including (for instance) a concise summary of the differences between the British and American endings of Three Act Tragedy, a novel with a central concept whose brilliance is, I think, generally under-rated. The motive for the crimes, however, isn't very satisfactory, hence the discrepancy between the two versions of the story.

In his introduction, Jared Cade refers to a J'Accuse, a TV programme presented by the late Michael Dibdin back in 1992, which amounted to a sustained attack on Christie's merits as a writer. Julian Symons, for one, felt very unhappy that he had been persuaded to take part and his views edited in a way that was disobliging to Christie, whom he admired both personally and professionally (and Christie reciprocated that admiration, by the way). Cade is, in my view, rightly critical of the programme. Dibdin was a good writer, but his involvement in the programme did him no credit. To say this is not to suggest that Christie is beyond criticism; obviously she isn't. But any criticism needs to be objective and founded on sound arguments, and - on the whole - that wasn't the case with J'Accuse.

Overall, this is a useful reference. There's no shortage of books about Christie these days - one day I might be tempted to add to the pile! - but there's enough material in this book to be of value to future researchers, in particular those puzzled by the complex publishing histories of some of Christie's novels, stories, and other works.