The response to that challenge was a tale of strychnine and murder that launched one of the most successful careers in crime fiction. Could she write a mystery novel in which the true villain was impossible to guess? In the midst of World War I – or so the story goes – a young Englishwoman received a literary challenge from her sister. There is altogether too much strychnine about this case – The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie, 1920.
#DID AGATHA CHRISTIE HAVE CHILDREN LICENSE#
She is survived by her husband and her son.Savagecats under Creative Commons BY 4.0 license Greenway was a serene harbour, the part of the inheritance from her remarkable, awkward mother that made up for the rest. She brought friends and relations to Greenway, to eat her own vegetables, fruit and figs, to walk in the camellia garden and sleep in cool rooms scented with Magnolia grandiflora. It was from Greenway, after Agatha's death in 1976, that Rosalind sent fierce letters to those whom she thought wished to alter, betray or cynically exploit her mother's work. For 55 years he and Rosalind travelled, read, and, from 1968, when they moved to a cottage at Greenway, Agatha's house in south Devon, helped to cultivate the great wooded gardens on the banks of the Dart. Calm and reassuring, he was the ideal companion. In 1949, she married again: to Anthony Hicks, trained in Oriental studies and as a barrister. Proud, reticent and independent, Rosalind struggled on with a boisterous infant, recalcitrant livestock and the Prichards' large, unheated house on the Welsh/English border, working away grief. In October 1944, she learned that Hubert had been killed. Their son, Mathew, was born in the autumn of 1942. These expeditions, a London season, and other travel occupied Rosalind, who was tall and handsome, with dark hair and a high colour, until her marriage in 1941, to Hubert Prichard, a regular soldier in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. A kindly scholar, delighting in both the intellectual and practical side of his work, he introduced his stepdaughter to archaeology and the Near East. Rosalind's stepfather, Max Mallowan, the archaeologist, was 15 years younger than her mother.
She saw little of her father after the divorce and his remarriage. Only in her 60th year could she bring herself to authorise a biography of her mother. Its aftermath - Agatha's return, shocked, amnesiac and withdrawn, after she had been found in an hotel in Harrogate, the Christies' divorce, Agatha's inability to discuss the episode with her daughter, years of popular speculation as to what had happened and why - was hard on Rosalind. Her disappearance, half a year after the publication of her clever and manipulative Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, baffled the police and thrilled the press.
In December, in a state of emotional and mental collapse, she drove away from Styles, the Christies' ominously named new house, and vanished. Then Archie told her he had fallen in love with someone else. Clearing Ashfield left Agatha ill and exhausted. Archie's business life became more difficult, Agatha more lonely, especially when he turned to golf for solace. Agatha was launched.īut her increasing fame and the family's growing prosperity did not bring contentment. It was published in New York in 1920, London in 1921.
Her father, Archie Christie, a hero of the Royal Flying Corps, had returned from the first world war and found work in the City, while her mother's first book, The Mysterious Affair At Styles, had been sent to John Lane. Rosalind had been born in her grandmother's house, Ashfield, in Torquay. Her mother's further legacy was a literary estate - the many detective novels, published in dozens of languages, plays, films, two volumes of autobiography - that provided her daughter with a comfortable living and the role, often burdensome, of hawk-eyed protector of the integrity of every manifestation of the published work. Notice in the newspapers was something to be endured.
From her mother, Agatha Christie, Rosalind Hicks, who has died aged 85, inherited fortitude, stamina and a desire for privacy.
0 kommentar(er)
