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The Christie Affair by Nina de Gramont: Book Review

The 11-day disappearance of Agatha Christie is the basis of Nina de Gramont's latest novel, a maze of plot twists and turns, time shifts, as well as flights of imagination that include star-crossed lovers, revenge and even murder.

Feel like a rollicking good yarn, as The Christie Affair might have been billed in 1930s England; one filled with characters such as a woman ‘no better than she should be’ a philandering war hero and England’s Queen of Publishing?

St. Martin
St. Martin's Press

You will surely have guessed by now what this novel may be about. The mystery, never conclusively solved,  behind the 11-day disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1926, writer of an astounding 86 novels and one play and who holds the Guinness World Record for the best-selling fiction writer of all time.  A writer who has sold more than two billion copies and which are still selling. Or being made into movies!  

Back in the 1920s, Mrs. Christie was fast becoming as famous as she has ever been.  Her sudden disappearance resulted in a fevered search by thousands of police, volunteers and even those new-fangled aeroplanes.

That much is a given. But author Nina de Gramont takes The Christie Affair into a whole new realm; a maze of plot twists and turns, time shifts as well as flights of imagination that include star-crossed lovers, revenge and even murder.

To enter this beehive of ‘what ifs’ and ‘could she haves’ requires not just a daring leap of imagination, but a real feel for the mores of that time between two world wars.

To her credit, Nina de Gramont has provided an unusual and highly entertaining take on the eleven days that the famed novelist obviously preferred to remain forever unrecorded. 

A warning!  Do not read this intriguing puzzle if you feel like dozing off.   You will literally ‘lose the plot’, which is principally narrated by the lover of Agatha’s husband but makes frequent diversions into the minds of the other characters.  Among them is my personal favourite, the bumbling and rumpled Police Inspector Frank Chilton, surely never destined to become a Hercule Poirot but not without talents of his own.

About Nina de Gramont

Nina de Gramont is an American novelist who writes short stories as well as novels for both teens and adults.  Every Little Thing in the World (2010) won an American Library Association Best Fiction Award for Young Adults and her adult novel The Last September (2015) a whodunit set in Cape Cod. She has also written essays and short stories for a variety of magazines including Seventeen, Redbook, and the Harvard Review.  She lives in coastal North Carolina with her husband and daughter and teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

Creative explorations of Agatha Christie disappearance

Exploring one of the most intriguing literary mysteries of all time – perhaps due in large part to the author’s fame – is as daring as it is far from a unique subject for writers of books, television and film.  There have literally been dozens of attempts and at least one movie Agatha (1979) starring Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman became known as ‘a tortuous production’.  This movie was based on Kathleen Tynan’s novel of the previous year, Agatha: The Agatha Christie Mystery.  Yet the centre of all this enduring fuss, Dame Agatha herself wrote not a word about her disappearance in her autobiography published posthumously. 

Book Information

The Christie Affair; publication date: Feb. 1, 2022; author: Nina de Gramont; publisher: St. Martins Press; price: S14.99


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