Title: Agatha Christie: The Finished Portrait

Author: Andrew Norman

Publisher: Tempus

Price: £9.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Agatha Christie

Category: British Literature

When Agatha Christie, the so-called 'Queen of Crime', disappeared from her home in Sunningdale in Berkshire for eleven days on 3 December 1927, the whole nation held its breath. The following day, when her car was found abandoned fourteen miles away, a nationwide search was instigated. From a painstaking reconstruction of Agatha's movements and behaviour during those eleven days, Dr Andrew Norman is able to shed new light on what, in many ways, has remained a baffling mystery. Only now, fifty years after Agatha's death, is it possible to explain fully, in the light of scientific knowledge, her behaviour during that troubled time. By deciphering clues from her celebrated works, "Agatha Christie: The Finished Portrait" sheds light on what is perhaps the greatest mystery of all to be associated with Britain's best-loved crime writer, namely that of the person herself.

Title: Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape

Author: Ann Thwaite

Publisher: Tempus

Price: £14.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Edmund Gosse

Category: British Literature

The life of Edmund Gosse was one of continuous contradiction. As he recalled in "Father and Son", he was a precocious only child brought up by his extraordinary father, whose thinking and conduct were dominated equally by the Bible and the "Actinologica Britannica", a study of marine life. Later, with inexplicable poise, he was simultaneously the intimate of Swinbourne and a sunday school superintendant, and public opinion divided in calling him the most discerning critic in England and a 'literary charlatan' with a 'genius for inaccuracy'. Gosse's rise to pre-eminence was rapid, and at his death he was acknowledged as the friend of Tennyson and Hans Christian Anderson, the confidant of Browning, R.L. Stevenson, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, and the champion of Ibsen, Gide and Yeats. In her biography, Ann Thwaite has painstakingly separated the facts from prejudice and rumour to reveal a picture of Edmund Gosse which can at last be called true to life. She refuses to ignore his many contradictions, but shows how they reflect the complexity of his singular genius.

Title: Conan Doyle and the Parson's Son

Author: Gordon Weaver

Publisher: Pegasus Publishers

Price: £9.99

Bookshop: Amazon

Spartacus Website: Arthur Conan Doyle

Category: British Literature

Using a combination of newspaper cuttings and articles, Public Records information and other documents, this book gives a detailed account of the events leading to the arrest, trial and conviction of George Edalji - a South Staffordshire solicitor sentenced to 7 years penal servitude for maiming a horse in 1903. The author describes in great detail the background to what became one of the great miscarriages of justice of the 20th century.

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