Agatha Christie: Witness for the Prosecution

Alexander Livergant is a literary scholar, translator, editor-in-chief of the journal Foreign Literature, and a professor at RSUH. He is the author of biographies of Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Oscar Wilde, Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, and P. G. Wodehouse. Agatha Christie: Witness for the Prosecution is the first portrait of the famous and most widely read author of detective novels and stories in Russian. Under the inventive pen of Agatha Christie, the classic detective reached unprecedented heights; the solutions to crimes in her novels are always unpredictable. A long, extraordinarily rich life and an immense body of work by the creator of the legendary detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple seems to be a rare example of prosperity. The biographer, relying on many materials, including those published for the first time in Russian, paints a somewhat different picture: it turns out that the writer's life was full of the most unexpected turns—and at times resembled the intricate plots of her novels.