Charles Osborne

For all her success and renown, however, Agatha Christie was a very private person. Over the years, many have attempted to capture her personality, her motivations, and the reasons for her enduring popularity, with little notable success. Now Charles Osborne, a lifelong student of Agatha Christie, has undertaken an examination of Christie and her accomplishments through her own work. The result is a comprehensive, illustrated guide to the world of Agatha Christie, featuring authoritative information on each book's provenance and on it's contemporary critical reception set against the background of the major events in the author's life.Illustrated with rarely seen photos and updated to include details of the publications, films and TV adaptations of her writings, this book provides fascinating reading for any Christie aficionado. AUTHORBIO: Charles Osborne is an internationally known expert on opera and theater who has written several books on the topics as well as novels, literary studies, and poetry.He is the author of three bestselling novelizations of Agatha Christie plays-Black Coffee (SMP, 1998), The Unexpected Guest (Minotaur, 1999), and Spider's Web (Minotaur, 2000). Osborne was born in Australia and lives in London.

Over the last 150 years, Wagner's operas have been parodied, translated into scores of languages - from Lettish to Catalan - reviled and revered. Audiences have been confronted with pre-Raphaelite Wagner, High victorian Wagner, art deco and high-tech Wagner. Charles Osborne's authoritative and perceptive text provides the historical framework and critical commentary for the productions highlighted in the illustrations, while his biographical dictionary of the main performers, conductors, designers and producers of Wagner will prove an invaluable reference source for all Wagnerpiles.

In the middle of the night in rural Scotland, Michael Starkwedder has run his car into a ditch and must go to the nearest house to seek help. But downstairs in this house, he discovers a murdered man in a wheelchair and a woman holding a recently fired gun. What seems obvious isn't, and the story that unfolds is classic Christie - a tangled web of lies and cover-ups, where nothing can be taken at face value, and the murderer, and motive, is the greatest mystery of all.

xii, 209 p., p. of plates : 24 cm

Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, the wife of a Foreign Office diplomat, is given to daydreaming. Supposing I were to come down one morning and find a dead body in the library, what should I do? She has her chance to find out when she discovers a corpse in the drawing-room of her house in Kent... Desperate to dispose of the body before her husband returns home accompanied by an important foreign politician, Clarissa persuades her three houseguests to become accessories and accomplices. The search begins for the murderer and the motive - all the while trying to persuade a police inspector that there has been no murder at all ...

156p. ; 23cm

Provides a representative selection of the best critical essays published on his work.