The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook

Author:Dominic Sandbrook
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141979311
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Mark of Cain

TODAY I KILLED GRANDFATHER

‘One does see so much evil in a village,’ murmured Miss Marple in an explanatory voice.

Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library (1942)

For all her success, Catherine Cookson was not even close to being the bestselling British writer of the twentieth century. Indeed, the largest estimate for her total book sales, 123 million, looks positively puny compared with the estimated 2 billion books, translated into more than 100 languages, claimed for the most successful British writer of the century. This was another woman – and a Victorian woman at that, having been born in 1890. In fact, no matter how you slice the figures, there is simply no getting away from the stark, awe-inspiring facts of Agatha Christie’s success. By the time Christie turned 60, she had already shifted some 50 million books worldwide, and even after her death her name continued to sell books in almost every country on earth. She was, wrote the journalist Francis Wyndham in 1966, the ‘best of all sellers … abstract, enigmatic, logical and completely ruthless’. The critic Robert Barnard, himself a fine crime writer, was once relaxing on an Italian beach when he saw a middle-aged local woman reading one of the Miss Marple books in translation. Two days later, having returned home to Tromsø, north of the Arctic Circle, Barnard spotted a teenage girl in a deck chair, reading … a book about Miss Marple, this time in Norwegian. In his words, Christie is read by ‘miners, shop assistants and old-age pensioners’, as well as ‘academics, politicians, scientists and artists’. Probably no British writer, not even Dickens, has ever enjoyed such universal appeal.1

Appointment with death: the actress June Duprez in the film version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (1945).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.