Reprinted from Roots and Branches.
The first of The Agatha Christie Companion‘s three chapters is a historical retrospective of the detective story as a genre. The second chapter is a brief biography of Agatha Christie. The final chapter concentrates on Christie’s detectives, with biographies of Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Parker Pyne, Harley Quin, Superintendent Battle, John Race, Mark Easterbrook, Arthur Calgary and Inspector Narracott. These are more or less detailed, depending on the information available. M. Poirot and Ms. Marple get several pages each, while Inspector Narracott is introduced in one paragraph. Each of the first two chapters has its own bibliography.
The Agatha Christie Companion is definitely a work of love. Over half the book consists of detailed appendices, starting with a nearly twenty page long bibliography of Christie’s works. This is followed by an alphabetical list of the titles of Christie’s books and short stories, two pages of alternate titles to her books and the short story finder, which is a chart indicating which book each of her short stories is in. Finally and most remarkably, Russell H. Fitzgibbon has compiled a list of virtually all of Agatha Christie’s characters: name, identity, and the work in which he or she appeared.
I believe that these appendices constitute the real value of The Agatha Christie Companion to scholar or fan alike. Trying to figure out whether you’ve read everything? Wondering who’s who or what’s what? The detailed checklists will straighten you out.
This isn’t a book of startling revelations or scandals, although it does mention Christie’s disappearance and episode of amnesia in late 1926, something that not all studies of Christie’s work do. It’s a good introduction to her works, and an invaluable starting point for anyone who wants to read or study them in any kind of detail.
The late Russell Humke Fitzgibbon taught Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a specialist in Latin America, and most of his other publications are in that field. Outside the realm of Political Science, Fitzgibbon edited the words of William Allen White in Forty Years on Main Street, and wrote The Ademic Senate of the University of the University of California, a historical study.
Recently, the University of Wisconsin Press has been reissuing books on Agatha Christie first published by the Bowling Green University Popular Press. In that series you may also enjoy Earl F. Bargainnier’s The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie.
(Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1980)
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