by Miriam R. Kramer Dame Agatha Christie’s books are often listed right after William Shakespeare’s works and the Bible on the list of the bestselling works of all time. How did a modest puzzle maker and writer who called herself “lowbrow” create a template for the twentieth-century mystery novel and achieve worldwide fame in her lifetime? Why has she maintained her reputation as the world continues to read her works widely forty-five years after her death? Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life by Laura Thompson provides a few clues while examining the mystery of Agatha’s life. Thompson focuses more on Agatha Christie’s mental processes than traditional biographical details throughout the book, exhibiting an admirably thorough and convincing reading of her works while offering her own interpretation of Agatha’s much-heralded disappearance for eleven days in 1926. She does establish Agatha’s base for her imagination in her childhood at Ashfield, her beloved house in Torquay, Devon, England. Agatha Miller was born in 1890 and grew up there as a very happy child with little formal schooling. As the youngest sibling in her family, she grew up like an only child in a structured, middle-class life near the seaside, free to dream and imagine her life while surrounded by her parents and the kind of competent, respectable servants who populate her novels. The first twelve years of her life gave her the warmth and stability to bear the turmoil that occurred after her father, Frederick, died of a heart attack. Her mother, Clara, had to decide what to do with Agatha as they faced precarious financial straits and the possible sale of Ashfield. Agatha went off to a pensionnat, a kind of finishing school, in Paris, briefly considering singing as a profession, and then went with her mother to Cairo as a debutante, since…