No body in the library

The opening paragraph of Duchess of Death’s fourth chapter, in which its subject is about to have her first whodunit published, begins thus:

The opening paragraph of Duchess of Death’s fourth chapter, in which its subject is about to have her first whodunit published, begins thus:

September 25, 1919. John Lane was very pleased with himself as he leaned into the mirror over the sink in his bathroom and examined his beard. Using a small pair of manicure scissors, which he was barely able to handle with his too-chubby fingers, he snipped at a few stray hairs.

And, four lines later in the same faux- finicky vein, the paragraph ends: ‘Yes, he was very pleased.’

Now, if Hercule Poirot’s name were to be substituted for John Lane’s, that passage would read as an amusing parody of Christie’s style. The problem is that Lane was of course a historical figure, co-founder of the Bodley Head as well as the gamy publisher, in his pre-Christie days, of The Yellow Book, and one would rather like to discover how Hack was privy to the niceties of his morning toilette. Or how, when Christie embarked on her great vanishing act, he knew that her breath ‘left a vapour trail for her passion to follow’ and that the gravel under her feet ‘sounded like a knife scraping burnt toast’. Since neither of these images, nor numberless others, are checklisted as quotes from the 5,000 ‘previously unpublished correspondences’ claimed by the book’s blurb, one scarcely needs much in the way of little grey cells to arrive at the conclusion that they’re all Hack’s own gratuitous maunderings.

No doubt there are readers who won’t be too fussed by such fabrications. I confess I have an almost intestinal resistance to them in a biographer, especially one willing to spend pages and pages on Christie’s pets, frocks and grand houses, yet displaying a quite insane indifference to what rendered her of interest in the first place — her books.