Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre

Julius Green has numerous West End plays and musicals to his credit as a theatre producer. In 2001 he created the Agatha Christie Theatre Company and is a Fellow of the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London. A regular columnist for The Stage newspaper, he was invited by HarperCollins to write the introduction to a new edition of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap and Other Plays celebrating The Mousetrap's 60th anniversary in 2012. He lives in Cambridge.

Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English with another billion in over 70 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 20 plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

'A magisterial reassessment of Christie's work for the stage.'-Lucy Worsley

'Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre is the pivot around which criticism of Christie's theatrical works revolves; there is before Green and there is after Green, and it is hard to imagine that any serious criticism on the subject could be written in the future without a rigorous engagement with this book. It is a project marked by intricate research and illuminating insights into the conditions within which the plays were written and produced.'-Benedict Morrison, The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie

'A thrilling look at the Queen of Crime ... Having sifted through the evidence in her personal archives both here and in the US, Christie expert Julius Green spends almost 600 pages proving the case for Dame Agatha's pole position in the pantheon of female playwrights ... Extensive quotations from unpublished and/or unperformed plays reveal a wit and nuanced understanding of human nature far beyond the novels.'-Daily Express

'Her theatrical masterpieces have made her the most successful female playwright of all time ... Now, on the 125th anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth, ten new plays by her have been unearthed by British theatre producer Julius Green ... Exploring her plays from 'page to stage' he shows that Christie regarded writing books as her day job but found true "creative fulfilment" in the theatre.'-Daily Mail

'Green turned detective himself and scoured archives around the world to uncover a number of unpublished, unknown works ... This book is a treat.'-Independent