Her own favourite was the third Westmacott novel, Absent in the Spring (1944), which she described in her autobiography as, ‘the one book that has satisfied me completely…I wrote that book in three days flat.’ She commented, ‘It was written with integrity, with sincerity, it was written as I meant to write it, and that is the proudest joy an author can have.’
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
The Mousetrap and Selected Plays
The first-ever publication in book form of The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of London’s West End, plus three other Christie thrillers.
The Mousetrap
A homicidal maniac terrorizes a group of snowbound guests to the refrain of ‘Three Blind Mice’…
And Then There Were None
Ten guilty people, brought together on an island in mysterious circumstances, await their sentence…
Appointment With Death
The suffocating heat of an exotic Middle-Eastern setting provides a backdrop for murder…
The Hollow
A set of friends convene at a country home where their convoluted relationships mean that any one of them could be a murderer…
Christie’s plays are as compulsive as her novels. Their colourful characters and ingenious plots provide yet more evidence of her mastery of the detective thriller.
ISBN: 0 00 649618 0
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays
The first-ever publication in book form of Witness for the Prosecution, Christie’s highly successful stage thriller which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play, plus three of her classic mysteries.
Witness for the Prosecution
A stunning courtroom drama in which a scheming wife testifies against her husband in a shocking murder trial…
Towards Zero
A psychopathic murderer homes in on unsuspecting victims in a seaside house, perched high on a cliff…
Go Back For Murder
When the young feity Carla, orphaned at the tender age of five, discovers 16 years later that her mother was imprisoned for murdering her father, she determines to prove her dead mother’s innocence…
Verdict
Passion, murder and love are the deadly ingredients which combine to make this one of Christie’s more unusual thrillers, which she described as ‘the best play I have written with the exception of Witness for the Prosecution.’
ISBN: 0 00 649045 X
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
Come, Tell Me How You Live
Agatha Christie was already well known as a crime writer when she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, to Syria and Iraq in the 1930s. She took enormous interest in all his excavations, and when friends asked what her strange life was like, she decided to answer their questions in this delightful book.
First published in 1946, Come, Tell Me How You Live gives a charming picture of Agatha Christie herself, while also giving insight into some of her most popular novels, including Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death. It is, as Jacquetta Hawkes concludes in her introduction, ‘a pure pleasure to read’.
‘Perfectly delightful…colourful, lively and occasionally touching and thought-provoking.’
CHARLES OSBORNE, Books & Bookmen
‘Good and enjoyable…she has a delightfully light touch.’
MARGHANITA LASKI, Country Life
ISBN: 0 00 653114 8
Acknowledgements
With gratitude to John Curran, Jared Cade, Karl Pike, author of Agatha Christie: The Collector’s Guide, and Geoff Bradley, editor of Crime and Detective Stories
T. M.
About the Author
While the Light Lasts
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 100 foreign countries. 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, 19 plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of the First World War, in which she served as a VAD. In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian detective who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. It was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.
In 1926, after averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship which lasted for 50 years and well over 70 books. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie’s books to be dramatised–under the name Alibi–and to have a successful run in London’s West End. The Mousetrap, her most famous play of all, opened in 1952 and is the longest-running play in history.
Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of books have been published posthumously: the bestselling novel Sleeping Murder appeared later that year, followed by her autobiography and the short story collections Miss Marple’s Final Cases, Problem at Pollensa Bay and While the Light Lasts. In 1998 Black Coffee was the first of her plays to be novelised by another author, Charles Osborne.
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The Agatha Christie Collection
The Man In The Brown Suit
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery
The Mysterious Mr Quin
The Sittaford Mystery
The Hound of Death
The Listerdale Mystery
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Parker Pyne Investigates
Murder Is Easy
And Then There Were None
Towards Zero
Death Comes as the End
Sparkling Cyanide
Crooked House
They Came to Baghdad
Destination Unknown
Spider’s Web *
The Unexpected Guest *
Ordeal by Innocence
The Pale Horse
Endless Night
Passenger To Frankfurt
Problem at Pollensa Bay
While the Light Lasts
Poirot
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Murder on the Links
Poirot Investigates
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Big Four
The Mystery of the Blue Train
Black Coffee *
Peril at End House
Lord Edgware Dies
Murder on the Orient Express
Three-Act Tragedy
Death in the Clouds
The ABC Murders
Murder in Mesopotamia
Cards on the Table
Murder in the Mews
Dumb Witness
Death on the Nile
Appointment With Death
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
Sad Cypress
One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Evil Under the Sun
Five Little Pigs
The Hollow
The Labours of Hercules
Taken at the Flood
Mrs McGinty’s Dead
After the Funeral
Hickory Dickory Dock
Dead Man’s Folly
Cat Among the Pigeons
The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
The Clocks
Third Girl
Hallowe’en Party
Elephants Can Remember
Poirot’s Early Cases
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
Marple
The Murder at the Vicarage
The Thirteen Problems
The Body in the Library
The Moving Finger
A Murder i
s Announced
They Do It With Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
The 4.50 from Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Tommy & Tuppence
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Published as Mary Westmacott
Giant’s Bread
Unfinished Portrait
Absent in the Spring
The Rose and the Yew Tree
A Daughter’s a Daughter
The Burden
Memoirs
An Autobiography
Come, Tell Me How You Live
Play Collections
The Mousetrap and Selected Plays
Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by
Collins 1997
Copyright © 1997 Agatha Christie Limited
(a Chorion company). All rights reserved.
www.agathachristie.com
Epub Edition 2010 ISBN: 978-0-00-742291-3
The moral right of the author is asserted
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
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* novelised by Charles Osborne
* novelised by Charles Osborne
* novelised by Charles Osborne
While the Light Lasts Page 16