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Agatha Christie’s life and career told through the decades, from the never-before-published original ending to her first book to the unused ideas for her last, complete with two unpublished Agatha Christie stories – including a lost Miss Marple.In this follow-up volume to the acclaimed Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, Christie archivist and expert John Curran leads the reader through the six decades of Agatha Christie's writing career, unearthing some remarkable clues to her success and a number of never-before-published excerpts and stories from her archives.Starting his investigation in the 1920s, John Curran examines the conventions of detective novels as they existed then and how Agatha Christie's publisher talked her into changing the ending of her very first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a move that almost certainly changed the fortunes of not only her career but the future of the whole crime writing genre. For the very first time, this book prints Agatha's original ending, painstakingly transcribed from her notebooks.Every decade saw Agatha Christie's success grow to new heights. The emergence of the world-famous Collins Crime Club in 1930 brought with it the very first Miss Marple mystery, the austerity of the 1940s had Agatha Christie preparing to kill off Hercule Poirot, and the 1950s saw her experiment increasingly with formats influenced by more modern thrillers. Focusing on the detail of more than 20 Christie novels to illustrate this, John Curran shows the evolution of Agatha's writing through the decades, including the influence of the swinging sixties and seventies, concluding the book with a look at Agatha's last notebook, using his Christie knowledge to speculate about what she had in mind based on her brief notes for an unwritten final book.Also includes a number of short stories from the archives reproduced in full, including the unpublished The Man Who Knew, How I Created Hercule Poirot, and an early draft for a Miss Marple story, The Case of the Caretaker's Wife.

To mark the 20th anniversary of Kenneth Williams’ death, a beautiful coffee table book celebrating his life, including never-before-seen photographs, sketches and personal testimony from Williams’ closest friends, for the very first time.2008 marks the 20th anniversary of the death of legendary comic actor and broadcaster Kenneth Williams. Among the actor's bequests, in a will which itself was controversial enough to require re-examination, was a large cache of private papers and memorabilia inherited by his godson, Robert Chiddell, and subsequently acquired by the broadcaster and Williams fanatic, Wesley Butters.This material, none of which has been seen before, includes scripts and drafts by Williams, lectures and speeches delivered by him (to an audience of policemen, in a couple of cases), a large number of superb photographs from all phases of his career, and creative writing which even extends to a fictional recreation of his own turbulent Cockney childhood.Without ever arranging it formally Williams had unwittingly assembled a brilliant scrapbook of his life. Kenneth Williams Unseen is that scrapbook, enlarged and emboldened by contributions from those who knew and loved him and is a must for every fan of the great man himself. This is the first authorised book on Williams in over a decade and will re-define the Williams legacy.

Battlefield Earth…Far in the future, mankind endures the relentless onslaught of alien oppressors, an ancient battle whose tide has begun to turn through the efforts of the Cerberus rebels. This remarkable band of warriors fights an elusive enemy, traveling through dangerous portals of time and space, where reality and un-reality collide in stunning, deadly purpose…Light of the damned…The diamond mines of the Congo are ground zero for a calculated new power grab by an ancient Mesopotamian god. Darkened and depraved, Nergal intends to harness the power of light to lock humanity in the blackness of eternal damnation. But Nergal's ability to blind his opponents is only the beginning. The Cerberus rebels will have to find the human who's pulling Nergal's strings…which means venturing into the gaping mouth of hell itself.