Tapes of Agatha Christie Unearthed

As both the Telegraph and the New York Times report, a trove of recordings featuring Agatha Christie has been unearthed – recordings no one knew existed before:

Her grandson Mathew Prichard stumbled upon 27 of the half-hour long tapes in a

  dusty cardboard box as he cleaned out a storeroom in Greenway, the Georgian

  property overlooking the Dart estuary in Devon that Christie called “the

  loveliest place in the world”.

The tapes, which nobody knew existed, are the raw material on which part of

  her autobiography was based.

Working alone at her own unhurried pace, the ageing Christie dictated the

  tapes on a Grundig Memorette machine in the mid 1960s.

Her rich, authoritative voice offers a wealth of insights into her life and

  how she developed her most beloved characters.

Among them is her description of Jane Marple – and how she partially based the

  genteel sleuth on her grandmother.

Laura Thompson, author of the biography ‘Agatha Christie: An English Mystery’,  said the “extraordinary” find was of great value because Christie

  rarely gave interviews, the Telegraph further reports. “She did speak on the radio to the BBC a couple of times in the 1950s but

  she did very, very little. It is a thrill to hear her voice.” That I must echo…. (warning: popup audio link, but worth it)