Fascinating Elements of Authors' Private Lives, This Week on Bookish

As an article this week on Bookish points out, some crime and thriller novelists have had lives as interesting as those of the stories they've written.

Agatha Christie, for example, wrote more than 200 detective and mystery novels and short stories, but there is one method of murder she used more than any other: poison. One source puts the number of poisonings in her books at 83. And there might be a reason why: as a nurse in World War I, she worked in the apothecary and was dreadfully afraid of mixing up bottles and giving wounded soldiers poison instead of medicine, becoming, in effect, an expert in the field. In 1976, when a London nurse familiar with Christie's The Pale Horse recognized the same symptoms in her young patient that she read about in the story (thallium poisoning), she alerted the girl's doctors, who saved her life.

From Ian Fleming's involvement with the CIA to Anne Perry's own criminal past, here are seven authors with a backstory as intriguing as their novels in … "Agatha Christie's Poisons and Other Crime & Mystery Writers' Fascinating Lives" by Ilana Masad for Bookish.