Editing Agatha Christie (section)

==== As Mary Westmacott ====

Christie published six mainstream novels under the name Mary Westmacott, a pseudonym which gave her the freedom to explore "her most private and precious imaginative garden".<ref name="thompson"/>{{Rp|366–67}}<ref name=":16"/>{{Rp|87–88}} These books typically received better reviews than her detective and thriller fiction.<ref name="thompson"/>{{Rp|366}} Of the first, ''[[Giant's Bread]]'' published in 1930, a reviewer for ''The New York Times'' wrote, "...{{nbsp}}her book is far above the average of current fiction, in fact, comes well under the classification of a 'good book'. And it is only a satisfying novel that can claim that appellation."<ref>{{cite news |date=17 August 1930 |title=Book Review |page=7 |work=[[The New York Times]]}}</ref> It was publicized from the very beginning that "Mary Westmacott" was a pen name of a well-known author, although the identity behind the pen name was kept secret; the dust jacket of ''Giant's Bread'' mentions that the author had previously written "under her real name...half a dozen books that have each passed the thirty thousand mark in sales." (In fact, though this was technically true, it disguised Christie's identity through understatement. By the publication of ''Giant's Bread'', Christie had published 10 novels and two short story collections, all of which had sold considerably more than 30,000 copies.) After Christie's authorship of the first four Westmacott novels was revealed by a journalist in 1949, she wrote two more, the last in 1956.<ref name="thompson"/>{{Rp|366}}

The other Westmacott titles are: ''[[Unfinished Portrait (novel)|Unfinished Portrait]]'' (1934), ''[[Absent in the Spring]]'' (1944), ''[[The Rose and the Yew Tree]]'' (1948), ''[[A Daughter's a Daughter]]'' (1952), and ''[[The Burden]]'' (1956).