PIQUERISMO
Identificando e interpretando la conducta parafílica en la escena del crimen violento
Autores:
SAFARIK, Mark. Senior Criminal Profiler Behaviorial Science Unit FBI (Ret.)
QUIÑONES URQUIZA, María Laura. Criminóloga, Perfiladora Criminal
Existen diversos modos en que un homicidio se lleva a cabo, los distintos estilos nos hablan en relación a las diferencias entre quienes los ejecutan, sobre sus múltiples preferencias de a quién, dónde y cuándo atacar, además del por qué, o mejor dicho el para qué. La ira extrema que lidera a ciertas conductas violentas, es aparentemente una cuestión que tiene que ver con la víctima, tal diferencia se refleja en los homicidios, como por ejemplo al disparar o envenenar lentamente a una persona, donde el asunto no parece requerir una confrontación tan directa, cercana y personal.
La habilidad de reconocer y diferenciar las diversas manifestaciones conductuales en escenas criminales violentas de complejidad, especialmente aquellas que comprenden asesinato serial, víctimas de homicidios múltiples en un mismo escenario (asesinato en masa) y homicidios sexuales, proveen, información clave, entre otras cuestiones, se debe contar con la habilidad de comprender el significado de la presencia o ausencia de ciertos comportamientos que se relacionan entre sí. Cuando se conduce el análisis del comportamiento que se manifiesta en la escena de un crimen violento, es importante evitar sobre enfocarse en un único aspecto y solo darle importancia a ello, pues es la totalidad de las circunstancias y la singularidad de su variable lo más importante, además del cómo y por qué ocurrieron. Tanto testigos y victimología toman un papel esencial en la investigación criminal.
No es muy común en este tipo de escenas de homicidios, observar victimas que han tenido heridas cortantes e incisas significativas. Sin una comprensión total de la dinámica en la escena criminal o la historia experiencial de haber examinado un gran número de homicidios que revisten apuñalamiento y cortes. Hay una tendencia a clasificar la observación de un excesivo número de este tipo de lesiones, y casi siempre, clasificarlas como “matar por demás” (1), y no como demostración de la parafilia descripta como piquerismo. Literalmente, existen cientos de parafilias, algunas son más conocidas y comunes que otras, tal es el caso del voyeurismo, exhibicionismo y pedofilia. Las conductas sexuales desviadas existen en un continuo de variedades y severidad, algunas pueden ser clasificadas como criminales, mientras que otras representan formas incómodas de comportamiento. El piquerismo es una parafilia que junto con otras como la flagelación, antropofagia y necrosadismo, suelen ser asociadas al homicidio por placer. (Arrigo & Pourcell, 2006).
El término Piquerismo, proviene del vocablo francés piquer que significa punzar, pinchar, penetrar con un instrumento dotado de fuerza viva y con el que se indica un tipo particular de parafilia, es decir de alteración sexual, respecto al modo predilecto de obtención de placer y que consiste en la búsqueda de su incremento, teniendo como mecanismo lesivo el deslizamiento, penetración con el filo y/o punta aguzada idónea, cuyo efecto en el cuerpo humano con cada una de ellas o combinando ambas a la vez es la punción, separación o distensión en la geografía corporal, exceptuamos aquí a las lesiones defensivas.
El piquerismo esta reconocido como una de las parafilias menos prevalentes, sus características esenciales son la recurrencia, fantasías sexuales de carácter excitatorio, necesidad sexual o comportamientos que incluyen 1) objetos inhumanos, 2) el sufrimiento o humillación de uno mismo o del partenaire, o 3) niños o personas que no han dado su consentimiento para ello y que ocurre por un período superior a los seis meses (DSM IV, 2000). El piquerismo generalmente refiere a la penetración de carne humana, aunque a veces también es practicado con animales.
Esta parafilia representa una de las variantes del sadomasoquismo, con frecuencia la zona objeto son los genitales, glúteos, senos o zona toráxica superior, e inclusive el rostro. Si es practicada con consentimiento de ambas partes y sin generar daños clínicos relevantes, es considerada un aderezo más dentro del acto sexual con tintes sado-masoquistas.
En casos de muerte violenta donde se observa este mecanismo agresivo, pareciera reflejarse una confusión respecto a la relación entre las personas y el cuerpo que las sostiene. En otros, donde el rostro también es mutilado con heridas punzantes superficiales también en forma de signos o letras, pretendería incluso, rotular a la víctima a modo de justificativo. El tipo de arma habla de un estilo de vida, conocimientos previos, además de las elecciones personales de los victimarios, de cómo el cuerpo es tratado cuando ya ha finalizado el período agónico y sigue siendo apuñalado para satisfacer las necesidades agresivo-sexuales del autor, donde no solo el cuerpo de la víctima si no también su “ser”, cumplen el rol de objeto. Es de vital importancia la reconstrucción cronológica y temporal de las lesiones.
El piquerismo en casos de serialidad, podría reflejar cómo el victimario ve su propio cuerpo, cómo ha construido su propia imagen e historia personal y el modo de satisfacer su auténtica sexualidad, quizás, de modo inconsciente, con fantasías sustitutivas de penetración. Los ataques motivados con ira difieren las motivaciones sexuales, éstos suelen poseer localización específica, a veces agrupada, la fuerza y rapidez con que han sido ejecutadas son notorias cuando las mismas poseen diagnóstico de vitalidad, y, a pesar de no tenerlo otras, ambas abundan, aún variando su intensidad. Es como si en realidad se buscara matar por demás.
(1) “Matar por demás” es un término que ha sido utilizado en demasía en varias investigaciones, con la finalidad de describir las injurias excesivas. El uso de este término es delicado ya que no ha sido definido ampliamente y no cuenta con una estandarización. En la Unidad de análisis del comportamiento y como fue descrito por Robert Ressler (Douglass, Burguess, Burguess y Ressler, 2006) es utilizado para describir las heridas causadas hasta por demás, es decir aquellas que ya no son necesarias para causar la muerte. Desafortunadamente, “matar por demás”, no posee una definición que amplíe la cantidad mínima, nivel o severidad de las injurias, o si estas fueron inflingidas pre o post mortem, además de si es conveniente incluir las injurias clasificadas como defensivas o de naturaleza superficial (Safarik & Jarvis, 2005).
jueves, 19 de agosto de 2010
miércoles, 21 de julio de 2010
Murder or an Accident? The Brain Knows
by Tim Wogan on March 29, 2010
Premeditation. Subjects took less account of intention when their right temporoparietal junction was turned off.
If a stranger steps on your foot, you'd probably shrug your shoulders and assure him that no harm has been done, even if your toes are throbbing like crazy. But if that stranger instead takes a swing with his fist-successfully or not—most people are unlikely to be so forgiving. Researchers now believe they've demonstrated which part of the brain allows us to make moral judgments of another person's motives, a find that could lead to a greater understanding of Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders.
Scientists already have some clues about how we judge the actions of another person. Previous research using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a method of imaging activity in the brain, has shown that an area just above the right ear called the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) receives more blood than usual when we read about people’s beliefs and intentions, particularly if we use the information to judge people negatively. But it's not possible to say from a simple observational study whether the brain activity is actually necessary to make such a judgment or whether making the negative judgment causes this region to become more active.
So social neuroscientist Liane Young of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and colleagues decided to turn off the right temporoparietal junction and see whether people would make different judgments of others' actions. They achieved this using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a technology that uses a tightly focused magnetic field to temporarily disable individual regions of the brain.
The researchers aimed the device either at the RTPJ or at a nearby region of the brain not thought to be involved in cognitive processing. Subjects between the ages of 18 and 30 read stories containing a series of hypothetical scenarios on a computer screen. In some, person A accidentally killed person B; in others, person A intended to kill person B but failed. Subjects were asked to rate from one to seven how excusable they found person A's conduct from “not at all” to “completely.” The subjects considered some scenarios with their temporoparietal junction turned off and other scenarios with the area functioning as normal.
In both cases, volunteers judged unsuccessful attempts at murder to be more egregious than cases of accidental killing. However, subjects were significantly more forgiving of attempted murder when their right temporoparietal junctions were knocked out by TMS than when they were functioning normally, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings imply that activity in the region is required for us to properly judge another person's motives, say the researchers.
The team is now working with Asperger sufferers: psychologists believe that Asperger syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders are characterized by an inability to discern other people’s intentions. (This is known as lacking a “theory of mind.”) “Just as we were able to disrupt ‘theory of mind’ using TMS, autistic participants might be individuals who have naturally disrupted ‘theory of mind’ processes," speculates Young.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a cognitive neurologist at University College London, says that the results may explain the changes in how we view the world as we grow up. “In humans, the temporoparietal junction continues to develop into adolescence and beyond," she says. But she cautions that disabling one region of the brain can affect others, making it difficult to say with certainty that one area alone is responsible for a given effect.
domingo, 18 de octubre de 2009
Selfishness, soap opera lives and infantile emotions: Why so many marriages end in murder trials
15th October 2009
David Wilson, a Professor of Criminology at Birmingham University, explores the disturbing cultural forces at work which have resulted in increased hostility within relationships
City banker Neil Ellerbeck strangled his unfaithful wife Kate last year
A sense of deepening moral crisis hangs over modern Britain.
The bonds of ethical responsibility that once held our society together appear to be dissolving.
Physical aggression is endemic, while restraint has been replaced by a brutish eagerness for immediate gratification or money.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this pattern is the growing incidence of violence within relationships, a worrying proportion of it perpetrated by women.
The traditional feeling that marriage should be a source of mutual safety and support seems to have evaporated.
Instead, in too many partnerships, marriage has become an engine of competition and loathing, with the most lethal consequences.
Only this week there has been a string of court cases depicting destructive violence in marriage, all of which paint today's Britain in an alarming light.
In one, millionaire banker Neil Ellerbeck was found guilty of manslaughter after strangling his wife Kate.
He was said to have 'exploded in pent-up anger' during a row over his wife's adultery, though Ellerbeck had been conducting his own affair.
In another, husband Alisdair Sinclair stands accused of stabbing to death his wife, mobile phone executive Sally, in front of two children.
It is alleged that Sinclair knifed Sally more than 30 times during a jealous rage at their home in Hampshire after she admitted to having an affair.
Sinclair, who denies the charge, told police when he was arrested that the killing was self-defence as his wife had launched a frenzied attack on him.
In the third case, poet Joanne Hale is accused of luring her husband Peter into the woods with the promise of a ' drugfuelled sex session' driven by a herbal aphrodisiac called Horny Goat Weed. She then allegedly slit his throat and left him for dead.
Her motive, the prosecution claim, was that she wanted to start a new relationship with a man she had met on the internet. Hale, who denies the charges, said in her police statement that her husband had threatened to cut his own throat.
Hale's alleged violence towards her husband has understandably attracted widespread shock, since it runs counter to the stereotyped image of women as compassionate home-makers.
The recent child abuse case in which former nursery worker Vanessa George has been named as the leader of a paedophile ring centred on a nursery in Plymouth could be taken as a sign of a worrying trend where women are becoming as dangerous as their criminalised male counterparts.
Sally Sinclair was allegedly stabbed to death in a jealous rage by her partner Alisdair George Sinclair
Yet it is important to maintain a sense of perspective. There have always been vicious women in our society. Violent female offenders are nothing new.
The late Victorian age, for instance, was horrified at the revelations of the crimes perpetrated by Mary Cotton, who murdered four successive husbands, partly for money and partly because she wanted to start a new sexual relationship each time.
She was also believed to have murdered several children. When she finally went to the gallows in 1873, she was suspected of having killed at least 20 people.
We should also remember that one of the worst serial killers in British history was the nurse Beverley Allitt, who murdered four children, attempted to kill another three and caused grevious bodily harm to a further six while working at a Lincolnshire hospital.
Nor should we forget the more notorious offenders such as Rose West and Myra Hindley. So, from a historical perspective, there is nothing unique about the offences to which Vanessa George has confessed.
It should also be noted that in the recent glut of so-called 'misery memoirs' - where adult writers recall the horrors of their childhoods filled with physical and sexual abuse - the worst offenders in these books often turn out to be women.
Again, in contrast to the traditional gentle female image, the figures who lurk in these pages are savage matriarchs or brutal mothers, their menace all the more terrifying because of their gender.
It would also be equally foolish to deny that violence is still predominantly perpetrated by men. Indeed, more than 90 per cent of violent offenders in prison are male, while even in the cases highlighted this week, women were usually on the receiving end.
But even acknowledging this gender imbalance, we have to face the reality that something has gone disastrously wrong in our society, and this change is manifesting itself dramatically through the incidence of hostility within relationships.
I believe that there are a number of disturbing cultural forces at work. One is the legacy of the 'every man for himself' economic revolution which engulfed Britain from the 1980s.
Many aspects of this upheaval were beneficial, such as in the encouragement of enterprise. But when translated to the social sphere, this has ultimately led to a narrow, short-term attitude in which individuals are inclined to think only of themselves and their own instant gratification.
The concept of self-sacrifice, of overcoming short-term difficulties in a relationship for the long-term good, is rapidly disappearing.
Relationships can always break down and splits are bound to be unhappy. But there used to be an idea that partners would try to talk through problems and accept that not everything could be changed overnight.
In contrast, today there is a belief that any crisis should be immediately resolved; that we have a right - even an entitlement - to permanent happiness; that we can shove aside anything that stands in our way, regardless of the feelings of others.
It is a spirit that is summed up in the increasingly prevalent American phrase 'Move on', as if we should always be able to dump our social baggage whenever we want.
We can also see the worrying influence of infantalisation. One of the key steps of maturing into adulthood is to learn restraint, but again that no longer seems to be happening.
'I want' is one of the guiding forces of our times. In all too many instances - as in the three recent cases mentioned - adults behave like toddlers, going into a hysterical rage if anyone denies them.
There is also something childish in the possessiveness that seems to have superseded love as the key part of marriage, wanting to smash up a cherished toy if there is a threat that it might be taken away or given to someone else.
Other influences are also at work. One is undoubtedly television, where soap operas encourage the belief that relationships are things of permanent instability, as characters flit from one liaison to another, sometimes even changing their sexuality on their personal odyssey.
In Hollywood films and much commercial, downmarket literature, there is also a worrying emphasis on gratuitous violence, such as that in the notorious Saw movies in which a sadist plots how much torture to inflict on his victims.
The internet, which featured in the George case through the use of social networking sites, has played its malign part, tearing apart the social and geographical boundaries that once held immoral behaviour in check.
Online, everyone is the centre of their own imaginary universe. But, sadly, imagination sometimes spills into reality, as grotesque fantasies are enacted.
And when the institution of marriage becomes little more than a violent battleground, we should be deeply worried. The moral fabric of our nation depends on it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1220485/Selfishness-soap-opera-lives-infantile-emotions-Why-marriages-end-murder-trials.html#ixzz0UIZb2qQ1
15th October 2009
David Wilson, a Professor of Criminology at Birmingham University, explores the disturbing cultural forces at work which have resulted in increased hostility within relationships
City banker Neil Ellerbeck strangled his unfaithful wife Kate last year
A sense of deepening moral crisis hangs over modern Britain.
The bonds of ethical responsibility that once held our society together appear to be dissolving.
Physical aggression is endemic, while restraint has been replaced by a brutish eagerness for immediate gratification or money.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this pattern is the growing incidence of violence within relationships, a worrying proportion of it perpetrated by women.
The traditional feeling that marriage should be a source of mutual safety and support seems to have evaporated.
Instead, in too many partnerships, marriage has become an engine of competition and loathing, with the most lethal consequences.
Only this week there has been a string of court cases depicting destructive violence in marriage, all of which paint today's Britain in an alarming light.
In one, millionaire banker Neil Ellerbeck was found guilty of manslaughter after strangling his wife Kate.
He was said to have 'exploded in pent-up anger' during a row over his wife's adultery, though Ellerbeck had been conducting his own affair.
In another, husband Alisdair Sinclair stands accused of stabbing to death his wife, mobile phone executive Sally, in front of two children.
It is alleged that Sinclair knifed Sally more than 30 times during a jealous rage at their home in Hampshire after she admitted to having an affair.
Sinclair, who denies the charge, told police when he was arrested that the killing was self-defence as his wife had launched a frenzied attack on him.
In the third case, poet Joanne Hale is accused of luring her husband Peter into the woods with the promise of a ' drugfuelled sex session' driven by a herbal aphrodisiac called Horny Goat Weed. She then allegedly slit his throat and left him for dead.
Her motive, the prosecution claim, was that she wanted to start a new relationship with a man she had met on the internet. Hale, who denies the charges, said in her police statement that her husband had threatened to cut his own throat.
Hale's alleged violence towards her husband has understandably attracted widespread shock, since it runs counter to the stereotyped image of women as compassionate home-makers.
The recent child abuse case in which former nursery worker Vanessa George has been named as the leader of a paedophile ring centred on a nursery in Plymouth could be taken as a sign of a worrying trend where women are becoming as dangerous as their criminalised male counterparts.
Sally Sinclair was allegedly stabbed to death in a jealous rage by her partner Alisdair George Sinclair
Yet it is important to maintain a sense of perspective. There have always been vicious women in our society. Violent female offenders are nothing new.
The late Victorian age, for instance, was horrified at the revelations of the crimes perpetrated by Mary Cotton, who murdered four successive husbands, partly for money and partly because she wanted to start a new sexual relationship each time.
She was also believed to have murdered several children. When she finally went to the gallows in 1873, she was suspected of having killed at least 20 people.
We should also remember that one of the worst serial killers in British history was the nurse Beverley Allitt, who murdered four children, attempted to kill another three and caused grevious bodily harm to a further six while working at a Lincolnshire hospital.
Nor should we forget the more notorious offenders such as Rose West and Myra Hindley. So, from a historical perspective, there is nothing unique about the offences to which Vanessa George has confessed.
It should also be noted that in the recent glut of so-called 'misery memoirs' - where adult writers recall the horrors of their childhoods filled with physical and sexual abuse - the worst offenders in these books often turn out to be women.
Again, in contrast to the traditional gentle female image, the figures who lurk in these pages are savage matriarchs or brutal mothers, their menace all the more terrifying because of their gender.
It would also be equally foolish to deny that violence is still predominantly perpetrated by men. Indeed, more than 90 per cent of violent offenders in prison are male, while even in the cases highlighted this week, women were usually on the receiving end.
But even acknowledging this gender imbalance, we have to face the reality that something has gone disastrously wrong in our society, and this change is manifesting itself dramatically through the incidence of hostility within relationships.
I believe that there are a number of disturbing cultural forces at work. One is the legacy of the 'every man for himself' economic revolution which engulfed Britain from the 1980s.
Many aspects of this upheaval were beneficial, such as in the encouragement of enterprise. But when translated to the social sphere, this has ultimately led to a narrow, short-term attitude in which individuals are inclined to think only of themselves and their own instant gratification.
The concept of self-sacrifice, of overcoming short-term difficulties in a relationship for the long-term good, is rapidly disappearing.
Relationships can always break down and splits are bound to be unhappy. But there used to be an idea that partners would try to talk through problems and accept that not everything could be changed overnight.
In contrast, today there is a belief that any crisis should be immediately resolved; that we have a right - even an entitlement - to permanent happiness; that we can shove aside anything that stands in our way, regardless of the feelings of others.
It is a spirit that is summed up in the increasingly prevalent American phrase 'Move on', as if we should always be able to dump our social baggage whenever we want.
We can also see the worrying influence of infantalisation. One of the key steps of maturing into adulthood is to learn restraint, but again that no longer seems to be happening.
'I want' is one of the guiding forces of our times. In all too many instances - as in the three recent cases mentioned - adults behave like toddlers, going into a hysterical rage if anyone denies them.
There is also something childish in the possessiveness that seems to have superseded love as the key part of marriage, wanting to smash up a cherished toy if there is a threat that it might be taken away or given to someone else.
Other influences are also at work. One is undoubtedly television, where soap operas encourage the belief that relationships are things of permanent instability, as characters flit from one liaison to another, sometimes even changing their sexuality on their personal odyssey.
In Hollywood films and much commercial, downmarket literature, there is also a worrying emphasis on gratuitous violence, such as that in the notorious Saw movies in which a sadist plots how much torture to inflict on his victims.
The internet, which featured in the George case through the use of social networking sites, has played its malign part, tearing apart the social and geographical boundaries that once held immoral behaviour in check.
Online, everyone is the centre of their own imaginary universe. But, sadly, imagination sometimes spills into reality, as grotesque fantasies are enacted.
And when the institution of marriage becomes little more than a violent battleground, we should be deeply worried. The moral fabric of our nation depends on it.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1220485/Selfishness-soap-opera-lives-infantile-emotions-Why-marriages-end-murder-trials.html#ixzz0UIZb2qQ1
viernes, 25 de septiembre de 2009
FENÓMENO DE SUPERFETACIÓN
viernes 25/09/2009 18:55 (CET)
ELMUNDO.ES | EUROPA PRESS
MADRID.- Parece un chiste típico de una comedia disparatada, pero es un hecho real. Una mujer norteamericana se ha quedado embarazada cuando ya esperaba otro niño y dará a luz dos bebés con una diferencia de edad de dos semanas y media y que no son gemelos. Esta curiosa situación podría deberse a un fenómeno raro en humanos y conocido como superfetación, que consiste en la formación de un feto mientras que otro está todavía presente en el útero.
Este fenómeno se produce cuando son liberados los óvulos procedentes de ciclos menstruales distintos, contra lo que ocurre normalmente con los gemelos heterocigóticos, en cuya formación son expulsados diversos óvulos en un sólo ciclo. Aunque es frecuente en animales, no lo es en personas y da como resultado un embarazo doble o múltiple de fetos con gran diferencia en su desarrollo gestacional.
La mujer, Julia Grovenburg, descubrió lo que ocurría durante una ecografía a la que se sometió a las ocho semanas de embarazo y que mostró a dos bebés separados por dos semanas y media, uno claramente más desarrollado que el otro, ante lo que los doctores apuntaron la posibilidad de que se tratara de un caso de superfetación.
Fue un 'shock' tanto para ella como para su marido Todd. Sin embargo, una vez superada la sorpresa inicial, Julia ha reconocido que "me divierte ser la protagonista de algo tan raro, siempre y cuando los bebés estén bien".
Según explicó a la prensa estadounidense el especialista en Obstetricia Patrick O'Brien, portavoz del Royal College de Obstetras y Ginecólogos, al año sólo se diagnostica un caso de este tipo en todo el mundo. "Es algo extraño, porque cuando una mujer concibe, sus hormonas cambian drásticamente y estos cambios frenan su ovulación y le impiden volver a concebir", indicó.
Aunque se le practicarán más pruebas a la madre y los bebés cuando nazcan para aclarar qué ha sucedido, el doctor O'Brien advirtió que los Grovenburgs no podrán tener una certeza absoluta, ya que en su caso, los test no podrán descartar que se trate de gemelos.
A casa por Navidad
"En ocasiones es difícil estar seguros, porque una mujer puede estar teniendo gemelos no idénticos con marcadas diferencias en su tamaño desde el primer momento de embarazo", apuntó, recalcando que "si hay una gran diferencia de tamaños entre los bebés, la primera sospecha es que uno de ellos no se ha desarrollado tan bien".
No obstante, puntualizó, la superfetación se convierte en una sospecha más ajustada a la realidad cuando los bebés parecen tener una diferencia de edad de más de dos semanas.
Además, de haber sido afectados por este extraordinario fenómeno, los bebés nacerían oficialmente en dos años diferentes: uno a finales de este año y el otro a principios de 2010. No obstante, lo más probable es que los dos -que se llamarán Jillian y Hudson- nazcan juntos, de forma natural o por cesárea, según las necesidades, el próximo diciembre.
http://www.elmundo.es/elmundosalud/2009/09/25/mujer/1253897672.html
jueves, 27 de agosto de 2009
Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories (Hardcover) by John Curran
A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories. When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide in more than 100 countries, she had achieved the impossible - more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller. So prolific was Agatha Christie's output - 66 crime novels, 20 plays, 6 romance books under a pseudonym and over 150 short stories - it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those 55 years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimes? Following the death of Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable secret was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie's private notebooks, 73 handwritten volumes of notes, lists and drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays and stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in her unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story. What is the 'deleted scene' in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles? How did the infamous twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, really come about? Which very famous Poirot novel started life as an adventure for Miss Marple? Which books were designed to have completely different endings, and what were they? Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own Autobiography, this remarkable new book includes a wealth of extracts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters, plus for the first time two newly discovered complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.
http://www.agathachristie.com/
A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's 73 recently discovered notebooks, including illustrations, deleted extracts, and two unpublished Poirot stories. When Agatha Christie died in 1976, aged 85, she had become the world's most popular author. With sales of more than two billion copies worldwide in more than 100 countries, she had achieved the impossible - more than one book every year since the 1920s, every one a bestseller. So prolific was Agatha Christie's output - 66 crime novels, 20 plays, 6 romance books under a pseudonym and over 150 short stories - it was often claimed that she had a photographic memory. Was this true? Or did she resort over those 55 years to more mundane methods of working out her ingenious crimes? Following the death of Agatha's daughter, Rosalind, at the end of 2004, a remarkable secret was revealed. Unearthed among her affairs at the family home of Greenway were Agatha Christie's private notebooks, 73 handwritten volumes of notes, lists and drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays and stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in her unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story. What is the 'deleted scene' in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles? How did the infamous twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, really come about? Which very famous Poirot novel started life as an adventure for Miss Marple? Which books were designed to have completely different endings, and what were they? Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own Autobiography, this remarkable new book includes a wealth of extracts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters, plus for the first time two newly discovered complete Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.
http://www.agathachristie.com/
lunes, 11 de mayo de 2009
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