The Agatha Christie Reader

Sparkling Cyanide (1945)

2011-09-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

PLOT: Who poisoned Rosemary's birthday champagne last year?

This book contains the worst sentence I've come across by Agatha Christie:

"Anthony took a gingerly sip of coffee."

Something about its sheer wrongness captivates me. "Anthony gingerly took a sip of coffee" would be fine. "Anthony took a nervous sip of coffee" would also win. Instead we have this weird monstrosity - I have to admit, it fascinates me.

Why? This isn't me jumping on the "Agatha Christie can't write" bandwagon. Graeme Greene apparently sneered she employed the English of a schoolgirl - which misses the point. Agatha Christie is a brilliant writer. There are many, many other writers from the Golden Age of Crime who are now forgotten; barely readable then, utterly unreadable now.

If Agatha Christie merely constructed amazing plots thinly plastered over with simple words, then she wouldn't still enjoy her amazing success. A good writer has great characters and it is her characters that people still talk about - everyone knows Poirot and Marple.

Agatha Christie has a style - you've only got to look at the marvellous wrongness of The Big Four when one of her relatives rolled up his sleeves and pitched in, keen to prove that anyone can have a crack at writin' one of these crime thingies, to realise that only Agatha Christie can write Agatha Christie. The Big Four is all plot and no style (and what a plot - sinister Chinees, death rays and dastardly doubles. Blimey).

At the other extreme is Postern of Fate which is all style and no plot. But it's remarkably entertaining and a great read purely because of the style. People do read Agatha Christie because of the writing.

So why am I picking on this one sentence? Because it allows me to arbitrarily point, midway through her career and say "she's become uneditable". Just as people highlight the moment when Harry Potter went from books to tomes, this is the moment at which Agatha Christie editors started waving her works through regardless. Or perhaps it was because there was a war on.

There certainly isn't a war on in Sparkling Cyanide. It's a curiously timeless, vaguely pre-War book in which the coffee is bad, but an heiress's only trouble is what to do with her money. There's perhaps a hint that the meagreness of rationing preyed on the author's mind - we get an unusually loving recitation of the fatal menu at the Luxembourg, conjured up with all the lavish attention employed for one of Lord Snooty's feasts.

The novelty in the book is that the central crime has already happened before page one. I read on, confidently expecting a flashback, but it never came. The crime is instead relived in moments, and then recreated with a fatal twist that takes you by surprise.

The victim - Rosemary - hovers over the book like a ghost, and we get a picture of her from the point of view of the suspects, several obsessed by her, but only one of them liking her. She deliberately never really appears - she is Christie's Rebecca.

The book is a character study - in some ways the actual crimes and investigation are an anticlimax to the people. For instance, the devious politician and his docile wife who, it transpires, is a much more complicated personality than anyone else even guesses at - Christie's masterstroke with poor Lady Alexander is that she reveals her brilliance to the reader, and then draws the curtain again, so we must read the second half of the book with everyone from her parents to casual acquaintances dismissing her as "mad" and "gothic". This leads to a remarkable scene where her parents, convinced of her guilt, confront each other:

"They looked at each other - so far divided that neither could see the other's point of view. So might Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have stared at each other with the word Iphigenia on their lips."

See? Marvellous stuff. The book is full of lovely bits of style, and Christie indulges herself shamelessly with a nutty spinster ("Twitterers can tell one a lot if one just lets them - twitter") as well as some spot-on observation:

"Iris's face adopted that same look of blank enquiry that her great-grandmother might have worn prior to saying a few minutes later "Oh Mr X, this is so sudden!"

Underneath all this razor sharp invention is a plot that almost... almost cheats. Christie takes you into the confidence of all of the suspects, while at the same time dragging a huge red herring across the trail. The reveal (when it comes) works, and works cleverly, but the reader is allowed the same kind of groan as when on the receiving end of a truly terrible pun.

Looking back you realise that all of the hints have been there, and everyone who should have been interviewed was, and all lines of enquiry were pursued... but... but... still. You've been well and truly had.

Her ingenious conclusion does even excuse the one wopping bit of racism in the book (we'll sadly wave through the other jarring references to Negro bands).

We meet again Colonel Race (who permeates Christie without ever really being more than a cameo), there is mention of Sergeant Battle, and there is even, quite surprisingly, a maid called Evans.

4.50 from Paddington

2011-02-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

Plot: Unique serial killer romp about British Rail and the National Health Service

Lucy Eyelesbarrow. There's other stuff in 4.50 from Paddington, and it's all good, but it's Lucy Eyelesbarrow who dominates this book. She is Agatha Christie's ultimate answer to The Servant Problem - what if a really clever, independent woman took up domestic service. With a First in Mathematics at Oxford, Lucy is the perfect servant - her brains, tact and beauty amply rewarded by gratetful employers. She takes on the job of hunting down a murderer because it appeals to her and because she likes Miss Marple - recognising in her both her brains and her character

Lucy is a truly marvellous example of a really independent Christie heroine - and it is a crushing shame that she's landed with a romantic plot - will she pick boring-but-brave Brian or charming-but-caddish Cedric? You very quickly start yelling "Neither! Neither!" and even Christie chickens out of sentencing Lucy to purgatory with either of them. The only possible appeal of Brian is his charming son, who Christie writes gloriously, even allowing him and chum Stoddard-West a glimpse of a dead body ("One's only young once."). Possibly, Lucy should wait until Alexander comes of age and make her move. The charming Alexander, however, is most keen on the match:

Averting his eyes to the ceiling, he said rather self-consciously:
"I think, really, you know, it would be a good thing if he married again... Somebody decent... I shouldn't, myself, mind at all having a stepmother..."

Just because Lucy is some grand doesn't mean that Miss Marple takes a back seat. In the early stages of the book she does some great detective work in finding the location of the mysterious corpse - she draws up a charming plan of action ("4. Griselda's boy Leonard who is so very knowledgeable about maps.") and then travels on a lot of trains. The reliability and state of the Nation's railways places this book firmly in the 50s, with Miss Marple remarking on the decline of First Class ("This taxation... that's what it is. No one can afford to travel first class except business men in the rush hours. I suppose because they can charge it to expenses.").

This is a remarkably post-War novel. The Crackenthropes of Rutherford Hall are once-rich industrialists whose principal remaining asset is their estate - sat in the middle of an expanding town, it is eagerly wanted by developers to bulldoze and turn into new housing. Rutherford Hall itself is seen as valueless - a mouldering stately home mostly closed off and impossible to keep up due to taxation and The Servant Problem. The house is presided over by the archetypal decayed gentleman, Mr Crackenthorpe, a man who cackles when his children are bumped off ("I'll outlive them all," he crowed, "You see if I don't.")

We also see the remarkable effect of the brand new National Health Service on poor Dr Quimper, a man driven almost mad by overwork and sleeplessness.

The book also features one of the oddest coincidences in the revelation of just who Edmund Crackenthorpe's lover in the French Resistance was. It's honestly a moment that would have you throwing the book across the room were it not being handled by Agatha Christie. Even then, it's touch and go.

One of the oddest things about this book though is the tone - it's a deeply horrible, tragic tale, but it's told in a tone of almost constantly upbeat, light-hearted whimsy, which is as charming as it is unsettling. It still doesn't stop Lucy Eyelesbarrow from stealing the show. I just hope she didn't marry either of them in the end.

Lord Edgware Dies (1933)

2011-01-20T02:37:00.000-08:00

Plot: So who would want Lord Edgware dead?

“Getting rid of husbands is not my speciality”

Poirot almost comes a cropper in this outing which is full of style and charm, but, as my friend Lee points out, is “one of those where the least likely person did it.” In other words, people keep on pointing out that X cannot possibly have done the crime, and the more they underline this, the more you suspect X did it after all. A Murder Is Announced is another good example of this.

Where this book succeeds is in its evocation of 1930s London, full of parties and nightclubs and bright young things, a land of champagne and divorce and actors and female impressionists and all sorts of modern things.

In among all this is the character of Lord Edgware. “I just can't describe him, but he's – queer.” The clearly depraved Lord (forever nipping off to Paris, city of sin) is a baffling monster, far more effectively creepy for his enigmatically satanic nature and remarkably pretty butler than if Christie spelt out what exactly his problem was. The nearest we get are some snide remarks about the butler by Japp and some muttering about how the butler “might have posed for Hermes or Apollo. Despite his good looks there was something vaguely effeminate”.

Poirot is almost the only innocent character in this murky mess of deviance and deceit. “I should like everyone to be happy” he says early on, but even there we are misled. Japp later pronounces:

“He's always been fond of having things difficult.... It's like an old lady playing at patience. If it doesn't come out, she cheats. Well, it's the other way round with him. If it's coming out too easily, he cheats to make it more difficult.”

Japp is right all along. Poirot takes great delight in terrorising a suspect who misled him. “I hope you have now been sufficiently punished for coming to me – me, Hercule Poirot, with a cock-and-bull story.”

In the end, although Poirot is clever, the murderer nearly gets away with it by being stupid. This sounds silly, but isn't. This is a story about a social manipulator who isn't clever but is very good at using people. In some ways this is far more satisfactory than a master criminal – seeing Poirot faring badly against his intellectual inferior is a great payoff.

Murder in the Mews (1937)

2011-01-13T02:30:00.000-08:00

Plot: Four long mysteries for Poirot.

Murder in the Mews:

“What are they like? Gay? Lots of Parties? That sort of thing?”

Poirot and Japp investigate a murder in a house where two ladies live together. One plays golf. It's impossible not to read this as accidental lesbian hilarity, even though there's not a whisker of it in the story itself. Instead it's a rather robust narrative about a blackmailer gradually ensnared in a trap of his own making. The pay-off to the story is very satisfying as Christie manages (even with a very limited cast list) to nudge you in one direction while at the same time pulling the rug from under you. It WAS who you thought it was, but not for the reasons you suspected. If you see what I mean.

The Incredible Theft:

“Here I scream” said Poirot helpfully. He opened his mouth and let out a shrill little bleat.

A country house, stolen plans, a weekend party of spies and gamblers... and a maid who has seen a ghost. It's all amiable stuff, with Poirot at his mischievous best. He's being told a pack of lies by nearly everyone and doesn't fail to let them all know that he finds it vastly amusing. It's a story about truth – or about good lies. As Poirot puts it pointedly “The lies I invent are always most delicate and most convincing”. He is both reassuring his host and also reminding the household that they are amateurs up against an expert on truth.

Essentially Poirot finds himself in a classic crime situation and proceeds to enjoy himself immensely. So great is Poirot's enjoyment that he even appears to chat up a maid, and get chatted up in return. He certainly is at great pains to praise her beauty. Maybe this is simply due to their shared Gallic nature?

Dead Man's Mirror

“One cannot escape one's Karma.”

Another “ideal for television” adventure featuring a country house, a locked-room and a lot of suspects, this manages to be a fairly straightforward Poirot pot-boiler set among the Chevenix-Gores. This is a household of improbables and suspectables right out of The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, and it rattles along at a fair pace... right up to an ending that made me go “oh no, hang on, there are too many suspects – which one of you are you again?”. But it's a ripping yarn.

Triangle At Rhodes

Poirot is on a beach holiday. Sat next to a woman who fancies herself as an observer of human nature. Yet it is Poirot who spots a crime in the offing. Readers of Death On The Nile and Curtain will recognise two things – Poirot issuing a significant warning, and Poirot detecting the hand of a social manipulator at work. The story also bears similarities with one of Miss Marple's 13 Problems, and is another great example of how Agatha Christie ensures that bad things happen to husband-stealing women.

The Moving Finger (1943)

2011-01-09T02:30:00.000-08:00

Plot: Poison-pen letters lead to tragedy in a small village.

The Poison-pen letter is a preoccupation of classic crime. Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night dances high above the canon as an example of frustrated Women Who Hate (it being a staple of these stories that such letters are only written by women).

When Agatha Christie tackles poison pen letters, of course she wheels out a spinster to catch a spinster – but this is very much a novel in which Miss Marple cameos at best. Just as Cat Among The Pigeons is a delightful feast with Poirot as a digestif, Miss Marple totters along at the very end of this book to offer a neat solution.

In the meantime we're on familiar ground of gossip and suspicion and wise counsel in a small community. As usual, the servants are a problem – there's a death which may be suicide until a maid is found brutally slain because she knew too much but didn't speak out in time, the silly moo. From there on in it rattles along nicely until we realise that we've been looking in the wrong direction entirely and that this isn't a tale of a rotten community but a more domestic horror. With added Marple.

What makes this as a book is that it's really a love story – it's about the narrator falling in love with a girl who is variously described as ugly, simple, plain, backward and ill-dressed. However, almost without realising it, the narrator gives her a proper makeover and falls dazzlingly in love with her. This is the real heart of the book – that in an atmosphere of suspicion this unusual relationship doesn't come under attack is one of the biggest clues as to what is really going on. Of course, this doesn't escape Miss Marple's notice. Nor does she miss the shopping montage.

Curiously, Christie claims this as one of her favourites. Which is odd – it's certainly one of her more believable and moving love stories, but as a Miss Marple book it's a strange beast.

Postern of Fate (1973)

2010-12-22T03:59:00.000-08:00

Plot: There's a plot?

Postern of Fate is free-association Agatha Christie, improvised like beat poetry in a smoky jazz cellar. That's another way of saying that it's regarded as her worst book ever, and yet... and yet... well, yet again, it's a book saved by Tommy and Tuppence.

Tommy and Tuppence have moved house. Tommy goes to London for meetings. Tuppence stays at home reading some old children's books and walking the dog. Occasionally they'll have lunch. Or dinner. Or argue with a tradesman. Sometimes Tuppence will go out to tea, or Tommy will reminisce. Occasionally, Tuppence will sit in a go-kart and roll down a hill. Once, the wheels fall off Tuppence's go-kart. This may be an attempt on her life. She's not really sure. Another time a pane of glass falls down near her. This may also be an attempt on her life. Again, no-one is really sure.

Tuppence sometimes tries to sort out the shed with the help of the local handyman Isaac, unless he's the gardener. But then again, Isaac is over 90, or in his 80s, or nearly 70. It's so hard to tell.

Sometimes, Tommy and Tuppence are investigating a crime that happened in the house during the first world war. Although, sometimes it happened later, or earlier. Or did it even happen at all?

In order to try and come to grips with this, Tommy goes to London for more meetings with people who either tell him about how much they enjoyed the plot of N or M, or mention that they were all in Passenger To Frankfurt. Meanwhile, Tuppence goes for more walks, and meets some children who also remark on how well she did in N or M.

There is mention of the Common Market.

Someone, at some point, god knows why, kills Old Isaac, so Tuppence needs to get a new gardener. Even though Isaac wasn't actually the gardener, but was there to help mend the conservatory. Luckily a man from the secret services tells Tommy that they'll send them a man who'll be an undercover agent and that they're not to trust anyone else. A lady turns up and offers to do the gardening. She also helps pour some coffee. Can you guess what happens next?

Luckily, eventually, it's all over. Someone, at some point, killed Mary Jordan. Tommy and Tuppence also appear to have thwarted an evil conspiracy, again. Or at least, we hear that the sinister conspiracy has moved to Bury St Edmonds. So that's okay.

What saves this book from being utterly utterly awful is that Tommy and Tuppence are as charming as ever. They're good company, even if they are telling you a story they don't seem to have a grip on. Christie's style remains similarly charming. In her 80s at the time, she wheeled this one out, her characters are addicted to reverie. The theme of this book is how unreliable memory and narrative are – appropriately enough, as Tommy and Tuppence are... well, let's just say that by this point Poirot is 120, Miss Marple is about 735, and lord knows how old Tommy and Tuppence are, or why Albert is mourning for an entirely different wife to the one he had last time.

Yes it's a bloody mess, but it's a charming one. If you can analyse why it's so adorable and compellingly readable then you're doing better than me. All I know is that I sat up night after night entranced by it, kids books, hearty stews, dog walks and all. There was an actual sigh of disappointment when something as vin ordinaire as a murder occurred. There's a great atmosphere here – similar to the magic of By The Pricking Of My Thumbs, that lovely feeling of Village Sinister, in which a discussion of magnolias can turn lethal at any moment.

The book is full of madness. There are clunking lines, there is banter that's eye-rolling (Tommy and Tuppence remove rubbish from inside a rocking horse. They call it surgery. Everyone laughs. No-one points out that Tuppence has earlier examined the horse and found it empty). There are clues that are never resolved. There is a greenhouse called KK. There is a significance hinted to at the real name of a Monkey Puzzle tree. And did I mention there's a go-kart?

And yet, it's somehow adorable. It's about Tuppence reading books and finding a long-lost mystery. It's about Tommy thinking. It's about a couple very much in love who can save the country and redecorate. And yes, very vaguely, it's about the Common Market.

Partners In Crime (1929)

2010-12-17T03:59:00.000-08:00

Plot: What Tommy and Tuppence did next... was take the piss, frankly.

After the ripping yarn of The Secret Adversary, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford set out to solve crimes using the methods of other detectives as a set of literary parodies.

The whole idea was already waaay out of date when the stories were adapted for a baffled 1980s television audience. While Francesca Annis chews the scenery and a variety of hats, James Warwick turns up in a variety of mad costumes without explanation, including a priest's costume. If you're well-read in
your crime, you may just think “Why is he dressed as Father Brown?” but that'll be about it. By the time Francesca Annis dances through a health farm in a series of veils, you may indeed be ready to commit a crime yourself.

If you want to know the sources, Charles Osbourne's Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie features a handy grid... giving your an at-a-glance guide to a lot of mostly out-of-print and forgotten sleuths. You probably won't be much wiser, although you may go “oooh, I've read a couple”. There's also a lovely analysis here

The most interesting parody is when Tommy pretends to be Hercule Poirot, at which point you can only applaud Christie for being rather meta.

Hopelessly out-of-context, how do the stories themselves hold up? The nearest comparison I guess is The Big Four, although Partners In Crime is neither as mad nor as bad. Some adventures are joyous and atmospheric (The House Of Lurking Death), some are madcap John Buchan (The Sinister Stranger) or just madly Dr Nikola (Blindman's Bluff with its electrified floor).

However, just when your teeth grind together like a vintage gearbox, you'll be reminded how adorable Tommy and Tuppence are, or how well they work in an atmosphere of vague conspiracy and intrigue. What keeps this collection fun is that they're having a ripping time, which makes it all more than bearable. They're great company even on an off-day. More of which, next time.

Parker Pyne Investigates (1934)

2010-11-27T02:21:00.000-08:00

Plot: Are you happy? If not consult Mr Parker Pyne.

This delightful collection of short stories goes off the deep end early and alters direction in mid-air. Parker Pyne is a detective who simple tries to make people happier. In his first story he saves a marriage by providing a neglected wife with a dashing gigolo. And that's it.

In the second story, it's a bored military man who finds excitement, thanks to a damsel in distress and the work of novelist Ariadne Oliver, who Mr Pyne occasionally employs to conjure up exciting fantasies.

These first two stories contain an almost identical set-up, and roll out with all the twists of a neatly ironed shirt...

By story three, Christie seems to have grown bored already. It's like she can sense that there's little drama here (certainly compared to how The Labours of Hercules treats a similar idea of a neglected wife and a philandering husband). So what does she do? First she plays a trick on Mr Pyne, and then she sends him on holiday. His last case before he does this contains the remarkable homily:

“What is truth? It is a fundamental axion of married life that you must lie to a woman.”

Before this can get any worse, thankfully Mr Pyne rocks up in the Middle East, site of Agatha Christie's best stories. He's in a world or ruins, natives and archaeology. We find him quoting (a forgotten poet) Flecker's lines about the “Postern of Fate” and one story is even called “Death On The Nile”. If, at this point, you can spot the difference between him and Hercule Poirot, you're doing quite well. These are broadly interchangeable adventures – Christie has abandonded her earlier idea of making people happy and instead headed off for more rewarding and more familiar ground.

That doesn't make the collection bad, by any means – but the atmospheric travel romps of the second half are just much more rewarding than the first half which presents Christie with a rigid formula which she has to work hard to shake herself free of.

Dumb Witness (1937)

2010-11-20T02:15:00.000-08:00

Plot: The curious case of the dog in the night.

Very much a companion piece to After The Funeral, this is a story that also features a downtrodden companion, an inheritance, and a clutch of ill-deserving relatives. However, it unwinds in a very different way.

One major difference is that Hastings is narrating, and shows a remarkable degree of psychological insight this time out.... although that's because he finally meets his intellectual equal, a small dog who he spends ages describing while Poirot stamps around pointing at enormous clues which Hastings utterly misses cos he's too busy playing with his new friend.

There is even a marvellous scene where Poirot is forced to demonstrate a clue to Hastings, then make it out of cardboard, and cut it out and demonstrate it to his hapless companion... all without illumination. We have Poirot jumping up and down, pretty much shouting out what's going on, and Hastings as oblivious as a sheep. Just this once, Christie lets us in early.

At around about you may well work out what is really going on – allowing a nice little cushion of smugness as the ending of the book plays out. Admittedly this gets immediately and creepily unsettled before going back to run along the lines we originally suspected – this is, after all, a book with a very very creepy husband and a very nervy wife...

The real shame of this book is that the victim has to die. Emily Arundell is a lovely character, full of life and fun and the book is all the poorer without her – but we do get her friend, the lovely Miss Peabody, who sees right through Hercule Poirot.

The Arundell family themselves are stupid, venal and worthless. Pretty Theresa is unimpressed by Poirot (lamenting that she doesn't have her autograph book on her), Charles just wants some money, and the plain daughter simply laments that she doesn't have the looks or the money or her relatives. Faced with such lamentable people, Poirot is at his least scrupulous, planting misinformation, listening at doors and playing the warring family off against each other. It's a delight that Hastings (when he notices) doesn't approve of any of this. But it shows that, just occasionally, Poirot doesn't care.

Despite the twee wrappings (does a dog know who did a murder? awww) the story contains a remarkable assortment of clues, all of which turn out to be relevant (pay attention to the mad spiritualist sisters who witness a glowing cloud of ectoplasm). It is a story that ties itself up neatly – any injustices are evened out slightly, and there is even a marriage of sorts, as Hastings finds true love at last:

“Woof,” said Bob with energetic assent.

After the Funeral (1953)

2010-11-14T02:15:00.000-08:00

Plot: Nun of it's what it seems.

Look out! There's mis-direction thundering through this book. The identity of the killer is boldly given away very early by a stray comment about the pleasing nature of a bath bun. But even so, this is just an audacious hint that what seems to be a country-house murder is Anything But.

Yet more proof that Christie changes with the times is that she's prepared to write a book with such a novel twist on The Butler Did It. You think (for quite a while) that this is all about the murder of a man with a legacy and his frankly awful family – but this is, instead, not about these people at all. To say the family are entirely red herrings is slightly unfair, but they are mostly ghastly window dressing for a very subtle crime.

When the unveiling happens, Christie's prose is at its best with the killer's description of their goals in life:

“One can occasionally get quite nice china – export rejects – not that awful white utility stuff.... Oak tables and little basket charis with striped red and white cushions.”

This is followed by the gasp “I've never imagined a lady-like murderer”. It's the “-like” that's deadly. The killer even shouts “Of course, one never looks much at...”. This isn't quite a middle-class mystery, but Christie shows that she's quite prepared to get inside the heads of people you assume she wouldn't have much time for.

In some ways the killer is a redrawing of Dora Bunner from A Murder Is Announced – someone with reduced circumstances but no poverty of ambition. And, frankly, one of the messages about this book is that good money is wasted on bad people.

Christie has visited this idea in books like A Pocketful Of Rye and Taken At The Flood – the idea of a cursed house full of vile people gradually reaching a kind of grace, but in this book almost the entire cast are rotten – beyond one smart daughter with a good head for business (but no head for men).

If Christie's having fun with her formula, she's also having fun with Poirot, who enters the mystery with an elaborate disguise, only to unveil himself equally elaborately - “Hercule Poirot at your service.”. The reaction is priceless:

“His name seemed to mean nothing at all to them.”

This is a book in which the perpetually retired Poirot has finally passed from fame. It's telling that he's more plausible disguised as a eurocrat than as a detective. We also get a return of Mr Goby, the investigator who only makes eye contact with inanimate objects and who uses nuns as enquiry agents... which leads us to the book's best red-herring, the Nuns! They flit sinisterly through the book, crow-like portents of doom, but in the end, do they have any relevance? Or are they simply more clutter to distract us all from a really audaciously disguised mystery?

Black Coffee

2010-10-20T23:52:00.000-07:00

Plot: Can you pastische Christie? What happens when you novelise a stageplay of hers...

And we're back with a journey into different territory with Black Coffee - a faithful adaptation of Christie's Poirot play by Charles Osborne.

Where this suceeds briliantly is that is delivers exactly what you think a Christie novel is - remote country house, locked room, murder by poison, brilliant solution by detective etc etc. It's an archetype, and it's strange to realise with a bump "oh, no, hang on, it's nothing of the sort - the other novels aren't like this".

So, Black Coffee delivers what you expect of Christie rather than what she so often dishes up. There are plenty of stock characters - brilliant scientist, noble secretary, troubled son, foreign wife, dodgy visiting stranger, bright young gal etc etc, but it is marvellous to see them gathered together literally all in the same place.

It's hard to review this, as such. Charles Osborne makes himself almost invisible as an author - allowing himself the occasional bit of scene setting (including baldly setting the story in 1934 and directly after The blessed Big Four). The dialogue feels lifted straight from the play, along with a lot of stage directions, and as such there are no real alarm bells ringing. It's a genuinely self-effacing bit of work.

I suppose the big annoyance is that Christie lifts a key plot point from Mysterious Affair At Styles and plonks it down at the end of Black Coffee. As soon as you see the offending object in the drawing of the room you think "oh no", and so it proves.

What is blissful about this as a novel is that it doesn't outstay its welcome - it contains just enough plot for its 200 pages and rattles through as a couple of hours reading, with plenty of jokes and joys.

Osborne really succeeds in conjuring up the feeling of this being a performed stage play - which is odd. I think it's the lifted stage directions that do it, but you get a real feeling less of this being a real drawing room and more that this is a set with actors dotted around it, making exits and dramatic entrances.

There are various other joys. There's more of Christie's hospital dispensing experience trotted out for our entertainment, and Poirot is a great character here - slightly enhanced for the stage and so ringing out clearly through the book. I think it's nice that there's at least one book in the canon that proudly does what you expect it to - although it's interesting that, when asked about his desire to star as Poirot on the stage, Suchet has indicated that he'd rather not be in Black Coffee.

A Murder Is Announced (1950)

2010-09-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

Plot: A murder is announced... please accept this, friends, the only intimation.

This is a book about spinsters. It's a subject tackled head-on in other crime of the period, such as Dorothy L Sayers' Gaudy Night, with its sexual frustration and violence, but this is a different take entirely.

Is it a lesser work than Gaudy Night? Well, it's certainly a different one. The book also suffers from "Gone With The Wind"'s problem of there being a much-more-celebrated adaptation in existence. When you're up against a telly version by Alan Plater, you're in trouble. Maybe it's my personal prejudice - but the book is a disappointment in a way that The Body In The Library is a triumph. But this is all unfair - comparing A Murder Is Announced to an amazing television version and to Gaudy Night is, at the end of the day, merely comparing grapes, plums and bananas.

Let's start with the central concept, which is brilliant - another village trope, that of the local paper, and how regional gossip is more important than national events - bookends the work. We start off with dismissive mention of twenty-three dead in food-poisoning at a hotel, which is mere trivia compared to local adverts for false teeth and dachshunds.

Dropped into all this, like the hand of fate, is the announcement that a murder will take place. It's almost supernaturally creepy, and also, like The Body In The Library, a notion that's too fictional to be real, and yet it is. This bizarreness is both celebrated and played on - of course the doomed Rudi Scherz shouts "Stick em up", naturally everyone assumes he's holding a gun, and obviously the lights go out before the murder happens.

Now, all that aside, and girding our spoiler-loins, let's look at the women.

This is a story about single women. The book features only one happy marriage - that of Bunch to the Vicar. They're a loving couple (almost carbon copies of Vicar+Wife in St Mary Mead). Bunch even has the splendidly named Tiglath Pileser for a cat. The vicar and his wife are all that is good and harmonious about Chipping Cleghorn - and naturally aren't even suspected for a second.

We also get Belle Goedler, the dying widow in the remote Highlands. She's had a brilliant life and knows the fulfilment of being married, and as such can judge the quiet sadness of Letitia Blacklock.

And that's it for wedded bliss.

Colonel and Mrs Easterbrook harbour a dreadful secret that's never uncovered - she's much younger than him and is flustered about her alibi, but what her flaw is is never revealed.

Similarly, Phillipa Haymes is married - but her husband is an army deserter who dies unmourned in a hospital as a tramp. She lives a life of torment and sadness, never able to tell her son the truth, nor to move on. As such she's seen as beautiful, but frozen like a statue, waiting to thaw upon his death.

The central spinsters of the novel of Lotty and Letty Blackwood - only one of whom actually appears. Both kind, one amoral - both driven. Letitia is a financial and business genius who allies herself to the Goedlers, a genuinely good woman who lives for finance and who never interests herself in men. She's the happy spinster in the book - one who never realises that she is incomplete.

By contrast, the disfigured Charlotte drives herself indoors, a once-pretty woman who cannot bear the world to see her. Her crippled self-confidence curdles her soul. Her mainstay is her belief in her father, a doctor who refuses her the simple operation that will cure her deformity. Lotty becomes a truly pathetic figure - her betrayed worhsip of her father causing an odd sort of arrested development. We learn that her dreams are of "travel, to have a house and beautiful grounds - to have clothes and jewels and go to plays and concerts, to gratify every whim - it was all a kind of fairy tale". Charlotte's fairly tale world has no mention of an adult relationship with a man. Instead she moves in her childhood friend Bunny and they recreate the magic of the old days, spending idyllic afternoons blackberrying. Charlotte remains childish - giving Bunny a child's birthday party send off. Even the devising of the "Murder Is Announced" plot is prankish and immature.

Bunny is Charlotte's accomplice in setting up this fairytale world. It is she who colludes in Charlotte's impersonation and fraud, but to her it is all so simple and plainly just. Bunny is a child grown old without having grown up - a simple person who finds being old confusing and saddening. Bunny gets a remarkable speech to Miss Marple in the coffee shop about the poverty she was reduced to:

"Darning one's clothes and hoping it won't show. And applying for jobs and always being told you're too old. And then perhaps getting a job and after all one isn't strong enough. One faints. And you're back again. It's the rent - always the rent - that's got to be paid. Otherwise you're out in the street. And in these days it leaves so little over. One's old age pension doesn't go far."

Unworldly Bunny is actually the most worldly character in the book, broken by the true sadness of the world and hiding it all under fluff and good nature. It's a dramatic portrait of a sadly shabby life, aware of her own stupidity and yet unable to alter it and just bumbling on and living in her make-believe fairy castle with her childhood friend.

You'll have gathered by now that I'm banging on about this as a novel of character. Which brings us to remarkble Murgatroyd and Hinch. Two practical old ladies sharing a farmstead. Agatha Christie does lesbians of a certain age, but without trumpet or fanfare. Instead they're both marvellous. They're reflections of Charlotte and Bunny. Whereas the former live a fantasy life, Murgatroyd and Hinch are solidly practical. Hinch is the muddy-booted schemer, slaughtering pigs, running a black market ring, all grit and colourful language ("I'm standing against the mantelpiece with my tongue hanging out for a drink"), while Murgatroyd is Bunny ("Oh, dear, Hinch, you know what a muddle I get into!").

The slaughter of Murgatroyd is the most horrific murder in Christie (am I still biased by watching Joan Sims die the part on telly?), no more dreadful for Hinch's reaction. She is described as inconsolable:

"Nobody offered Miss Hinchcliffe sympathy or mentioned Miss Murgatroyd's death. The ravaged face of the tall vigorous woman told its own tale, and would have made any expression of sympathy an impertinence."

Hinch is a remarkable and a brilliant character. She feels real. Her reaction when she finds her friend's body is stunning - she's horrified, but still practical, insisting on telling Miss Marple what they'd been doing while they wait for the police to turn up. No hysterics, but also no doubt of the awful grief going on. She also gets the best line in the book when she turns up for the denouncement:

"[Inspector Craddock] said I needn't come unless I liked," said Miss Hinchcliffe. "But I do like."

I genuinely and utterly love Hinch. She's my second favourite "spinster" in the book.

My favourite spinster, naturally, is Miss Marple, even though she takes a subtle backseat. It's quite clear what she's there for, as soon as Sir Henry Clithering realises she's in town ("Ye Gods and Little Fishes, can it be...? My own particular, one and only, four starred Pussy. The super Pussy of all old Pussies."). Marple is slower and quieter in this book (you get the feeling it's about two-thirds of the way through before she KNOWS who did it). I'm deducting points from the Pan edition for the back cover that reprints Miss Marple's end-of-book list of clues ("Lamp. Violets. Where is bottle of aspirin? Delicious Death. Maing enquiries. Severe affliction bravely borne. Iodine. Pearls. Letty. Berne. Old Age Pension.") - but it does at least prove the old dear is sharp as ever. She has her list of clues, but she's not quick enough to prevent a murder turning into a killing spree.

In the meantime she manages a lot of knitting, some cunning observations, and some slighting comments about the local cakes at the coffee shop. But it is Miss Marple who knows everyone - there's a neat section of village parallels and then a remarkable final chapter where she explains the psychology of the murderer in a way that's as sympathetic as it is heartbreaking ("She was quite a kindly woman... It's what's in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy.")

Finally, there's the servant problem. In a book stuffed full of remarkable characters there's Mitzi "the Mittel European", a character who makes it through to the end of the book surprisingly unscathed. She's outlandish and terrible and yet the sheer outpouring of her makes her very believable. Even the murderer finds her exhausting, and it's part of the book's astute eye on the 1950s servant problem and the agonies of rationing that the murderer has to placate Mitzi in the middle of at least three lethal plots as good cooks are just so hard to find.

Anyway, after a book all about miserable single women and unconventional relationships, we end with a wedding. Remarkably it's between two characters who, according to Miss Marple's judgment really shouldn't go anywhere near each other. What makes their union most peculiar is that they appear to get married in between pages - we assume that Chapter 22 follows almost immediately after the unveling of the murderer in Chapter 21, but then there's sudden talk of wedding presents. Is it really a happy ending, or simply a conventional one?

The Body in the Library (1942)

2010-08-04T01:57:00.000-07:00

Plot: "Ma'am, there's a body in the library!"

Familiarity can breed contempt. Or a mild boredom. I've put off reading The Body In The Library for just that reason - after all, if you've seen the brilliant BBC version several times, and sat squirming in horrified delight through the ITV travesty... well, why need you bother reading the wretched book? It can't better the opening of the BBC wonder - "There's a body in the library!" can it?

Oh yes it bloody can. The sheer delight of The Body In The Library is that it contains everything that The Murder On The Links was missing. The latter was a beautifully crafted machine of a plot - but The Body In The Library is just as wonderful a bit of engineering, only wrapped in a knitted fluffy pink cover.

The sublime opening line is "Mrs Bantry was dreaming. Her sweet peas had just taken a First at the flower show." We are straight back in St Mary Mead with all its domestic horrors and spinsters sniping across the privet. There are glorious cameos from The Murder At The Vicarage. Gossiping Miss Hartnell is back:

"'His poor wife,' Miss Hartnell tried to disguise her deep and ardent pleasure."

Also returning is Griselda the vicar's wife in a charming cameo rolling around on a rug with her toddler.

We also get returns from the cast of The Thirteen Problems - the Bantrys and Sir Henry Clithering. Dolly Bantry rocks, as ever, summing up her reaction to her husband flirting with "pretty girls who come to tennis":

"There's no harm in it. And why shouldn't he? After all... I've got the garden."

But it is Miss Marple who dominates this book, and does so brilliantly, stealing scenes she's not even in. Every moment is perfectly, wonderfully described, such as when the telephone rings too early in the morning:

"So well ordered was her prim spinster's life that unforseen telephone calls were a source of vivid conjecture."

Which leads us to Dolly's breathlessly immortal:

"We've just found a body in the library."

It's tempting to just type out whole chunks of the book. It's as delightful as a menacing trifle. It'd be nice to say "Only Agatha Christie and Jane Austen really understood the true nature of the English Village" but... oh, sod it, let's.

There are so many glorious, incidental details. For instance Basil Blake's country cottage:

"A hideous shell of sham Tudor, was known to the postal authorities, and to William Booker, builder, as 'Chatsworth'; to Basil and his friends as 'The Period Place', and to the village of St Mary Mead at large as 'Mr Booker's new house'."

What's so lovely about this sentence is how much is tells us about the dry practicality of St Mary Mead, the modern wit of Basil Blake's set, and even the pretensions of poor William Booker, builder - a character who is not even in the book. But this is Christie at her absolute best, both as a plotter and a stylist. The sheer wonder of Miss Hartnell's envious protest at Miss Marple having gone up to view the body before breakfast - "Well, I mean, I think that is carrying things too far."

That's not to say the book is an out-and-out comedy - far from it. The humour is always shrewd and there are moments of genuine awkwardness, such as when the crippled millionaire Jefferson wakes up, both literally and from his infatuation with Ruby Keene - "'Margaret...' It was the name of his dead wife..."

There's a similarly delicate hand at work in the handling of the murder of the girl guide Pamela Reeves. Child murders are quite rare in Christie, and this compares interestingly with the comparatively callous description of the dispatch of the victim in Dead Man's Folly.

The humane shrewdness continues in Sir Henry's perfect introduction of Miss Marple:

"Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face, and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it as all in the day's work. Her name's Miss Marple."

Miss Marple is at her shrewdest in this book, dropping apposite stories about boys hiding frogs in clocks, and making wonderful comparisons to various maids, as when she reveals that her "little maid Janet" always relaxed too soon after telling a lie: "She'd explain quite convincingly that the mice had eaten the end of a cake and give herself away by smirking as she left the room."

This comes at the end of the scene where Miss Marple has interviewed girl guides and has decided which one has more to say. Wonderfully:

"Miss Marple spoke crisply.
'I'd like to speak to Florence Small.'"

Oh lawks, I have typed out most of this book, but it is a glorious thing. Miss Marple reduces everyone in the book to the "General Common Denominator", describing Jefferson's infatuation with Ruby Keene through village life, explaining how when Mr Harbottle's sister left him for to nurse a relative, she returned to find him infatuated with the maid and herself banished to "live most uncomfortably in rooms in Eastbourne" because "the old man found it much pleasanter to have a young, cheerful girl telling him how clever and amusing he was than to have his sister continually pointing out his faults to him". Isn't that just brilliant? In about three paragraphs we get a rattling good parable that also tells the whole story of three people utterly incidental to the story.

Miss Marple is at her absolute sharpest. There's the wonderful showdown with Basil Blake and his lover Miss Dinah Hill where they're both absolutely vile to her and she simply sits there and strips away their wicked veneer to reveal how deeply lovingly conventional they are, winning them both over in a couple of lines. It's an amazing scene, and gets followed by Miss Marple's remarkable revelation of the real Basil when she says how he rescued four people and a dog from a burning building in an act of stunning heroism.

A lot of this is sheer, glorious window dressing. A delight in knowing the plot from the television is realising that Miss Marple has solved it very early on. By halfway through she has announced "There was a very careful plan made. What happened was that the plan went wrong". A few pages later she announces of a vital clue "It had been worrying me, you know - how to account for her nails." There's still nearly a hundred pages to go, but this isn't annoying. Miss Marple isn't smug - we're enjoying the journey and we know she'll tell us in her own time. She even later informs Dolly that she knows everything but won't tell Dolly because she knows her too well. "It's no good, dear."

Although Miss Marple dominates the book, other characters sing. Colonel Bantry's social exclusion is marvellously described:

"Did you go to dinner with the Duffs on Thursday?"
"Oh, that! It was put off. Their cook was ill."
"Stupid people," said Mrs Bantry... She sat down by the desk and absent-mindedly picked up a pair of gardening scissors. With them she cut off the fingers, one by one, of her second glove.
"What are you doing, Dolly?"
"Feeling destructive,"

There's also the exceedingly painful description of Jefferson finding a picture of a young man in Ruby Keene's handbag, which is Agatha Christie's equivalent of Desdemona's handkerchief: "Now then Kitten, now then. You know who it is right enough."

Even a cameo such as the dancer Raymond Starr ("one of the Devonshire Starrs" it is claimed) gets the following remarkable speech about why he left work at a hotel in the Riviera, after overhearing an old Colonel saying:

"Where's the gigolo? I want to get hold of the gigolo. My wife and daughter want to dance, yer know. Where is the feller? What does he sting yer for? It's the gigolo I want."

Raymond even gets the last line of the book to himself when, dreams crushed he must carry on:

"Oh well, my luck's out. Dance, dance, little gentleman!"

There's also the peculiarly lovely touch of the nine year-old detective who announces proudly "I've got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie" - make of that what you will. This is an author who is on top of her game and knows it - but is also accidentally setting up the cute self-awareness of the Margaret Rutherford films. Let's just for a second imagine the glory of Margaret Rutherford and Mr Stringer solving the case of The Body In The Library. Oh go on - ballroom dancing, tennis, girl guides and film stars and even more ballroom dancing. The frocks alone would make you faint.

Seriously, this is utterly, utterly brilliant.

Murder on the Links (1923)

2010-07-30T06:55:00.000-07:00

Plot: Well, there's a murder. On some links.

What happens when Agatha Christie isn't as famously readable as normal? For some reason Murder On The Links bounced off my eyes tiresomely and I grew cross with myself for just not getting it. Well, for the first 150 pages or so.

It's an odd book - lacking the fluid style of "golden age" Christie, the sheer machine code brilliance of "The Mysterious Affair At Styles", or even the bonkers madness of "The Big Four", it just happens. Perfectly competently etc etc, but just so hard to get into.

The failing is more with me than with Christie - by now I'm looking for things which aren't yet there. Poirot is a stiff cadaver, Hastings an unsubtle booby, and although the murder happens swiftly, the mechanics of the investigation grind mercilessly on as one drab character after another is wheeled creakingly to the stage to give a statement. It's all so lifeless and tepid.

Poirot's stilted characterisation isn't helped by the introduction of Giraud, an even more outlandishly eccentric Gallic detective. Each is just a heap of annoying mannerisms, both treat Hastings with amused scorn, and neither makes the other feel real and...

And then, once you're over the first 150 pages, the fireworks go off.

Trying to put my finger on it, I'd risk saying that the book improves as soon as Christie gets her big cheat out of the way. Poirot rushes off to Paris and comes back with a bit of information the reader could not have possibly known, deduced or guessed. As soon as Poirot slaps this down on the table, the book changes gear and all sorts of intercontinental madness is rolled out at great pace, the enormous plot engine churning furiously away.

Suddenly the book becomes ripping fun. We meet twin acrobats! We hurtle between France and England and France again! We meet new characters! We dramatically re-interpret old ones! There are wigs and disguises, and remarkable, remarkable twists. It's as though Christie has finally pushed the book up a wearisome slope and is now enjoying freewheeling downhill.

All sorts of things that seemed lumpen suddenly have a purpose, and, amid all the fireworks, there's a lot of sheer misdirection. If you catch your breath, the direction from which the murderer comes is obvious, but you don't pause, not even for a second as you're just too excited. Christie keeps pulling back the stage, announcing twist after giddy twist - many of them exquisitely sign-posted.

It's like the welcome return of an old friend. Much of Murder On The Links reads like the kind of contemporary fiction Christie often spoofs - intriguing mystery, eccentric detective, not much else... but those last hundred pages she's firmly back in the driving seat. The glory of the end of the book is tremendous - Poirot is almost godlike in his cunning, Hastings is at his best, both as a character and biased narrator, and the whole thing is fluidly oiled.

Which makes Not Getting On with the opening even more annoying. It feels like the fault is squarely mine rather than Christie's. But, as this is the internet, the home of snide carping, I'll instead say that it is the sign of a mastercrafstman finding their true voice in midflight. There we go - that's a thunderingly mixed metaphor. Good.

A Caribbean Mystery (1964)

2010-07-19T03:55:00.000-07:00

Plot: Miss Marple finds murder in paradise.

Fundamentally Death On The Nile with a dash of Curtain, A Caribbean Mystery is a surprisingly subtle book that repeat At Bertram's Hotel's trick of plonking Miss Marple on a luxury holiday and has her watch the world fall apart. The hotel in the Caribbean Mystery is full of the same old types as the one in The Body In The Library - sourpuss milionaires and unhappy wives and dull majors. But there's a rigid sense of "the fun must carry on" despite the rocketing death toll.

"Major Palgrave's death was already only an incident... Life here was sunshine, sea and social pleasures."

This is the story of a murderer who keeps getting away with crime because no-one wants to notice what they're doing. It's cunning and insidious and a little bit Gaslight.

Miss Marple is at her gossipy best. She's shameless in this story. There's a lovely chapter which begins with one character starting some scandal, and "looking carefully around. Miss Marple drew her chair a little closer". This is a story about the nature of gossip and how it can be used to cover up crime. So, we have a criminal who convinces everyone that Major Palgrave was poisoned by an accidental overdose of his medication - even though we later learn that Major Palgrave took no medication. The criminal does this several times, suggesting, insinuating and passing on misinformation - covering up tracks, laying false scents and burying the past. Miss Marple's challenge, fittingly, is to get to the truth of each misdirection, finding the source of each lie. It's similar in a way to when Hercule Poirot tackles the Hyrdra in the Labours of Hercules.

There's a lovely moment when the Canon upbraids his sister for gossiping with Miss Marple. "The two women sat in silence. They were rebuked and in deference to their training, they deferred to the criticism of a man. But inwardly they were frustrated, irritated and quite unrepentant." It's easy to dismiss Agatha Christie, but at moments like this she's EM Forster with a body count.

The book also features, remarkably, scenes of the unconventional home life of Victoria the Caribbean Maid. These are not the disaster you might be braced for, but show Christie not only being sensitive, but also doing patois. I KNOW! Thankfully Miss Marple does not at any point rap.

Talking of the old dear, we get a brief snatch of personal history, where Miss Marple remembers meeting a dashing young man at a croquet party. Later, she rejected him when she discovered that "after all, he was dull. Very dull."

The standout relationship is between Miss Marple and the dour Frederick Rafiel, the ailing millionaire. Rafiel is anything but dull, and clearly sees in Miss Marple both a tool and a challenge. It is he who nicknames her Nemesis, setting up the sequel. But the two have a wonderfully warm, sparky relationship, and it has echoes of the glorious pairings of early Christie when she's stick two bright young things in a motor car and let them have fun. But these are two bright old things and they're out for vengeance. The book really does belong to the two of them - and the scene when they say goodbye is genuinely touching.

The Hound of Death (1933)

2010-07-14T03:54:00.000-07:00

Plot: Exploding nuns! Possessed cats! Ghostly children! It's all in The Hound Of Death!

Just when you think "Agatha Christie, blah blah blah" along comes The Hound of Death, a collection that wouldn't be out of home in Wordsworth's marvellous "Tales of the Supernatural" range. It shows what a diverse range Christie has, sometimes maddeningly so. Here's a few notable appearances:

The Hound of Death
A disappointingly brilliant Lovecraftian tale of horror in which a nun summons up one of the Great Old Ones and a sinister death cult is thwarted. This story is "disappointing" in that it's all over far too quickly - Christie (in bonkers Big Four/Passenger To Frankfurt mode) could easily have pulled off an entire book stuff with nuns, fireballs and supernatural horrors. Instead we get thirty pages almost as a teaser for something utterly, utterly different.

The Red Signal
A murder mystery, but one featuring a seance and the idea of madness as a creeping hidden horror (a feeling that crops up in the scenes with the mad villain of Towards Zero). It's a smart exercise, as the entire story can be read one way as a pitiless tragedy, and then, as soon as the unmasking takes place, I immediately found myself going back to the start and realising how almost every line has a double-meaning. Like Hound Of Death there's a similar feeling of compressed narrative, with a whole John Buchan "hero pursued" narrative squeezed into two pages.

The Fourth Man
A creepy tale of possession and malevolence that includes sinister schoolgirls and even a spirit that deliberately assumes false personalities to make itself even more interesting. Again, blimey. The "finishing school" is a setting that Christie flirts with but never settles on - in The Secret Adversary we think that Tuppence is about to go undercover in one, in At Bertram's Hotel much mention is made of the finishing school, but it's like a big setting that Christie was saving for a rainy day. Again, the telling of this tale is much more complicated, being recollected in fine Victorian Horror fashion by four strangers in a railway carriage.

The Lamp
Kind of like a pocket Henry James in which a living child is seduced by a dead one. Utterly creepy and manages to pull off a tragic and a happy ending.

Wireless
Another unusual story in which an old lady is killed off by a vicious practical joke involving the voices of the dead possessing a radio. Cleverly, Christie turns the tables on the perpetrator very smartly and absolutely - but the story is also notable for the narrative shift. Once the lovable old woman is disposed of, we spend the next half of the story in the hapless company of her killer as their plans are totally confounded.

Witness For The Prosecution
Not at all supernatural - this is a Christie standard that we'll come back to later in play form, but it's striking how beat-for-beat perfect the story is in this early incarnation.

The Blue Jar
Another shaggy dog story about the supernatural. This is a remarkable Hustle tale, featuring one of Christie's dim young blokes who play golf and are altogether a good sort. The ending is not happy, but funny.

The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael
Possibly unique as a story about a possessed cat thwarting a murder plot, this is utterly bonkers. The story does suffer from about two characters too many (who are all of you? who did it again?), but manages to pull off something quite remarkably bizarre while keeping a commendably straight face. And it features a cat. I like cats.

The Call of Wings
A businessman realises that money does not bring happiness and gradually ascends to a higher plane. Um. Is it a morality tale, or a story of a haunting? Or is this one just a bit odd?

The Last Seance
A horrible story about a doomed medium and her obsessed client. It's set up for tragedy right from the start. Curiously it takes the supernatural as a given, and builds on it a small story of domestic greed and murder.

SOS
A story about poisoning which is prevented through almost supernatural means. It's a very odd tale - quite tricksy to follow, and the literary device of a stranger breaking in from outside looks to be a set-up but turns out to be sheer lucky coincidence (a broken down car is almost never coincidental in Christie, from Spider's Web through to Three Act Tragedy, The Mysterious Mister Quinn and Why Didn't They Ask Evans).

Anyway, corking collection but really very very odd indeed.

Towards Zero (1944)

2010-07-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

Plot: "When murder is the end and not the beginning"

Towards Zero keeps reminding you that it is an experimental book, but it's easy to forget that it is. It says at the start that the murder will happen at the end. Despite this, two murders happen roughly where you'd expect them to in a Christie book - one early on, and then a major one at about the halfway point. Duly, you at this point forget that this is all a sideshow and decide "ah, look at that, there's a definite murder". This is a mistake - when Christie tells you you should be thinking about a major murder to come and you don't, you're asking for trouble.

This is a book about predestination, about people being moved into place - some of them by a mad manipulator, and some of them by fate. It's about celestial clockwork being set in motion - although, that said, there are some odd things about this book:

1) Too many characters
Seriously, if you can remember who everyone is throughout, you're doing well. I've picked this book up to make notes on and am thinking "no, now hang on, is he the colonial adventurer or the noble suicide?". There's an equally baffling splay of girls and boys and it all gets quite confusing - not in the sense of "Who can the murderer be?" so much as "Who are all of you?".

2) Clever stuff
Inspector Battle is back, and is introduced in a brilliant mini-adventure about solving theft at his daughter's school which shows him off as the master of subtle social observation. It seems like a throw-away incident, but Christie reminds you at the end, it is not - it is vitally important to how Battle later works out who has done what.

3) Good lies
The resolution of the mystery relies on a good and clever character (who only now enters the story) guessing the remarkable way in which the murder was committed... and lying about it. This is interesting - especially as Battle knows and approves of the lie.

4) Things to be wary of
The story hinges on a dashing man trying to win back his first wife. Now, given what you know of how Christie looks at dashing ex-husbands, wounded first wives and troublesome second wives, see if you can guess who might be at the heart of the murder mystery?

5) Naming
Yes, it's very funny that a character is called Mr Royde. But there's also someone called Neville Strange. Which, when you get to the end of the book, appears all too clearly peculiar.

6) Something fishy
This book features an actual red herring in the form of a fishy smell which is... a fishy smell. I'm racking my head for a similar scent-related clue occuring in Christie, and I can't think of one, beyond the occasional mention of a whiff of bitter almonds.

7) The dancing boy
The book features Ted Latimer - the second Mrs Strange's best friend. He's curiously written - referred to as "a gigolo" or as something bright and loud and entertaining. But he's not actually gay - his flamboyance merely hides a broken heart. Curiously, it is his bitter observance of the characters of the book as "animals... happy and superior in your roped-off enclosure" that gets to the real nature of the people in the book (and the deceit they're wrapped up in).

8) Fate and clockwork
Interestingly, at the end of the book it's like a purging of a plague - not only is everyone now in the right place to marry the right people, but a curse has been lifted, and for the first time, if you think about it, you can perceive why everyone is in the position that they've been put in. It's quite a subtle trick that goes on - sometimes re-reading of various passages shows you that the reasons for something happening have been quite different to how the people involved have thought them.

Third Girl (1966)

2010-06-15T10:47:00.000-07:00

Plot: Dolly birds on disco drugs! Poirot sails into the sixties!

Yet more japes with Ariadne Oliver and Hercule Poirot, this time set in the wild whirl of sixties flatshares. Things have come quite a way from the boarding house of Hickory Dickory Dock - we're in a world where three young gals pal up in a flat, swapping chit chat over morning coffee and sharing gossip about their come-downs:

"I was up too late last night," Frances said, "... Basil would make us try some new pills - Emerald Dreams."

Now, don't roll your eyes. Despite all this lunacy it's all very jolly. Christie's always been quite blase about drugs, and despite this odd hiccup, the relentless sang-froid actually suits the feel of the story - which is a bit like that Murray Lachlan Young poem "Everyone's Taking Cocaine".

The constant drugs form an important background, as underneath all this (slight spoilers) is the suspected Gaslighting of poor Norma the Third Girl. Is she really a mentally disturbed murderess? Is she taking refuge in drugs? Is she doing things unconsciously? Or is something stranger happening? The truth is both interesting and complex, and shows Christie experimenting with a whole new type of murder and a whole new type of poisoning.

The trick that Christie is pulling is actually very clever, as she uses the drugs both as a red herring and as a key ingredient, and also uses them to misdirect you away from what's really going on (which has slight echoes of Curtain).

Both Poirot and Ariadne are clearly very old here - in fact, the whole mystery starts because Norma takes one look at Poirot, nearly tells him everything and then says "I'm sorry, but you're too old" and rushes out of the room.

In a way this is the story of the Golden Age of Crime trying to come to terms with the 1960s. Although, what actually happens is that the Golden Age storytelling tames the 60s. Gradually Christie stirs some familiar ingredients into the new age - so we get a country house, a mysterious old colonel writing his memoirs, a sinister foreign nurse, and a ruggedly heroic doctor type who is planning on emigrating to the colonies. Elements that Christie cannot control she cunningly unleashes Poirot on, so we see him running an espionage network, and even arranging a kidnapping from a greasy spoon cafe.

Ariadne Oliver is as splendid as ever, and gets to go on a secret mission, attend an artist's studio party, and get clubbed unconscious. The latter act has curious similarities to the indisposal of Tuppence in By The Pricking Of My Thumbs - surely, you think later, it would have been easy to murder the old love? But then we'd be denied a great character.

Talking of characters, we get a lovely old loopy colonel who manages this week's winning racist remark about Poirot:

"A clever chap but a thorough frog, isn't he? You know, mincing and dancing and bowing and scraping."

Again, not a *great* book, but a thoroughly lovely rattle of a read which gets away with it.

Dead Man's Folly (1956)

2010-05-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

Plot: A murder mystery game turns real.

You're in for a bit of a surprise with Dead Man's Folly. It pulls off that strange late Christie trick of being very readable and entertaining whilst being... er, not very good.

Things that suck:

1) The murder of a child.
Christie just sails into this without even a flicker of sentimentality. Poor Marlene Tucker is vulgar, which kind of marks her out for death. There's even the monstrous moment where a doctor is asked if it's a sex crime: "I wouldn't say so, no. I shouldn't say she'd been a very attractive girl." Marlene's family are treated similarly badly with mutterings about their grubbiness, nagging, and general weakness. Her mother's reaction is a mixture of sobbing grief and a lament that her husband won't get his chance at the coconut shy now.

2) Not with Poirot around
By now, surely, you'd know better than to stage a murder with Poirot on the scene? We've encountered this problem before in Death On The Nile, but this is a positive trumpeting, arranging for Poirot to be on hand for a pre-determined death. Are we supposed to believe that murderers are brashly over-confident?

3) The whole reason for the crime
When you realise what's causing all this, you do have a sudden spike of worry. Is that really all it comes down to? There are about three different solutions that would avoid any homicide. One of which is to claim mumps, the other is to rush off shopping and leave a note. It's genuinely a case where murder just seems like a lot of trouble just to avoid an awkward social occasion.

4) The ending
It's not just rushed, it's a positive cascade of revelation. Many of the facts are Utterly New to the reader. There's no feeling of "Oh, if only I'd realised" just a lament of "Oi, that's not fair!". This is offset by the marvellous symbolism of Poirot's last act which makes the entire book make sense.

But what's to love about this book?

1) Ariadne and Hercule
Christie's fictional alter ego bumbles through the book brilliantly. She's outraged at learning that "apparently she drinks like a fish" and is all mad hair and scatty schemes that make her great fun - and Poirot positively softens under her influence. The two balance each other nicely and make for a great pair.

2) The Idea
There's a story in "While The Last Lasts" based on a treasure hunt Christie was asked to devise. Here we see a whole mystery built up around a murder game... the only shame is that the game is abandoned so quickly, and proves to be almost incidental to the actual murder (a good hard shove on a dark night would be a lot subtler).

3) The Parallels
Ariadne Oliver's mind creates some bizarre characters for her game - outlandish grotesques who all, eventually, turn out to have their twins somewhere in the book. It's a clever way of Christie getting away with a larger-than-life plot while at the same time mocking the extravagances of crime fiction.

4) Mrs Folliat
The lapsed gentlewoman is lovely. We've come a long way from the roaring gals of the 1920s to the genteel poor. Mrs Folliat is a proto-Audrey Fforbes-Hamilton, renting out the lodge while her stately home is occupied by newcomers. She maintains her social position almost effortlessly, and behaves with perfect grace as the real lady of the manor. It's a very complicated, bittersweet portrait of fallen grandeur, and Christie pulls it off brilliantly... especially when we realise that Mrs F's sacrifices have been more severe than we originally realised.

5) Lady Stubbs
The naively manipulative wife is another great portrait. Everyone involved announces that she's a really very stupid women, and yet no-one can quite escape her simpering manipulation. She manages to dominate the book while spending quite a lot of it absent, usually tucked up in bed.

There are also a lot of familiar themes knocking around - impersonation, long-lost relatives, sinister spies, dangerously smooth foreighners, and even the terrible mayhem wrought by a new wife...

Yes, it may be a bit of an odd read, and not one of the best, but it's still very rewarding.

Death Comes as the End (1945)

2010-05-24T01:55:00.000-07:00

Plot: A serial killer in Ancient Egypt.

I owe this book an apology. It's taken me six months to read it and several false starts. It even failed the "curl up in bed with a stiff drink" approach. Finally I succumbed on a lazy Sunday afternoon and, if you can get past the first fifty pages, it's corking.

The problem with Death Comes As The End is the beginning. It's telling that this is one of the easiest Christie books to find second hand, frequently with a pristine spine and a smell of defeat. I wonder how many holidays have had a morning on a sun-lounger slightly ruined by the first few chapters before it gets swapped for something easier.

To be critical and snobbish, Christie is normally devlishly easy reading. This book isn't. Here's a sample few early sentences:
"The total then is two hundred and thirty of spelt and one hundred and twenty of barley."
"Yes, but there is the price of the timber and the crop was paid in oil at Perhaa."

or
"Guard the produce of my grain, guard everything of mine, for I shall hold you responsible."

As viewers of The Phantom Menace known, trade and taxes are a great way to start, plus we continually hear of young Renisenb who lies around drowsily. When the heroine is more bored than the reader, you're in trouble.

I'm going to argue that Christie is showing off her research and her sourcea. She claims to have based the book on some letters, and seems to reproduce them throughout the book. Which is all very well, but initially really doesn't help. It's all wheat and exhortation.

Get fifty pages in though, and the cast start dropping like flies. Even better, they're all brilliant - there's the vile gossip Henet, the proto Marple Esa, the pompous dad Imhotep, his awful sons, their sour wives, his noble daughter and her fun suitors. From thereon in the book tears along with an incredibly high corpse-per-page count, as though Christie is making up for the false start. "Sorry it's a bit tricky, but look, there goes another one."

You even find yourself flicking back to the start and re-reading it for extra clues. Or to try and remember who these people are and how they were introduced. Occasionally, the narrative swings back to the opening style and we get drowsy mention of afternoon cruises in pleasure boats and so on. But it's far more bearable as, with a turn of the page, there'll be another corpse.

The book's other distraction is the chapter titles which are in a complicated dating system based on tides. Initially I spent much time puzzling over these, but then ignored them and was much happier.

I'm sure there are readers out there who've just dived into the book and loved it, but I don't think I'm the only one who struggled until Christie's natural style asserts itself.

But what of the plot itself? Well, once it gets going, you're in for something a bit like Taken At The Flood, where a new wife throws a family into deadly disarray. These are very Christie people - with concealed passions, submerged pasts, and tortured inner lives. The parallels with Taken At The Flood are several, including the discovery of a raving madman hiding behind a humble farmer's personality. The references to domestic abuse also abound, with one wife being "the kind of woman who would enjoy it".

Where Taken At The Flood offers us the dazed new wife and her vindictive brother/lover, this book gives us the scheming new wife and her dazed former lover, who spends most of his time composing bloody awful songs and talking about sailing on his pleasure boat. This turns out not to be a euphemism.

Both books are fundamentally about how a family engages with a new wife, and her response to the various methods of bribery and bullying. Of course, Nofret is more active. In Taken At The Flood it's the brother who does all the threatening and undermining while the wife flops around as drowsy as Renisenb.

Renisenb is kind of the heroine, but she's as light as a feather. The book's detective-types are old Mrs Esa and the foreman Hori, but they're not necessarily to be trusted. Renisenb floats between the two of them, or sits drowsily around wondering why everyone's in love with her. It's a good question, frankly. Partly it increases the number of suspects, partly there seems to be a tradition for a Christie gal to have two fellas after her, one poetic, one solid.

The book's best character is nasty Henet the whining confidant. We've met her before in Christie, but she's here at her sharpest and nastiest. She's the real villain of the piece, having schemed for decades to bring down a family she doesn't even belong to through devoted service. She lights up every page that she's on.

A similar triumph comes in a remarkable passage where we have a murder from the point of view of a victim, waking up and realising that they've been poisoned. It's a lovely bit of writing from Christie. I'm scratching my head trying to remember a similar passage somewhere else - I think there is one, but this is a brilliant scene as we catch the flickering brilliance of a dying consciousness working out what's happened and why. This isn't a soul that dies screaming but one that uses its last few precious seconds to solve a puzzle and so pass on content.

Overall, if you can sweep aside the opening, the character names and the occasional purple passage, this is a brilliant book - satisfyingly gory, full of great events and cunning misdirection, and with some bang-up characters evoking a distant era with remarkable clarity. By the end, I felt thoroughly ashamed that I'd made such hard work of the beginning.

Death In The Clouds (1935)

2010-05-17T01:45:00.000-07:00

Plot: Murder in mid-air with a sting in the tale.

Sorry for the summary which makes me feel like someone haplessly subbing Jeffrey Archer blurbs. It's not doing Death In The Clouds justice. Let's start by looking at a few tropes:

1) Locked room mystery
Peculiarly, Christie doesn't often use this device. When she does, she frequently sets herself the added challenge of locking all the suspects in with the victim - here, in Murder On The Orient Express and even in Cards On The Table. Just for an added bit of fun.

Of course, Christie doesn't leave it at that, and makes one of the suspects a hapless author of detective fiction who is too busy consulting his railway timetables to spot a real murder taking place in front of him. Poor Mr Clancy with his mess and bananas is the butt of a lot of the book's humour.

2) Plain Jane Super Brain
We know what to expect of Jane Grey by now. She's that figure who emerges in 30s Christie - plucky, lower-middle class. Ordinary background but bright and capable. Sometimes she's a typist, sometimes a shop assistant. Here she's a hairdresser. Perhaps placed there for her typical reader she's not a noblewoman with a sports car, but an aspirational figure - taken out of normal life and plunged into a world of intrigue and murder. There are a lot of similarities with Jane and the heroine of They Came To Baghdad - she's practical, reasonable, develops an interest in archaeology (and archaeologists), and is not necessarily looking for love in the right place.

3) The Dashing Young Man Who Is Not What He Appears
Talking of which, the less said the better. But Christie is developing an archetypal character who will rock up, be jolly reasonable, and yet... come the end...

4) The Society Bitch
There's no other phrase for Lady Horbury, who is just vile and Christie has enormous fun with her. Men-stealing society harpies get little mercy from Christie (is this revenge for the end of her first marriage?), and Lady H has every single vice lovingly described. She takes cocaine with more gusto than any other Christie character we've so far encountered which clearly marks her out as a wrong-un. She even declared "Do you know who I am?" and is unable to file her nails without assistance. Her ultimate fate will annoy readers, but is in keeping with the journey of similar characters in titles like Five Little Pigs.

5) Sensation
Christie frequently mocks the absurdity of the plot - it's all about a woman assasinated in mid-air with snake venom. But, as Poirot points out "c'est possible?" - but it's very effective as a mystery. It's made even more so by some vicious mockery of the press, with a wonderful interlude courtesy of a reporter from the Weekly Howl with "a certain glib assurance" and a loose connection to the truth. Reading this book explains why Christie didn't love giving interviews.

6) Avoidance of formula
Christie's well into her stride with this book. She manages to fit in the dutiful round of interrogations, and even the obvious list-making, but she breaks it up compellingly. So our detectives dart across the Channel, assume disguises, investigate curiosities, arrange two weddings and provide a list of everyone's luggage (both stuffed with clues and also a fascinating cultural document).

7) Jews
It's tempting to type "anti-semitism rears its ugly head", but that's almost falling into the same trap. We meet a Jewish hairdresser called Antoine who is referred to as "Ikey Andrew". He's not a sympathetic character and I really wish he hadn't been Jewish. It's getting tiresome.

8) Dentists
Hello Norman Gale, Jane's bumbling quasi-love-interest. Again we see Poirot forming a band of investigators out of his suspects, and Norman is fun. On first seeing Jane on the plane he checks her for gum disease. We follow his thoughts as his practice collapses as his patients shy away from him after his involvement with the murder, provoking a hint of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe with the line "If the dentist were to run amuck".

Lord knows why I'm making a list, as it means I can't come up with a heading for Poriot's use of the phrase "Le Sex Appeal", no matter how much I want to.

The Secret Adversary (1922)

2010-05-10T01:29:00.000-07:00

Plot: Can our heroes stop the evil Mr Brown from forming a Labour Government?

Crikey, has ever a book seemed more timely than The Secret Adversary, Christie's second work, which introduces Tommy and Tuppence and is her first mystery-thriller. It's a rip-roaring riot, full of much unintentional humour as our solid duo fight on behalf of the Conservative Party to unmask the sinister Mr Brown and save Great Britain from economic collapse.

Tommy and Tuppence are briliant, and this book is purely, wonderfully "Wodehousian" (an easy phrase for when two bright young things banter joyously throughout). When we first meet Tuppence she's wistfully trying to marry money and is gutted when she discovers her wartime general "keeps a bicycle shop in times of peace". "I'm so very fond of money," she says frequently.

Underneath all the froth, this is a reaction to the horrors of the First World War. Christie was inspired by the number of out-of-work soldiers who knocked at her door, and she composed a book about two such people cast adrift after the war, with a lot of breeding and no money. She rewards them for their charm with lots of nice meals and a stay at the Ritz as well as much excitement, as a contrast to a dull and meagre living as a door-to-door salesmen.

Instead she gives us two lovely people who call each other "old thing" and "old bean" and who have fun, all in a good cause. Their boss, the mysterious Mr Carter may call Tuppence "little lady" but she's a thoroughly emancipated woman, while Tommy reads the Daily Mail and actually applauds the good bits. SIGH. He's not all awful, though. Christie gifts him with a fine line in wit. He greets a grubby villain with "Someone's not been using Pears soap," and bubbles merrily along - in later books he becomes much smarter, but here he's like a lump of wood with manners.

There's a contrast between two American lovers, who are sprightly and open-hearted, and Tommy and Tuppence, who very awkwardly declare their love on the final page ("They sat very straight and forbore to look at each other").

The actual plot is merry enough, and instantly familiar to readers of "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?", only better. Why that isn't a Tommy and Tuppence book is baffling, although perhaps her readers would have cried foul, as so many of the tropes (mental homes and clifftops and photographs and mysterious impostors) reoccur in that book. This is like a template for much later Christie - we even see elements of it spoofed in The Seven Dials mystery.

Sadly, this familiarity breeds an early suspicion. If you've read a lot of Christie recently you'll start twiddling your thumbs fairly early on. How was Marguerite murdered without any of Tommy and Tuppence's band of friends noticing? How does Mr Brown keep discovering their whereabouts when only the four of them know? How, tell us, how? It's a technique that Christie perfects in later books, but here the reader will have spotted a good hundred pages before our heroes do that All Is Not Right in their camp.

But this is a minor flaw - this is really a magnificent early work, breezing along with an almost improvisational joy at the twists and turns of the narrative. It's also refreshingly naive - a lot of elements are just woven in from John Buchan and Sapper without the later filtering and caution that Christie exhibits (Mr Brown is very like the multi-faced villain of 39 Steps). An exception is Tuppence's lovely relationship with Albert, the page boy addicted to pulp crime - and, as we'll see when we hit Partners In Crime, the next time we meet Tommy and Tuppence they've become a smarter vehicle for literary pastische. But hooray old thing.

It may not be

Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

2010-05-07T08:04:00.000-07:00

Plot: Poirot solves death at the digs.

Hello death! You're everywhere. One can imagine the dinner party where, after the soup a guest leans over and says, "But Mrs Christie, it must be so interesting spending six months of the year on a dig! You really must set one of your murders there, absolutely must."

As we've seen, archaeology and travel to the cradles of civilisation is a frequent theme in Christie, one that hardens once she meets Max Mallowan. It is in this story that it finds its clearest expression, both in the setting and the moment when Poirot finds a murdered body in a grave from thousands of years ago and ponders human existence, society, and the very notion of a murder mystery ("A Mrs Leidner of two thousand years ago").

Murder in Mesopotamia is about people living on a grave. We've all seen Amityville Horror and Pet Cemetery - we know what happens next. Christie plonks the 1930s like the latest layer on a tottering cake of death, putting all of human life into perspective. For Poirot, on his way back from Syria, this is just one more case. For the other players, but one event in their lives. Lives which are long over by the time we read it. Yet, for all that, Christie says it is still important.

Depending on how you look on it, Murder In Mesopotamia is either reliant on a bizarre contrivance or is a palimpsest. I was taught the word at univesity - a piece of parchment that was rubbed out and overwritten, just like several of the characters in Murder In Mesopotamia.

At the centre we have Mrs Leidner, the archaeologist's wife, a woman who 20 years ago married a spy and has almost wilfully forgotten every detail of him beyond his handwriting. We have the spy himself, who may still be alive somewhere in the ruins, unrecognised by his wife.

Crikey, you think. That's unlikely - and, indeed, the TV adaptation goes to some efforts to tidy this up, separating the lovers immediately after their wedding and saying "well, her first marriage was in black in white, there's no way she'd recognise him now". But this very personal history is indeed unearthed, with the added complication that, somewhere on the dig may also lurk that first husband's vengeful brother, who may even, suggests Poirot, be impersonating the female narrator, Nurse Leatheran.

This is, as you may have guessed, a story that layers improbability on improbability. We have letters from the dead husband, we have forged letters from the dead husband, we have art thieves, we have drug addicts shaking among the rubble, we have a jolly hockeysticks gal who keeps on turning up and suggesting tennis (she's wandered in from Murder At Ther Vicarage) ... and yet, at the same time, we have Poirot who cuts sharply through all this absurdity.

For example, there is the ghostly figure at the window, whose very unreality turns out to be both a cruel trick and a deadly lure. We have a squinting foreigner and a sinister monk, who Poirot dispatches with a couple of clues. It's all, in the most literal sense, window dressing. Murder In Mesopotamia is a puzzle box where none of the clues are not what they appear to be. Much time is spent, for example, in establishing movements at the fatal moment across the courtyard. Christie has great fun here recycling charming local colour from her memoir "Come Tell Me How You Live" and bamboozling the reader (there's even a diagram)... and it's all the auther red-herringing loudly "Look at the Courtyard! The Courtyard!".

A similar blind is Mrs Leidner's nature. In the book she is, according to who is speaking, either a charmer, a schemer, a hypocondriac or a siren. Nurse Leatheran decides that she likes her, and for the most part, she seems rather fun. But we are also supposed to think that she is the malign household god who drives the happy expedition to misery. This is easily done in the book, but, again, the TV adaptation struggles with this - on screen it's all too clear that Mrs Leidner is a good enough sort.

Mind you, the TV version does a decent job with poor Miss Johnson, who, before suffering a truly terrible death, must nearly reveal the solution three times. In print the first revelation works rather well. It is quite obvious, he says haughtily, that the second approach to the jump is mere teasing - she quite baldly states that she's worked it out, but just has to think about it. The TV version cleverly throws in a misdirection here, which covers what is in the genre the fine old declaration "I know the answer and so must die". Her third revelation (in very gruesome circumstances) is in a fine tradition of teasing ambiguity (Is there an occasion in Christie where a victim cries "Fred did it"?).

I should stick in a word here about the art thieves. This is an archaeological expedition where, to a greater or lesser extent, most of the expedition are frauds - some aren't who they claim to be, some just don't want to be there, and one's off his tits. It's poetic justice that their finds are all stolen and replaced with copies. No-one notices - which raises a few basic points about their competence, but also touches on the idea of the real value of a find - is it the object itself or simply the discovery?

Finally, a few words about Nurse Leatheran. I like the old bird. She's a Christie archetype - the stong, sympathetic type. We've seen her in Death In The Clouds and on The Blue Train. She's detatched, she's cool, she's reliable - and, such a sharp observer that Poirot fears for her life. The TV adaptation backgrounds her in favour of Hastings, which is understandable, especially as it gives the mystery another suspect. It is noticeable in this book that Poirot doesn't draw up a list of suspects. He'll rattle through them occasionally, but if we had one of his blunt lists we'd realise that they were rather thin on the ground.

This is also one of those Christies where if you play "Who has the least reason and the most solid alibi?" you'll get the correct answer immediately.

NEXT: Death in the Clouds

The ABC Murders (1936)

2010-04-30T11:31:00.000-07:00

Plot: Poirot must hunt down an alphabetical serial killer.

The ABC Murders follows on nicely from "Why Didn't They Ask Evans". While the latter book is a solid-enough romp (oh, that sounds like faint praise, but you know what I mean - it's robust run-around fun), The ABC Murders does some very remarkable things with a similar set up.

It also features a chase across England sparked by mysterious clues found on a body, delights in misdirection and heroic endeavour.... but it's both a more preposterous and yet darker tale.

The preposterous bits are met head-on by Poirot. While Hastings thrills to them (strange clues and taunting letters and all), Poirot is grim about the whole thing - he sees it as an elaborate bit of set dressing, a disguise for something else. Poirot does not like finding himself in a book. It's easy to see why Hastings is recalled as narrator for this - he pretty much has the time of his life, whereas Poirot is furious at what is going on. He realises what Hastings does not - that the killer will claim several pointless lives in order to disguise their true intentions.

Christie backs this grimness up with a remarkable switch in narrative. Several scenes are told from "the killer's" point-of-view, as the worried Alexander Bonaparte Cust begins to worry that he himself is committing the crimes. He's a fascinating character, and it's both touching and disturbing when Poirot meets him - ABC is one of the walking wounded of the First World War, a man so broken and disturbed that he's never been quite right since, and has no idea whether or not he still has a place in society.

Poirot is the very opposite of displaced. "I am like the prima donna who always makes one more appearance" he tells Japp in answer to the question of his retirement. Japp responds "Shouldn't wonder if you ended by detecting your own death. That's an idea that is, ought to be put into a book." Hmmmmn.

Poirot is all about order, and sees the grim game as an excuse to teach Hastings how to pack properly, to be suspicious of fingerprints ("I put that in to please you, my friend.") and a just wariness of inventive journalism. Poirot even uses xenophobia as a smart way to pick out the killer from his "jeer at foreigners" which suggests that some of her unfortunate comments are a good deal cleverer than they often appear, especially when Poirot taunts the murderer with "I consider your crime not an English crime at all - not above-board - not sporting..."

Christie's style is at full blast throughout. As well as the marvellous Cust passages there are some brilliant descriptions, such as a body found by a "fresh-air early morning Colonel".

In hunting down the killer, Poirot forms a merry band of friends to help him. This isn't a unique device - we've seen that same kind of thing in The Secret Of Chimneys and Three Act Tragedy - and, as always, this isn't quite what it seems.

It is smart Megan Barnard who starts to see though this society of friends. She's an interesting, emancipated lower-middle class female character - something of a rarity in Christie, but very good. "What you've been saying. It's just words. It doesn't mean anything," she tells Poirot after a pep talk. Poirot is taken aback, but approving - he's playing a game of his own. As he says at the end of the book "Vive le sport!"

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (1934)

2010-04-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

Plot: Bobby and Frankie looks for clues and find love

Such is the way of blogs. I wrote a post for this and lost it somewhere. If this were a clue in Why Didn't They Ask Evans, Bobby would probably stumble upon it in the shrubbery, or plucky Lady Frankie would charm it out of my laptop with good manners.

There are people who will tell you that this book is a marvellously Wodehousian frivolity, a confection as light and charming as a meringue. Personally, I've always found meringue cloying.

This isn't to say that I hated this book - just that it's an inferior go at somemthing like The Secret Of Chimneys or early Tommy and Tuppence (indeed Francesca Annis has played both Tuppence and Frankie). Oddly enough it's the kind of plot that somehow feels more suitable to early Allingham, Mrs Bradley or Ngaio Marsh. Christie does good stuff with it, but it's all a bit... oh, I'm being unfair on it. But, for every lovely sinister touch (like the victim's sinister relatives, the creepy sanatorium or Bobby's early poisoning) there's a lot of things that feel quite thin.

For instance, Frankie's main idea for solving the crime is to literally crash a houseparty and become fast friends with everyone in the neighbourhood. Which is genius, but does mean that she spends an awful long time having tea. This is not Wodehousian - his Jeeves books have quite a lot going on in them while appearing untroubled on the surface.

Similarly, the book has a curious approach to suspects. It sets out its stall early and sticks to it, announcing that you can take your pick from
- The Creepy Creepy Doctor
- The Good-For-Nothing Dashing Young Man
- Someone picked out almost at random and who is the Last Person You'd Suspect

Without laying out the details, Christie manages to have all three slices of cake, to a greater or lesser degree. For instant, there is a Surprise Villain. When they're revealed you don't clutch your pearls and think "that is a surprise", you cry foul. And then have to think about it carefully and decide "Actually, yes, that's very clever", but by that point the Surprise Villain has abandoned all former subtlety and is behaving with gay abandon. So it's not surprising that our heroes spot them.

That's the other thing - Frankie and Bobby really are either lucky or cursed. In While The Light Lasts there's a lovely romantic couple on a treasure hunt and they're ingenious and adorable... and then there's Frankie and Bobbie. Oh, they're fine, they're just a bit thin. Intellectually, you just don't quite feel they deserve the prize they get. Frankie we'll give a pass to because she's fabulous, but Bobbie succeeds simply because he's nice. Which is initially sweet, but after a while does make you wonder how we ever won a war.

But I should stop grousing - even thin Christie is a great read, whizzing past, full of madcap situations and events.

NEXT: The ABC Murders

At Bertram's Hotel (1965)

2010-04-06T12:50:00.000-07:00

Plot: Can Miss Marple go on holiday without packing murder? Well, no.

At Bertram's Hotel is an unlikely companion piece to Passenger To Frankfurt. You expect certain things from a Miss Marple - murder, gossip and tea - and this book has all of those. But it's also UTTERLY BATTY.

You think it's going to be a sedate crime story and then you realise this is Christie pulling off one of her bizarre thriller capers. There are vast criminal conspiracies, counterfeit clergymen, money-laundering syndicates and even an entire hotel that isn't what it seems to be.

The central conceit of At Bertram's Hotel is that it is too good to be true - rather like a set from a bygone era ("Nne of this place seemed real at all"). This doesn't quite come across in either TV adaptation - after all how do you make a period drama look even more stylised?

It dominates the book as a character, represented through various mouthpieces, such as the glacially perfect receptionist and the far too brilliant maitre'd. The joy though is realising that almost the entire staff of the hotel and a good many of the guests are actors hired to play the part - an idea so wonderfully batty it turns up in a couple of episodes of The Avengers (one of them made before this was published).

Talking of The Avengers, say hello to Bess Sedgwick "she had been a member of the French Resistance... had once saved two children from a bruning house... was said to be the second-best dressed woman in Europe... she had successfuly smuggled herself aboard a nuclear submarine". If the book doesn't exactly feel authentically 60s, the rip-roading Bess is really something new, like the Plucky Young Gals of 20s Christie, but somehow brighter and colder - there's a lovely moment when Miss Marple and her friend look carefully at Bess, wonder if she's happy and decide "no."

Miss Marple observes all of this from an easy chair "Everyone's universal great-aunt" - and she's a perfect central character for this book, sitting there like the events are a play staged just for her. She doesn't miss a thing.

There's a lovely scene where she goes for a walk through a changed London. "She visited no picture galleries and no museums... What she did visit were the glass and china departments of the large stores" and remarks on everything that has changed. "There must be progress I suppose" she laments, quietly. Later on she comments "Life is really a One Way Street, isn't it?" - which is both the solution to the crime and also slight hint that Miss Marple's not so out-of-touch (I've wikipedia'd the phrase and it seems to have been invented in 1909, but I'm wagering only really caught on in England during the great 60s expansion in town planning).

This is then followed by a coincidence (remarkable in real life but fitting in this book) of having two characters play out a scene just when Miss Marple sits down to tea, and Christie has great fun in playing up Miss Marple's desperate attempts to eavesdrop.

The book has a remarkable heroine in the figure of Bridget, a sort of orhpan who plods through the book tracking down her parents. While not as straight down-the- line as other heroines such as Lady Bundle Brent, she's plucky, inventive and daring. She's the hare to Miss Marple's tortoise.

What is curious about having a parentless child is that the book's detective is nicknamed "Father" throughout, resulting in a remarkable scene where he stands in loco parentis for Bridget.

From a gender point, this is a very curious book. All the women in it are independent, strong willed and display various degrees of cunning, and are pretty skilled at deception (whether it's mere politeness or grand larceny).

With the exception of Father, the men are quite lacking. They're mostly well-meaning, but often baffled, or not seeing the full picture. Even the book's male villans are limp. This includes the obvious gigolo racing-car driver Ladislaus, who is oddly intangible despite clearly shagging a mother and her daughter. Which would be shocking if he were more of a character.

Father is a triumph - a roly-poly avuncular menace he's like Sgt Battle in some ways. He pretends to be the junior policeman, he potters around in plain clothes, he plays the fool ever-so-slightly, but he takes Miss Marple seriously in a quite remarkable moment when he says: "I'm not going to arrest you Miss Marple. You have an alibi". The old lady is quite put out - and this is the first policeman to get one over on the love.

There are a few interesting traces of modernity. The delightful Canon Pennyfather may have wandered in from Anthony Trollope, but he goes for a curry. Sexual liberation is everywhere - when Bridget proclaims her romantic adventures in an Italian Convent her mother sighs "Every girl your age has a Guido in her life." There's the villainous Ladislaus with his sexual appetites, and there's even mention of a dodgy doctor who got struck off "helping a lot of girls who were no better than they should be".

Another sign of this being late Christie is the freewheeling plot. At the same time as reading this I was trying a Ngaio Marsh. She's very good - but nearly all her books follow the classic "Crime / Interrogation of all the Suspects / Revelation" structure, which is somtimes incredibly tiresome (and may explain why I don't care for Five Little Pigs although everyone else loves it). At Bertram's Hotel has no such structural limitations - it's all over the shop, but in a way that's constantly engrossing and surprising. True, the denoument is a mixture of masterclass and magic, but it's never ever dull. Which is quite a surprise when you consider that there isn't a murder until two-thirds in.

"I am not really fond of interfering. Though well meant it can cause a great deal of harm."

There's a real sadness at the heart of the book. Frequently when Miss Marple brings someone to justice we feel only pleasure. But this time she's pitted herself against a building, and she feels real regret at having to bring it down. "She felt sad - for Bertram's Hotel and for herself."

Passenger To Frankfurt (1970)

2010-03-10T12:49:00.000-08:00

Plot: Hitler's Lost Son and some Hippies take over the world!

“Where do you get your ideas from?” Agatha Christie ponders in the introduction. This bold, mad romp is isn't so much inspired as improvised, changing tack, plot and characters from page to page.

This would matter more if it wasn't so bloody entertaining from moment to moment. It's only as you approach the end that you think “No, now, hang on a minute, this isn't fair...”

We start with Sir Stafford Nye – a diplomat who, we are assured, would go far except for his addiction to jokes. This is surprising as he tells Not One Joke throughout the entire book. He's a game old bird and enters into an intrigue with the mysterious Passenger To Frankfurt, becoming involved in an international conspiracy which is thrillingly described and then.... peters out oddly.

We switch several times to the rooms of some high-powered diplomats, some of them vividly described in clouds of cigar smoke, some of them utterly faceless (one of them's a villain, by the way, but when they're unmasked you'll have a great moment of “uh, who is that again?”).

We then switch away to Stafford's marvellous octogenarian Aunt Matilda. She's a wily old bird and has realised that there's a conspiracy afoot To Destroy Civilisation. So she promptly goes on holiday to Bavaria, where she encounters the conspirators, among them a very fat lady, Hitler's Son, and what appears to be the SS who are taking over the young of the world by organising some nice concerts with decent catering. Crikey.

Poor Sir Stafford wanders back in and then potters out like he's forgotten his keys. At one moment he laments that “Fiction was infinitely superior to real life”, which all depends on your point of view. He's frequently either clutching an enigmatic stuffed panda or a glamorous young woman/princess. Who he may or may not be in love with, who may or may not be related to him, who may or may not be about to destroy the world. Occasionally he plays Wagner on the recorder and who can blame him?

That this all makes sense as you're reading it (but not immediately afterwards) is quite a tribute to Christie. She's an utter poppet for wonderful diversions, such as Aunt Matilda remembering that as a child she wasn't allowed to read novels in the morning, and who hints thickly (and entirely erroneously) that the mystery hinges on The Prisoner Of Zenda.

Occasionally we'll hear that Washington has been destroyed by rioting children, or that planes are being hijacked and taken to Africa. A figure somewhat like General de Gaul will take to the streets of Paris in an attempt to quell the uprising, but it's all too complicated and sometimes has a bit to do with biological warfare and sometimes to do with the destruction of all the airports across Europe. There's even a diagram of the conspiracy, which really doesn't help at all, but looks a bit like a flower. Which is pretty.

There's a remarkable scene recalled in an insane asylum featuring Hitler talking to some Hitler impersonators, which may go some way towards explaining the diabolical schemes of a large woman called Charlotte. Then again, it may not, as contradictory explanations are given – frequently and bafflingly.

It ends in a remote house in Scotland where the solution is... well, only possible to wor out if you've been paying very close attention. And even then, it's quite remarkably odd, like late Margery Allingham doing battle with GK Chesterton sieved through a worn sock. But there's a wedding, although quite why that happens isn't explained.

It's a lovely, maddening pudding of a book. That you'll love a bit despite yourself. Notice the interesting cover of the current edition – the book itself is like the 1920s trying to engage with a world of punk and flower power. But the book cover tuts and goes for some nice frocks. And bless it for that.

We also never find out the significance of the stuffed panda.

NEXT: Why didn't they ask Evans?

Three Act Tragedy (1934)

2010-03-02T12:12:00.000-08:00

Plot: A famous actor enlists Poirot and Satterthwaite's help to investigate a series of baffling murders.

Poirot may never have teamed up with Miss Marple (Christie claimed they'd annoy each other – which is THE WHOLE POINT), but he cheerfully twins the Belgian Brain with the Love Detective to solve what looks like a drawing room crime mystery.

Called in by famous thesp Sir Charles, the crimes suit both detectives – for Satterthwaite there is a love to bring about, and for Poirot there is a cunning crime. And Sir Charles himself isn't beyond playing the detective.

The whole book is staged – Christie admits so by providing a cast list and credits at the beginning (and even a hint of the solution). As Charles Osborne points out in his book on Christie, this is a book where the murderer, once you fix on them, is quite blindingly obvious (indeed, the recent TV adaptation has to go to Utterly Extraordinary Lengths to try and overcome this, leaving you shouting “Why aren't they showing XXX in shot? Why?”). And, it is worth mentioning, this is one time when the Butler did it. Well, kind of. But this is after all, a staged mystery.

Satterthwaite works very well with Poirot. His first observation of the man has him “suspecting him of deliberately exaggerating his foreign mannerisms”, an admission that Poirot later makes himself.

Poirot is content to background himself (“It is Sir Charles who must have the star part” he says) – except for at the remarkable curtain line (“It might have been ME.”). This doesn't prevent him from being as playful as the murderer – the scene where he stages a murder of his own is, when you read it a second time, extraordinarily inventive, and sees Poirot actually taking the murderer on at their own game.

Poirot isn't the only one making acute observations and impersonations. Christie's ear for servant dialogue shows itself again. There's Mrs Leckie who gets an entire page of dialogue with barely a pause for breath, and marvellous it all is (“good girls they are, every one of them – not that I'd say that Doris gets up when she should do in the morning,..).

Fittingly, the book includes an author in peril – a shy mousy, malicious woman who is content to observe life and knows more about what's going on that she lets admits. If it is a Christie self-portrait, it's an odd one. Literary theorists will be delighted to discover that the last chapters of the book feature a race by the detective to save the life of the author, for in reality, the poor dear is as much a victim as one of her own creations as the characters elsewhere in the book. Er, discuss.

NEXT: Hitler's secret son! Hippies destroy the world! It's Passenger To Frankfurt!

Mysterious Mr Quin (1930)

2010-02-20T11:57:00.000-08:00

Plot: We meet a supernatural love detective

Christie takes a sharp left here. This is clearly the same author who created Hercule Poirot, but this is also the same author behind the mystical bittersweet collection of While The Light Lasts.

Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite are a fascinating duo. Mr Satterthwaite is a well-meaning man of means who has never really taken part in life. He lives in luxury, but is entering his retirement, and cannot see himself ever loving, so contents himself with sharply observing others. He's fashionable and snobbish and fussy - but he's also concerned about the happiness of other people, and takes a keen interest in human nature.

In many ways, he's an equivalent of Poirot - a man content to travel the world, occasionally becoming involved in adventurers, watching everything with his beady eye. But he isn't brilliant - his brain needs that extra push.

The extra push comes from Mr Harley Quin, a mystical figure who comes and goes like magic, part of the ancient Harleyquinade (a pantomime that turns up several times in Christie). Quin appears like a benevolent, sometimes avenging, spirit of love.

It is Quin who uncovers long-ago crimes, allowing suspicious lovers to realise that both are innocent. It is Quin who confronts the Croupier and fallen, fashionable ruin of his first wife, and allows them to forgive each other. Quin is a malevolent spirit - and his meetings with Satterthwaite are nothing but ordained. Unlike those Poirot cases where the reader's eyes roll up at the sheer coincidence, Mr Quin is clearly a supernatural power restoring order to the world, summoning Satterthwaite to help him.

It is the last story that the ambiguous nature of Quin is teased at with the Lovers' Lane, where Mr Satterthwaite gets a glimpse of "something at once menacing and terrifying... Joy, Sorrow, Despair."

At the end, we have Satterthwaite alone, humbled before ...what?, forced to ask himself whether his contented life without love has been worth it after all.

While The Light Lasts (1997)

2010-02-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

Plot: Random love stories with a bit of Poirot.

While The Light Lasts is a curious collection. It's almost a merging of the supernatural and the romantic magic of Mary Westmacott with a very, very occasional crime thrown in.

The Edge is the most curious story - if you're a fan of reading autobiography into fiction. It's about a dowdy lover cast aside by a shallow man for a young beauty. Published just after Christie found out about her husband's affair and ran away, it's easy to assume that this is a little act of revenge.

There's also a lot to love about Manx Gold. The story itself is pulp Christie, but the idea of hiding the clues to a real treasure hunt throughout the narrative is extremely innovative, even if you actually have to be standing on the Isle of Mann to stand a chance of solving any of them.

The Actress is a story about a plucky actress thwarting a blackmailer - and it's easy to see in this the prototype for all of Christie's quick-witted and frequently villainous actresses.

There's also The Lonely God, a surprisingly kind story about love winning out in the end, thanks to a sweet-natured idol.

But that's about it for upbeat. Ignoring the Poirot reprints of early versions, the rest of the collection is about the thwarting of love. Painters and paintings abound - Within A Wall features a painter who only realises the true nature of the woman he loves and the woman he hates when it is too late. The House of Dreams is about a vision and madness, and While The Light Lasts features the shock of a returning husband and a last glimpse of happiness - an idea which turns up in Taken At The Flood.

Is it a great collection? Maybe not. But it is refreshingly different after a diet of pluck, twists and endless impostors.

The Thirteen Problems (1932)

2010-01-31T12:05:00.000-08:00

Plot: Miss Marple solves the problems of an after dinner Mystery Club.

If Murder At The Vicarage was an establishing book it is The Thirteen Problems which makes Miss Marple's reputation. It is during these quiet tales that Miss Marple moves from being a clever village gossip to an international crime solver - without really leaving her inglenook and knitting.

For it is here that she meets Sir Henry Clithering of Scotland Yard, and a circle of friends including actresses and artists and other notables. In other words, it is here that Miss Marple makes a name for herself - and she does not waste the opportunity.

These are all stories where the solution is neatly provided by Miss Marple, often at the expense of the teller - the rule of thumb is that the Brighter the Young Thing the bigger their downfall will be at Miss Marple's hands.

Poor Raymond West is dispatched by her on page three ("do you think people are really so unpleasant as you make them out to be?" which is Miss Marple being perhaps a little hypocritical - especially when she says "I hope you dear young people will never realise how wicked the world really is").

Initially overlooked by artist Joyce, Miss Marple later "accidentally" exposes her engagement to Raymond. In sketches about the spinster, the joke is that she is actually the murderer - but this ignores Miss Marple's formidable skills at character assassination. She reserves her biggest guns for daffy actress Jane, who constantly mocks Miss Marple ("I'm sure I shouldn't have any brains at all if I lived in a village"). She may receive her comeuppance off-stage, but it is devastating nevertheless.

The stories themselves are the usual Christie short story - with inveigling servants, deceptions, disguise (there's even two uses of roughly the same plot about swimming and impersonation) and sleight of hand. Several times the dead body isn't the dead body you're lead to believe. At other times, it is the victim who is changed. That's not to be snippy about these stories - the telling of them is extremely engaging, and the stories work on three levels - as a mystery, as an occasionally devastating self-destruction by the teller, and as a revelation of Miss Marple's supreme brain.

Some of the mysteries are extremely clever and centre as much on the smart noticing of details as Miss Marple's famed tiny recollections of village life. Christie makes great use of her chemical experise - both in the poisonings here, and in one instance, in the side effect of a chemical reaction. There's even, in The Idol House of Astarte, a seeming flirtation with the supernatural - which is never completely debunked. True, the murder turns out to be quite natural - but the circumstances which occasion it remain remarkable.

The main joy is in seeing Miss Marple herself telling stories. In one of them she reveals precisely why she thrives on gossip: "How often is tittle-tattle, as you call it, true!" In the same story she even recounts her failures - the number of times she's realised a husband will try and destroy his wife and failed to prevent it. It's one of the darker insights into her psyche - she claims that husbands are tempted to this because they are stronger. The inference is that wives would do it more if they could...

This book is both charming and necessary. From here on in, Miss Marple is free to roam, an acknowledged solver of crimes. Her path to Nemesis is laid open.

Next: Supernatural frolics in the name of love in The Mysterious Mister Quinn

Poirot Investigates (1924)

2010-01-18T01:23:00.000-08:00

Plot: More early cases! Missing jewels, ancient curses and prime ministers for Poirot.

This collection of Poirot short stories shares several familiar themes. Risking mild spoilers, I'm going to lump them as follows:

Don't trust the servants!
The Jewel Robbery At The Grand Metropolitan and The Mystery Of Hunter's Lodge and The Italian Nobleman all demonstrate this in different ways - all complicated puzzle box mysteries where the only possible solution is that the only people who could have done it are the people you're not supposed to notice. In one case, the butler actually does it.

Impostors!
Christie's fascination with disguise and identity runs through the collection. Two of the above stories are about servants who aren't servants, but we also get The Disappearance Of Mr Davenheim (a thief who isn't a thief), The Million Dollar Bond Robbery (naughty nurse and fake passenger), The Cheap Flat (substitute victims), The Western Star (impostor jewels), and the Kidnapped Prime Minister (guess who isn't quite what they appear to be here?).

Of course, this lumping is a gross simplification - each is just a facet in a constantly recut puzzle. But, if you want to solve-along-with-Poirot, it's a wise bet to keep a suspicious eye on the servants, overlapping alibis, and people who might not be who they claim to be.

If we're going to carry on in this slightly facetious mood, we'll miss the fun. The Egyptian Tomb, for instance, could be said to be about faked symptoms and false curses, but that's to ignore an atmospheric tale of foreign travel, mysterious shadows and, of course, the contemporary fun of Tutankhamun's Tomb.

The Tragedy Of Marsden Manor has a similar dance - it's pure atmosphere, even featuring a ghost. The ghoulish aspects of the story become enormously enhanced in the telly version, which looks like a prototype Jonathan Creek.

The fun-from-beyond-the-grave continues with The Missing Will, an adventure where a dead man sets his niece a puzzle - there's an interesting parallel here with Miss Marple's final cases, which are pretty much concerned with hidden wills, mysterious legacies and impossible disguises.

These stories may be slight, but there's plenty of time to fit in the odd thriller - The Cheap Flat looks like it might be about the difficulties of renting somewhere nice in London, but it's actually about an international spy ring. The Kidnapped Prime Minister pulls off the same trick of global scandal happening around Poirot, who plays the eye of the storm, even famously stating his methods - refusing to fly about Europe or look for cigarette ash, he simply pounds his head and announced "The clues are within HERE!".

And that's kind of the summary of these cases, where Poirot is the calm eye of the storm, quietly, patiently solving all manner of outlandish mysteries. Or just about managing to unmask yet another fake servant without rolling his eyes.

NEXT: Miss Marple solves The Thirteen Problems

Poirot's Early Cases (1974)

2010-01-11T01:11:00.000-08:00

Plot: A book of short stories from Poirot's early days

This is a 1974 collection of Poirot stories from the 20s and 30s - so during "The Golden Period" between The Mysterious Affair At Styles and Poirot's retirement where the TV series plonks itself firmly.

As a collection this sees Poirot and Hastings established pretty much in the Holmes and Watson mould that they can also be glimpsed in in The Big Four. Several cases feature Poirot behaving rather more like Holmes than normal - The Veiled Lady is a perfect example of this, featuring as it does a veiled visitor who is not all she appears (how Victorian!), a Charles Augustus Milverton-style of blackmail, and even Poirot entering a house in disguise.

Also in this category are The Market Basing Mystery (a locked-room suicide), the LeMesurier Inheritance (an country estate falls under an ancient curse) , The Double Clue (robberies and mysterious nobles), and The Submarine Plans (Christie's version of The Bruce Partington Plans). That's not to knock these stories - they're all rather fine adventures, and The Double Clue even introduces us to Poirot's Irene Adler, Countess Vera, the charming jewel-thief.

At the risk of making this entry full of lists, we move rather more with the times in stories like The Victory Ball, with its bright young things mingling murder and cocaine, The King Of Clubs (in which The Casting Couch collides with suburbia), and Double Sin, which is marvellous fun all about the tourist charabanc. Perhaps the most period piece is Problem At Sea, which features the dreadful Young Gals Kitty and Pamela with their plans to "rescue" dull guests. How ripping!

The Adventure of the Clapham Cook sees Poirot venture very much into the modern suburbs, where, much affronted, he sweeps aside the airs of the middle class and realises that this is basically A Servant Problem caused by too much gullible reading of sensational magazines.

Wasp's Nest is interesting as it shows Poirot preventing a murder, and even tipping a chemical into a fellow's drink. It's a neat counterpoint to The Cornish Mystery which sees Poirot on the scene just a moment too late, and bitterly resentful of this fact. The latter story also features the monster of gossip (which we'll see again in the similar Many Headed Hydra section of The Labours of Hercules).

The Adventure Of The Third Floor Flat has its fascinations. It's very much a period piece about Darling Pat and the men around her, but we do learn that Poirot leases his flat in the name of "Mr O'Connor", and the mystery itself is Really Very Clever, even if it betray's Christie's cynicism about charing men and wide-eyed women.

The Lost Mine is almost an antidote to The Big Four, neatly spoofing that book's sinister Chinese dens and mysterious forces. The Chocolate Box is fascinating in that it purports to show one of Poirot's Failures, but even here, the old rogue can't resist showing off.

The Plymouth Express is in some ways a dry run for The Adventure Of The Blue Train which is, in turn, a dry run for Murder On The Orient Express. It does feature a criminal called "Red Narky", so for that alone, we forgive it anything. "How Does Your Garden Grow?" is similarly a pre-echo of Dumb Witness, and The Victory Ball (with its impersonations, actresses, cocaine and murder) is something of a precursor to Lord Edgware Dies.

Poirot is a sprightly delight throughout. Picking out a sentence at random "'The shoes were all wrong,' said Poirot dreamily" shows the fun that Christie is having both with her mystery and with her detective. If Hastings is sillier than Watson, Poirot is absurder than Holmes, and yet, somehow warmer and more human. What pervades these stories is both a cynicism about, and yet a delight in, human nature.

I'll leave you with the truly bizarre original paperback cover:

Next: More of the same in Poirot Investigates

Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960)

2010-01-06T06:46:00.000-08:00

Plot: A collection of "two main courses and a selection of entrees".

Short stories - some reprints from much earlier, one a rewrite, one an old story with a new title. Only the first story is "Christmassy" - Poirot is invited down to spend Christmas and unmask a jewel thief in a country house. In many ways this story is a pastische of what people think an Agatha Christie mystery to be - country house, bright young things, complications, impostors, glamorous thieves, lots of snow and servants, a dead body, a taint of international intrigue and a twist or two.

It's notable for showing Poirot staging a crime which is also a rather macabre practical joke. The other thing this isn't really is a "whodunnit" since it turns out that the thief is, er, well, pretty much who it was supposed to be all along.

It is the first story in the collection to feature disguise and assumed identity - an idea which is played out again in The Under Dog, and then rather more dramatically in The Dream, Four-And-Twenty Blackbirds, and Greenshaw's Folly. In fact, the shame of these last three stories is that the trick in each case is identical. Admittedly they're very different stories, but you wonder if Poirot spent his entire life surrounded by people in false whiskers.

The Dream is a very interesting story in that it places Poirot up against the supernatural. This is a terrible idea on the crook's part, as Poirot cannot accept an impossible explanation, and therefore solves the crime. It's also a match between the villain and Poirot's vanity - and there's no doubt who can win this one.

Servants underpin both The Under Dog and The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. In the latter, Poirot receives a warning from a worried maid, in the first Poirot finds himself trying to rationally solve a murder while Lady Astwell jumps up and down pointing at a hapless secretary and denouncing him based only on feminine intuition.

The Under Dog and The Dream are both classic "House of Evil" adventures in miniature - a dead and unpleasant businessman, impostors, put-upon secretaries, a not-exactly grieving family.

These tropes rear their head again in Greenshaw's Folly, a Miss Marple story that features a strange house, its eccentric owner, resentful housekeeper, wretched gardener, locked door mysteries, a policeman, lost relatives, and a fair amount of disguise. It also, remarkably, features a divorced woman who is employed as a secretary. There's also a very strange sense of the story heading in one direction and then turning in another (there's a lot of mention early on about clocks and hidden treasure), but this may just be misdirection from the mystery here being remarkably similar to two other stories in the collection. In many ways the story fits in much better in "Miss Marple's Final Cases", an anthology which allows Miss M to shine, and where the mysteries are sufficiently different to prevent the reader from groaning "not again". Especially as you have Miss Marple solving the mystery by magic and also dropping the wonderful line "When I was a girl, Inspector, nobody mentioned the word Stomach."

Finally there's The Adventure of the Spanish (Baghdad) Chest. Which is a weird and satisfying blend of Othello and Rope, mixed in with a truly gruesome method of murder that's curiously like something out of Edgar Allen Poe. It's curiously like a stage play, and isn't really so much a mystery as a poisonous puzzle box.

Next: More short stories with Poirot's Early Cases

Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938)

2009-12-28T01:00:00.000-08:00

Plot: A yuletide death in the family fails to bring comfort and joy.

Merry Christmas! Towards the end of her career, Agatha Christie books were published as "A Christie for Christmas". In the 1960s, when her output slowed, her publishers tactfully let it be known that they'd let her off the hook and publish a "Ngaio Marsh for Christmas". The result was By The Pricking Of My Thumbs by return of post.

Even today, Christie adaptations glut the festive schedules - it seems we all love a good murder and a mince pie, and the nostalgic world that Christie evokes seems as much a part of the myth of Christmas as roaring fires, carol singing, snow and mince pies.

Viewed nostalgically, it seems surprising that more Christies aren't set at Christmas. There is, I think, this book, a Poirot short story and the first Harley Quinn mystery sees in the New Year. And that's about it.

Oddly, Hercule Poirot's Christmas is not a very Christmassy book. The Sittaford Mystery is at least snowier - indeed, the lack of Christmas decorations forms a late plot point, when Pilar Estravadors discovers them in a cupboard and comments on her expectations of "the crackers and the burning raisins and those shiny things on a tree..."

Christmas is simply an excuse for wicked old Simeeon Lee to gather his family around him - yes, it's the good old country House of Evil again, with the miserable live-in relatives, the exotic strangers from abroad, the returning prodigals, and curious servants, mixed in with impostors and spongers. This is pretty much the set-up of A Pocket Full of Rye, bolted onto the structure of a typical Poirot (death-interrogation-revelation).

If it all feels a little staged, this turns out to be part of Christie's plan. She even allows a character to comment "this is one of those damned cases you get in detective stories where a man is killed in a locked room". The reader will even spot the point, two-thirds in, where Poirot solves the murder and simply treads water until it's time to reveal the solution.

That this is a "locked room" murder is actually quite extraordinary in Christie's work. She adores the impossible mystery, but normally avoids the obvious impossibility of the locked room, leaving those to Carter Dickson. That she's chosen to employ this device is very deliberate here - she is throwing the reader's mind to thinking "how did the villain commit this crime and escape" rather than "why was the room locked in the first place?"

The whole thing is an elaborate sleight, which becomes quite easy to resolve once you realise who the murderer is. This is theoretically quite easy in this book - Simeon Lee drops several unconscious hints before his demise which Christie frequently reinforces - but in practice you may well miss it because it's just not where you're looking.

Again this is down to Christie. By the end you realise that this book is deliberately formulaic - the old house, the sequential interrogations, and other trusty bits of Christie's false machinery all wheeled out to keep you baffled.

This is helped by the book's mostly pallid characterisation. It's quite easy to forget who is who among the Lee clan (oh! so many brothers and wives). Christie even jogs your elbow by introducing Pilar Estravados, Lee granddaughter, who is the most striking woman in the book. So wonderfully radiant is Pilar that it makes the other Lee women very dull indeed, and even casts most of the men into shadow. Pilar is magnificently unBritish and unsentimental - she likes Simeon Lee, despite his immorality, she is unabashed about her selfishness, and isn't ashamed to be an adventuress, which throws her up against the book's two returning colonials, who are again rather less interesting.

Pilar, indeed, draws so much attention that the book becomes a did she/didn't she. If she did, then it's disappointing, but if she didn't, then who could possibly be as satisfying a villain? So bright is her star that it's impossible to forget that, as everyone admits, she had nothing to gain by killing Simeon Lee. Or did she, after all?

At the end of it all, Hercule Poirot's Christmas is a great example of what appears to be a by-the-numbers work by a master of the genre, but is, in fact, rather more than that.

Next: Yuletide merrymaking continues with The Adventure Of The Christmas Pudding

And Then There Were None (1939)

2009-12-20T08:10:00.001-08:00

Plot: Ten strangers trapped on an island start to die. Are any of them innocent?

I've never liked the "N-word". It's one of those words that manages to sound offensive and derogatory, in the same way as "Faggot" or any of those short and magnificently abusive Anglo-Saxon terms that just slip out whenever I try and use the Northern Line. It's a horrible, nasty word, and one that is, these days, thankfully repugnant. Like parquet flooring, it is being usefully reclaimed, but it remains pretty much unusable and unsayable unless in very careful contexts.

It is scattered through the first version of Agatha Christie's most infamously titled book like bones in a kipper. The expurgated text is a far easier read nowadays, and one in the eye for the "political correctness gone mad" brigade. I've just finished reading the original version, and it's a mildly queasy journey. The sheer outdated proliferation of the word is simply a distraction from a brilliantly good book. If the book wasn't so good, I don't think so much of a fuss would have been made about the troublesome title.

One thing that surprised me was discovering that the book was known as "Ten Little N-s" in England up until 1979. Really? Even more alarming was looking at the cover of my 1979 Fontana edition:

This neatly knocks on the head the BNP's odious argument that the Golliwog has no racial connotation and is simply a figure of fun like a teddy bear. Yeah right. It also, if you look at the lizard's face, contains a pretty massive clue to the murderer. So, it's doubly offensive.

But how sensitive should we be about this? In Christie's defence, she's certainly not the only author of the period to use the term, and she uses it with all the thoughtless abandon of someone with no offensive intent. This is not a book aimed at inciting racial hatred - the use of the N-word is such an incidental detail that it's almost Christie's biggest ever red-herring - and the success with which the text has been stripped of it proves how inconsequential it was to the narrative in the first place. Indeed, American pretty much immediately insisted on calling the book "And Then There Were None" - this book isn't known over there under the original title, which made for quiet a surprising recent protet in the US when a local NAACP president tried to block a High School production of the play And Then There Were None - on the grounds that it was based on a book which had once had a different title In Another Country. Which seemed a bit surprising - but then one has to, just as with Christie, be aware of the context. A lot of the reporting of this case appears to be from what you might call the political right. As I said - context it everything.

For instance, And Then There Were None does contain one really racially repugnant character - a horrible Jewish man, who is mocked and villified. Which is particularly unpleasant since this is 1939. You can mount a defence that we only really see Mr Isaac Morris from one character's viewpoint, and he's not necessarily sympathetic... but still, it's unfortunately tactless to say the least. Which is about the worst you can see about this book.

With that lengthy preamble to one side... what about the book? Well, it's utterly brilliant. It's a great concept - 10 strangers all at the mercy of a mysterious nemesis. It's easy to forget that it's not until late on that you realise the murderer is amongst them... or are they?

This is a game of psychological torture played out with the usual Christie suspects (Dashing Young Man, Military Man, Old Maid, Colonial Adventurer, Noble Mouse, Humble Retainer etc...) the exception being that They're All Guilty.

Freed from having to have a proper investigation, or even really a detective, Christie runs wildly experimental. We really see inside everyone's minds - these are complicated people, for once deceiving themselves rather than Hercule Poirot. There are even a few remarkable scenes where Christie treats us to everyone's inner thoughts - including the murderer's. It's really thunderingly good at what it does - it's about suspense and justice and victims and innocence.

It's curious - these people are all scoundrels, but you do find yourself rooting for some of them. Christie is so good at drawing these types of people that it's hard to hate all of them. She even take great delight at building up the first victim as a shining god among men, a truly handsome brute - and then swiftly polishing him off.

The rhyme works here more even successfully than in A Pocket Full Of Rye - it's more than just a narrative frame, it's almost a narrator, taunting and warning the cast as events press remorselessly on to their grim conclusion.

Interestingly the play version has a different ending - and, as this is the basis of the film, it is quite remarkable when reading the book to realise that events are taking a very different turn indeed.

Next: Festive fury in Hercule Poirot's Christmas

Meanwhile on AOL

2009-12-16T04:54:00.000-08:00

A brief look at the Poirot TV series that I've done for the nice people at AOL.

A Pocket Full of Rye (1954)

2009-12-15T02:44:00.000-08:00

Plot: Murder by nursery rhyme brings Marple to Yewtree Lodge.

This story mixes Death By Nursery Rhyme with the House of Evil magnificently. It helps that this is a really very well written book - it's full of carefully observed human behavious, and again features a typing pool (just as entertaining as in The Clocks and They Came To Baghdad). The typing pool gives us our opening:

"It was Miss Somers's turn to make the tea. Miss Somers was the neewest and the most inefficient of the typists. She was no longer young..."

Much is made of Christie's poisonous work at a dispensary, but clearly she also understood office warfare. The scene where the staff argue over who to call when they find their boss has been poisoned is brilliantly funny and also features a clash between Old Medicine and the NHS ("They won't come. Because of the National Health.") and even discussion of 999.

To prove that Christie has moved with the times, there's much discussion of The Servant Problem. Instead of the wonderfully staffed houses of the 1920s, Yewtree Lodge is understaffed, but order is kept by the marvellously dry Miss Dove not afraid to help out with cooking, cleaning and dishing up (an echo of the splendid Lucy Eylesbarrow in 4.50 from Paddington).

Yewtree Lodge is a return to the House of Evil that we first saw in The Mysterious Affair At Styles. The whole household are variously described as unpleasant, nasty and odious. These are all unhappy people bound together by secrets and mealtimes - an unhealthy atmosphere that results in murder. The catharsis of murder is like the cleansing of the stables - by the end of the book most of the cast may be dead, but those who remain have found a measure of happiness and contentment.

A lot of this is brought about by Miss Marple who is deliberately ordinary. The Police Inspector just accepts her: "Miss Marple was very unlike the popular idea of an avenging fury. And yet, he thought, that was perhaps exactly what she was."

She is both winged nemesis and a cup of hot cocoa. There's a lovely scene where we find Miss Marple has temporarily transformed Yewtree Lodge simply by sitting in a corner of it and knitting. As one character remarks:

"With the fire and the lamps and you knitting things for babies. It all seems cosy and homely and like England ought to be."

To which Miss Marple replies: "It's like England is."

If Miss Marple restores order, she also pigeon-holes people. Young Pat, married into the poisonous family, is, Miss Marple decides, out of place: "A background of shabby chintz and horses and dogs, Miss Marple felt vaguely, would have been much more suitable that this richly furnished interior decor."

Amidst all the bodies dropping like flies, it is easy to forget that Miss Marple comes not to avenge the death of the financier, or his fine wife, but their plain silly servant girl - simply because Miss Marple knew her and liked her, despite her foolishness. Again, it's a sign of the changing times that we get mention of holiday camps and motion pictures filling girls' heads with ideas above their station.

Again and again this is a novel about people being neatly dusted down and put in their proper place like ornaments. Poor Gladys would not have died if she hadn't had fancies beyond a teashop. Pat would be happier with horses. And Miss Marple decides that Mrs Percvial Fortescue is like Mrs Emmett the bank manager's wife in St Mary Mead. He had "married beneath him and the result was that his wife was in a position of great loneliness since she could not, of course, associate with the wives of trades people."

In this book we see clearly that Miss Marple does not strive for utopia, simply for the status quo. When asked if St Mary Mead is a nice place, she's not romantic:

"It's quite a pretty village. There are some nice people living in it and some extremely unpleasant people as well."

Structurally, the book makes another great change from formula Poirots of 100 pages of set up, a murder, some interrogations and some unmasking. The corpses start piling up pretty much from the first page, and you can tell that Christie is having enormous fun working out her plan.

This brings us to the nursery rhyme, which either both fits the story superbly and clangs around like ball bearings in a bean bag. It adds to the almost supernatural feeling of murder as a negative force of vengeance, the exact opposite of Miss Marple. The twists and turns of the plot that explain the rhyme are clever and cunning... but, at the same time, you realise the significance of the rhyme is the very weakness of it as a device. It's almost like the killer is revealing their plot. As Miss Marple points out at a certain point in the book, there will be no more killings because there is no rhyme left. Worse, she's worked out that there simply must be a connection between the blackbirds in the rhyme and the mysterious Blackbird Mine... a connection which makes it painfully easy to work out who the murderer is simply by spotting who keeps on mentioning the mine...

And yet this remains a great, great book and another triumph for Miss Marple. If not, we realise at the end, a triumph for the Royal Mail; Miss Marple gets home, order restored, chaos thwarted, and finds a misdirected letter which would have solved the case if it had been delivered on time.

NEXT: And Then There Were None: A triumph of plot over racism?

By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968)

2009-12-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

Plot: An old lady goes missing from a retirement home and it's all to do with a mysterious picture.

Well, we're not meeting Tommy and Tuppence in order. Christie's sleuths don't generally tend to change that much, but Tommy and Tuppence are the exception, growing older each time we encounter them. We first meet them just after the First World War and here they're all grown up - although clearly not quite in their 60s.

This is another nostalgia murder, with a clue to a long-forgotten crime and the title being a quotation from a rhyme (well, okay, Macbeth, so it's not quite a nursery rhyme, but it fits interestingly in with other rhyming titles). As Tommy and Tuppence have aged, so has their quarry. As Tuppence puts it, "If you're pretty nasty when you're twenty, and just as nasty when you're forty, and nastier still when you're sixty and a perfect devil by the time you're eighty...", presciently predicting the course of the story before she meets dotty Mrs Lancaster with her question "Was it your poor child?" (a question that apparently will crop up a few times in various books), a red-herring that's vital to the plot of this book.

This is a wild departure from a rigidly plotted Poirot of murder-investigation-revelation. This is more like a teasing quest for something unknown. Is Tuppence looking for inner peace, a missing pensioner or a house in a forgotten painting?

What evolves is a weird first half that should be BORING. Nothing happens. There's a feeling of missed opportunities - Tuppence always turning up too late, or pottering aimlessly around the village where she's staying, always just a few steps away from a mystery. But amid all the small talk and banter, there is a feeling of creeping, creeping menace - of things found in chimneys, mysteries in graveyards, and village gossip no longer repeated. And then BANG! Tuppence goes missing, and it's up to Tommy to rescue his wife.

The second half features corrupt solicitors, a search for clues hidden in a painting, talk of mental homes and a complicated conspiracy being gradually revealed. And it's all rather marvellous. As Tuppence comments when they're re-united "Hearsay, suggestions, legends, gossip. The whole thing is kind of like a bran tub."

But, with careful sifting, the results are suitably rewarding. This is a story that really does pay off. Whereas the nostalgia murder of "Five Little Pigs" is more a clever stylistic exercise, this is a genuine treasure hunt with an obvious prize, a suitably horrible mystery, and everything to reward the reader from secret rooms to fiendish clues.

This is really Tuppence's book. She's a breath of fresh air after the omnipotence and self-confidence of Poirot and Marple. She's just clever, intuitive and genuinely interested in human nature, while at the same time worried that life has passed her by. She gets into terrible scrapes that you wouldn't imagine happening to Marple, and her detecting is methodical, almost plodding, in a way that would have Poirot despairing. And yet... she is immensely lovable because of it.

NEXT: Miss Marple gets A Pocket Full Of Rye

Hickory Dickory Dock (1955)

2009-11-30T03:53:00.000-08:00

PLOT: Student flatshare - Bizarre thefts, death by poisoning, rucksacks and racism. It's the 1950s version of This Life

This is both the most racist and the least racist Christie I've read by far. Set in a shared student house with a clutch of international students, owned by the vile Greek Mrs Nicoletis, there are several sentences that make you wince, such as Mrs Nicoletis's first rant ("as for these coloured ones - scram!"). We meet the student known "affectionately" as Black Bess, and the gentle Mr Akibombo, and there's even the ghastly Nigel, who is probably a gay. He's not quite the mincing horror from Murder Is Easy, but he's always laughing and shrieking and spreading marmalade on toast in the middle of a crisis. And if that isn't a sign of a wendy, then I don't know what is.

Poirot muddles through admirably. As a foreigner himself he avoids the worst of it, but there are a fair few clumps of outdated terms and unsympathetic characters. In amongst all this is a fascinating portrait of shared student housing - and a remarkably mixed, accepting lot they are if you remember that at the time many boarding houses had signs outside saying "No Dogs, No Irish, No Blacks". But still... this isn't an easy read at times.

It's the stray details that disturb. I think we're meant to loathe Mrs Nicoletis, and not to like the vile Chandra Lal, and we're supposed to think fondly of Mr Akibombo, who appears to go out on dates with one character even though she actually falls for someone else, even though she does ask him to her wedding. It's just the occasional descriptions of the poor man - sometimes he's quite eloquent, other times he's like the Um-Bongo commercial. And then there are lines like "Akibombo nodded an enthusiastic black woolly head and showed his white teeth in a pleased smile", which is as close to Bo-Jo's dreaded "picaninny smiles" as you would want to get.

But this isn't actually a story about racism. It is about love. And Poirot "suddenly felt very tired of love", when he clears up an initial mystery, which turns out to be about a student turning kleptomaniac in order to gain the interest of the psychology student she loves. This all goes horribly wrong, and soon there's an impressively high body count.

By the end it's all quite curious. Some things are resolved and some things aren't - the mysterious smuggling ring, for example either does, or does not work out neatly. A few people fall in love, and some real nastiness is revealed. It's a great read, but at the same time, there's that troubling question of "Is Christie simply being honest about her times and is she actually quite liberal for them?" remains.

Five Little Pigs (1942)

2009-11-23T01:31:00.000-08:00

PLOT: Poirot is asked to solve a murder that took place 16 years ago, and does so by talking to the five witnesses. A lot.

There's a despicable kind of person who apparently can't resist flicking to the end of a detective novel just to know who did it. Five Little Pigs is that remarkable thing, a book which feel like you needn't to bother.

I'm not claiming any amazing deductive powers here. This is a book that, from a handful of pages in, pretty much screams the name of the villain. The clues are dropped in so obviously they may as well be printed in bold italic with a bit of underlining. But are things really that simple? Even if they're just red herrings, should they be painted such a bright shade of scarlet?

It's a peculiar book all in. Perhaps I'm just saying that because knowing who did it in this case knocks so much of the stuffing out of it. You can, you should, re-read Murder of Roger Ackroyd knowing who did it. But this is one where, from the very first, you don't even detect cunning misdirection, so much as a giant arrow hanging over the perpetrator whenever their name is mentioned. And if it doesn't turn out to be them, then it's an absolutely massive cheat.

In terms of approach it is similar to Josephine Tey's Daughter Of Time, in that it unleashes a detective on a long-ago crime. Poirot must pick his way through recollection and written statements, overturning accepted fact and revealing a deeper psychological truth. Or, if you prefer, Poirot must kick his heels for a couple of hundred pages before revealing the bleeding obvious.

Without the narrative veneer of Hastings, we do get a remarkable insight into the detective's methods. We see him deciding when to "play the foreigner", by turns flattering, deceiving, or applying rigorous candour. We see him carefully, ingeniously cultivating the trust of suspects, of relaying half of a truth in the hopes of securing revelation.

We also see more of Poirot's mind. The book is mostly about the careful interrogation of five suspects - and we see how, powerfully, Poirot doesn't care for any of them very much. Whereas Miss Marple loves people for all their weaknesses, Poirot sees each suspect merely as a type and works on them accordingly.

In many books the human centre is Hastings. In this book it is the cameo of the victims' daughter, all grown up. Everyone else is merely fodder for Poirot's mental machinery. Poor Clara Lemarchant - a wild artist for a father and an equally precarious mother, damned by everyone. Even Clara, determined to vindicate her, says "I wasn't, I don't think, especially fond of her".

The art of the book lies in delicately layering and relayering Clara's idea of her parents. Sometimes we see them as vile grotesques, at others as deeply human and interesting for all of their flaws. Sometimes we side with the mother, sometimes with the father, frequently with their friends, and even occasionally with the wily girl intent on destroying their marriage.

The problem is that, just as Poirot doesn't like any of them very much, neither do we. There's some remarkable psychology at work, but also a sneaking suspicion that Agatha Christie herself doesn't care for any of them either.

It is a cold book. There's little of Christie's trademark humour and warmth. Sometimes, reading these books, you think what fun it would be to meet these people. But not this one - you get an impression of awkward meals, gin and door-slamming.

It is at its most remarkable when it offers portraits of the survivors - such as Lord and Lady Dittisham in their cold, luxurious palace. If Lord Dittisham is a poet without human sympathy, his wife is a statue robbed of a soul.

While I've said the structure is remarkable, it's actually a twist on the route often taken by Ngaio Marsh, where the crime takes place and then is narrated from several points of view by witnesses before the detective sees the way through the woods. And, oddly, just as the heart sinks slightly when you realise you're reading one of the duller Ngaio Marsh novels, there's a similar feeling that hangs over Five Little Pigs - it is a book held prisoner in its structure. It's especially dispiriting when, Poirot having interviewed all five suspects, he then reviews their five written accounts. "Oh no, not again," you groan - even though it's a great exercise in different narrative voices, and is also stripping the detective novel down to its bare essentials - five subtly conflicting narratives. Five little pigs. One porkie pie.

Curiously, Christie will return to the "nostalgia murder" approach a couple of times - including in the late, problematic Poirot adventure, Elephants Can Remember. It's as though she's trying to solve not a murder, but a structure. Somewhere in this, she is thinking, is the key to a brilliant mystery novel. Maybe I've not quite got it yet, but I'll have another go...

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940)

2009-11-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

PLOT: Someone really doesn't like dentists.

This book is about remarkable coincidence. You can buy that a murder happens whenever Poirot goes on holiday, just as Jessica Fletcher's friends probably check in with their solicitors every time she announces she's dropping round.

By now, of course, you'd assume that if you were planning a murder and you realise that Poirot is on holiday with you, you'd have second thoughts. Similarly, if you're a rich heiress with a persecution complex and Poirot turns up, you'd either jump off the train or summon a priest.

At first glance, this book takes that on the chin. Poirot isn't on safari but mundanely at the dentist. This is an everyday creepy setting and a great place for a murder... but...

The chain of coincidence that this book then requires is remarkable.

Poirot has a dentist. Fine.
He shares this dentist with the most powerful financial brain in Britain. Also fine - after all, why not specialise in clever teeth?
Although one of your clients is Miss Sainsbury Seale, who is very dim.
And she just happens to know a powerful secret.
She also just happens to have met a powerful blackmailer who just happens to have toothache.

So, just a few pages in, remarkable machinery has been set in motion and the murderer is presented with a most remarkable opportunity that will change the country's future. It's too good to miss. But, and you should remember this... this is also Poirot's dentist!

For the book to succeed, and it does succeed, Christie lays on top of this coincidence a remarkable number of layers of complexity.

So, as well as the dentist at the centre of the universe we have impostors, super secret spies, mysterious organisations, false telegrams and suspicious fiancees as well as at least one death which is almost motiveless.

This is a book stuffed full of herrings, some of them painted a magnificent red which is patiently washed off by Poirot, leaving you, by the end, aware that the book is about something you really didn't think it could be about.

The framing device of the nursery rhyme adds to the splendid conclusion - it has almost nothing to do with the story, and yet, by the end, you realise it has everything to do with the solution.

The book also re-poses the question of necessary murder to Poirot. Is there such a thing as a crime that is so important that justice cannot be brought? Not in Poirot's eyes. Curiously, the ITV adaptation implies that, by making this choice, Poirot causes the second world war. Which seems a little unfair.

Taken At The Flood (1948)

2009-11-09T01:25:00.000-08:00

PLOT: Can Poirot save rich widow Rosaleen Underhay?

Poirot's made it through the Second World War. When we first met him he was a refugee during the First World War and possibly retired. So how old is he now? It's best not to ask.

Taken At The Flood is interesting from the point of "Does Christie change with the times, or does she simply redress her mannequins in fashionable outfits?". This is a grim novel of a damaged, glum Britain, with air raids, blitzed London and villages plunged into miserable poverty. It's very contemporary and appropriate - there's no sense of conspicuous affluence or that the cast haven't been changed by the global upheaval.

And yet... peel off the new wrappings, and we've the classic village full of suspicion, a rich young heiress, a black sheep, a tiny bit of occult and a lot of vocal and chemical poison. The sense is that, despite everything, England carries on - the world of quiet malice behind the flower arranging.

Poirot is dragged in by the poisonously new age Mrs Lionel Cloade ("M. Poirot, I have come to you under spirit guidance"). It's a story of an Old Family who are trying to adjust to New Money - to their rich brother's nervous widow, Rosaleen, and her domineering brother, David.

It's world of subtle nastiness and complicated resentments. The Cloades despise Rosaleen, but depend on her for money, at the same time as questioning just how she came into her inheritance. The story all comes down to what noble Lynn Cloade realises - "We'd do anything, anything for money."

The story splits two ways - both an investigation of mystery of the past and a mysterious stranger from the present, and Poirot hovers over both, quietly, regretfully investigating. And everywhere he turns is the same motive - "We'd do anything for money". So it is that we meet characters like the shabby genteel Major, who still goes to his club but lives in threadbare poverty, broken by taxation. Every single person in the book is driven by greed - this is the world of classic Christie but come upon hard times.

So it is that we find Poriot at a miserable hotel ("Here there was a good fire, but in a large arm-chair, toasting her toes comfortably, was a monumental old lady who glared at Poirot" and the Coffee Room, "the only time coffee was served there was somewhat grudgingly for breakfast and that even then a good deal of watery hot was its principal component"), carrying out his investigation into the lives of people who are literally mean-spirited. In many ways it's business as usual - complicated lies and alibis, but hanging over it is a sense of tiredness and despair. The war is over but there's no real sense of victory, and everyone's morals are slightly off balance.

It's a melancholy, dismal book, and affecting in its sense of tragedy. The noblest character is Lynn, returning from war to find herself repelled by her lovelorn cousin Rowley and instead besotted with rakish David. But who will she end up with? Well, actually, that's one of the most interesting, and troubling scenes...

SPOILERS:

Lynn goes to see Rowley to break the news that she's leaving him for exciting, risky David. Rowley is anguished - she's been away to war, he's been stuck behind, having to keep the farm going. He feels left out of life and now abandoned by her. For her part she's refusing to give up her independence, her love of excitement.

And then Rowley cracks, and strangles Lynn, and we realise that Rowley's broken the law to keep order.

Only... Poirot turns up at the last minute, suggests a pot of tea, and explains what's really happened. It's quite startling - oddly like the kitchen murder from Torn Curtain in its savagery and civility, but also has a really, really odd conclusion.

Lynn realises that, after all, it is Rowley she loves. Or, as she puts it, "When you caught hold of me by the throat... I knew then that I was your woman." Umm. I think the point is that she's realised that Rowley isn't as meek as she thought he was, but the message that's coming over is that a bit of domestic violence can bring necessary spice to a relationship. Ah well, different times.

The ending is ultimately and appropriately bleak and morally curious. Poirot, the avenging angel, allows death to be misattributed and for a killer to find happiness with someone they attempted to murder.

Peril At End House (1932)

2009-11-03T10:41:00.000-08:00

PLOT: Who could possibly want to kill the eccentric heiress of a ramshackle house?

Crikey. On one level this is a jolly murder romp with a neat twist ending. On another level this is a very dark game of cat and mouse - and Poirot's not necessarily the cat.

Superficially bright and sunny this is Poirot and Hastings on a seaside holiday taking strolls and, in between cups of tea, trying to save young Nick Buckley from some implausible plots against her life.

Actually, this is a complicated look at the Bright Young Things. We've seen them before in The Secret of Chimneys deftly mixing crime and cocktails, but this is a darker brew. Young Nick may seem like an untidy saint, but her friends paint a blacker picture of the society she mixes in, all involved in drug-smuggling, debt and dirty weekends.

We get Nick's best friend Freddie, who doesn't really like Nick, is off her head most of the time, and yet has a certain integrity. We get the honest naval officer who is anything but and the successful art dealer whose as fast as his car.

This contrasts with two dull cousins - honest Maggie and the lawyer, neither of whom are painted as particularly exciting, and yet both of them are revealed as having a lot more going on than first appears.

This is a book of fragile appearances and constant impersonation - only Poirot and Hastings are who they appear to be. We even reach a stage where Poirot meets some comedy Australians and remarks that they're a bit too comedy Australian to be believable.

By the end of the book, even Poirot is being impersonated as part of a plot involving chocolates that aren't what they appear to be and we've a corpse that isn't what it appears to be and ... oh my lord.

You won't be surprised to hear that this is a book with a good twist ending that sees Poirot more than justify his reputation - and a good job too, as the book has seen characters assuring Poirot that they've never heard of him. As it turns out, that isn't what it appears to be, either.

The Clocks (1963)

2009-10-28T10:30:00.000-07:00

PLOT: A mystery man is found dead in room full of clocks.

[ Hello! Thanks to the postal strike it's late this week and we're taking an unscheduled detour from Foreign Travel ]

This is "Late Christie" apparently. Which is another way of saying curiously reflective and even more self-aware. Much discussion is made of the chunk in the middle where Poirot turns literary critic. In this long detour, Poirot announces that he has been reading detective fiction, and offers frank appraisals of some writers (real and semi-disguised).

First up he gives both bullets to his dear friend Ariadne Oliver. "The long arm of coincidence is far too freely employed. And, being young at the time, she was foolish enough to make her detective a Finn..." And on he goes, pointing out that Christie is nothing if not acutely self-aware.

Poirot's lecture also takes in (I'm guessing) Dickson-Carr ("the whole point is always the alibi"), Erle Stanley Gardner ("melodrama stirred up with a stick"), and Chandler ("rye and bourbon")... the exact victims here aren't as important as the points being scored about the genre ("what is a Brownstone mansion - I have never known?"). Finally the Belgian settles happily on Sherlock Holmes.

What seems a pretty siding turns out to have direct bearing on The Clocks, which is a mystery almost about mysteries. In some ways it's a snide sequel to The Seven Dials Mystery. We have another corpse in a room of clocks, we have talk of an organisation of spies, and we even discover Inspector Battle's son investigating (it's never said exactly who "Colin Lamb" is, but it's made fairly clear).

Christie is making the point that time has passed. What was perfect in a Wodehouse-style jape now looks deliberately bizarre. Whereas The Seven Dials mystery was solved in secret corridors, fast cars and high-society, this is uncovered by painstaking and deliberate plodding around a middle-class housing estate. The placidly omniscient Sergeant Battle's son shares his father's quiet efficiency, but his life is more about donkey work.

This is a story of two worlds which Poirot hovers above like a quietly-amused God of a past age. There is the housing estate that Lamb trudges endlessly around with its front rooms and back gardens, and then there is the world of Sheila Webb's typing bureau, a place of boring repetition, of lunch hours and office gossip.

We've met the typing pool before in Christie (notably in They Came To Baghdad), but here this isn't a springboard to espionage, but a very mundane place, where the excitement is a broken heel or a morning off, and their typing work is not secrets, but all too often the the very worst kind of novel ("there is nothing duller than dull pornography").

The housing estate is similarly unglamorous. Gone are the drawing rooms and parlour games of early Christie. Whereas Miss Marple ventured to an estate in The Mirror Crack's From Side To Side, Battle is firmly entrenched in it. But just because it's a lower social class doesn't make the people any less remarkable - we've the magnificent blind teacher, the harrassed mother, the grubby children who say "Coo!", even someone who is referred to as an actual tart. But somewhere among these drab, normal people is a murderer and also a ring of international espionage.

This is a very strange mystery in a very mundane world. It is this contrast that points Poirot to the solution - "the whole thing is melodramatic, fantastic, and completely unreal". Having found this, Poirot unravels this and is even able to solve the murder and the spy case. Although, even here, he can't resist pulling a chain of coincidences out of the bag that even Ariadne Oliver would blench at. You do get to the end of The Clocks charmed and satisfied, but also quietly muttering "So she is her... and she knew this and so when she... and he... and oh...!"

NEXT: Peril At End House

Destination Unknown 1955

2009-10-19T01:11:00.000-07:00

PLOT: Missing scientists, plucky suicide, and The Prisoner in Casablanca.

Almost pure plot, Destination Unknown rattles along triumphantly, trumpeting its difference - No drawing rooms! No detectives! No death! I'm betting this sheer unChristie-ness contributes to its rather low reputation, which is thoroughly undeserved.

The first half is the standard world of the Christie thriller - there are mysterious government agents behind closed doors, luxurious hotels and enigmatic passengers on planes. There are the vividly convincing touches of local detail ("You come with me. We have very fine toilet! Oh very fine! Just like the Ritz Hotel.").

But there is a crucial difference - that of a mysterious women in a hotel who assumes a false name, a wife abandoned by her cheating husband and contemplating suicide in luxurious surroundings. Is this an Agatha Christie figure? *shrugs* What's more important is what Hilary Craven offers the plot - she's able to go on a remarkable mission because she's very willing to die.

This mission takes up the second half of the book, and it is The Prisoner. Hilary finds herself in a mysterious society which could be in Africa or behind the Iron Curtain. There are enigmatic leaders, assumed identities, brainwashers, peculiar rules, surveillance, and all the luxurious comforts of home including shops and cinemas... but it is still a prison, a prison designed to extract knowledge from people the world thinks dead. Frankly, blimey. To take against this book because there aren't corpses in the library is short-sighted - all Christie is missing is a giant killer balloon and some repressed homosexuality and we're there.

There's some intriguing political musings going on here. Christie appears to be saying that communist and fascist and anarchist are all easily swayed. Her Number One isn't a Nightmare Soul, but a cunning capitalist spider sucking knowledge from everyone.

In amongst a shower of riches we're presented with a character called Andy Peters, the veiled awkwardness of two people pretending to be married while under observation, and an uneasy disguise which includes "full Negroid lips".

One of the big shames is that the book peters out. In some ways it's been driving towards this ending, and it ticks a lot of boxes - showdown, secrets, arrests etc, but there's also the queasy sense that diplomatic pragmatism has prevailed over justice and that Christie is hurrying back to familiar ground without having fully explored her amazing alternative society.

Appointment with Death (1938)

2009-10-12T05:58:00.000-07:00

PLOT: Big bad Momma pops it in Petra.

"What an absurdity of an old tyrant!"

Unusually, this book gets duller AFTER the murder is committed.

Christie creates a great villain in Mrs Boynton, the satanic buddha (is there such a thing?) with her vast bulk, toad face and malevolent control over her family. Which is fine until the old dear is finished off, leaving the book without its most interesting character for the last two thirds.

It's the exact reverse of the "Oh, this is all very well, but when will the detective turn up?" factor. Marvellous as he is, Poirot would have to enter cartwheeling with fireworks clamped between his teeth to be as fascinating as Mrs Boynton.

If ever a Christie villain needed a plan for world domination and a death ray it's Mrs B. As it is, she's a supreme evil forced to content herself with torturing her family. As plucky Sarah King comments, it's a bit pathetic really.

And yet, for the 100 pages where Mrs Boynton holds court, she dominates the book, undermining, shredding and manipulating her offspring, making them so colourless that it's quite hard to remember how many step-children she has. One heartily wishes the old bat dead, and then instantly regrets the impulse when facing 150 pages without her.

As though slightly despairing of the Boynton clan, Christie wheels out a vibrant supporting cast. There's the wonderfully Avengers-ish Dr Sarah King, and the brilliant ghastly Lady Westholme with her "large red rocking horse nostrils" and many other finely written scenes ("Lady Westholme entered the room with the assurance of a transatlantic liner coming into dock" is one of many wonderful Wodehouse-isms). There's also a jumpy spinster and a curiously creepy psychiatrist who talks frankly about intercourse ("One always comes back to sex, does one not?")

We score 1 for Pro-Semitism with the wonderfully repellant tour guide ("misery and iniquities the Jews do to us") who everyone deplores. Poirot's replacement Hastings here is Colonel Carbury, a tidy mind in an untidy body whose tie Poirot is always straightening.

There are two further weaknesses that the book must deal with. The first is that all the characters appear to have read Murder On The Orient Express and use its twist ending as a reason for Poirot to drop the case - this is another crime where the world is better without the victim in it. Poirot counters all this admirably ("I do not approve of murder"), but cannot overcome the setting.

The stage play of Appointment With Death elimintates Poirot and, once the characters reach Petra, they stay there. The book gets to Petra, finishes off Mrs B, and then spends the rest of it in hotel rooms. Poirot does not even get to Petra, which seems unfair. One imagines that, for the inevitable ITV adaptation, David Suchet's contract will stipulate "Poirot arrives in Petra on a donkey".

The book finishes in a remarkable fashion. When Poirot summons people to the "You may have wondered why I called you here" scene, there are several suspects missing. What happens next is either clever or arbitrary, but great use is made of a throwaway mention of a shoe being dropped. As to whether the murderer is a good choice or not, Christie changed her mind for the stage play.

This is a curious book. People who don't read Christie say that she's a bad writer but her plots are good. This book is arguably the reverse - it's full of great characters wonderfully described, but the actual mystery is a slight disappointment.

NEXT: Christie does The Prisoner with Destination Unknown

They Came To Baghdad (1951)

2009-10-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

PLOT: Bridget Jones does James Bond in a ripping thriller of intrigue, murder and bad typing.

Victoria Jones is bored of being a very bad typist and on a whim follows a dashing stranger to Iraq where she gets involved in an international conspiracy. Along the way she's kidnapped, betrayed, and goes undercover as an archaeologist with no idea that she alone is the last living key to a global disaster.

Crikey! This is thumpingly good stuff. Just when I was getting tired of murder cocktail with a twist, here comes a charming thriller starring plucky Victoria Jones. By her own admission she's neither intelligent nor smart, but she has bucketloads of pluck and cunning which sees her through a world of lethal murder and secret revolutions admirably.

Victoria is a great heroine and proves how even more fun a Bridget Jones book would be if the guest cast dropped like flies. She's endearingly at home at an ambassador's reception and totally out of place infiltrating a sinister society. It's knuckle-gasp time as she trots into work, surrounded by obviously Villainous Sorts, making a hash of typing up the lethal plans of the Olive Branch.

With her wounded pride and her "Some of the cleverest people can't spell" attitude she sticks out like a sore thumb against the ice cool Catherine who you just know is a bad 'un. After Poirot's perfections, Victoria is a breath of fresh air, armed only with her niceness and determination.

Christie pulls off 1950s Iraq with aplomb and not a whiff of racism, peopling it with vivid locals, arrogant Englishers, and offices with secret doors and hidden agendas. We get the super-super spy Fakir Carmichael who is so noble he'd make Biggles blub, we've the secretly efficient Mr Dakin, we've a wonderfully decent hotelier who doesn't mind that Victoria's broke, and diplomats with a love of good furniture.

It's splendid, splendid stuff - and just when you think it can't get better, comes Victoria's visit to the archaeological dig, and a spot of clear autobiography for Christie as she faithfully explains her Mesopotamian labours and the wonders of Max Mallowan. As charming as the reality was, the real Christie wasn't on the tun from a death cult. But there we are.

NEXT: Big bad momma in Petra - it's Appointment With Death!

Murder On The Orient Express (1934)

2009-09-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

PLOT: Seriously - have you not seen the film? Businessman found dead on famous train.

Is this the most famous Christie because of the film? It certainly has to have one of the best plots or plot twists.

But it also works on several other levels. The setting is fabulously exciting, and the snowdrift strands the suspects strangely outside time. The feeling is that the murder has placed everyone beyond the world, and they can't be reached until Poirot has solved the crime. Which makes it sound like Donnie Darko, but still...

Christie has gathered together a wild variety of exciting characters as suspects. Death On The Nile will see an even wilder bunch of travellers, but we've still got everything from Russian Princesses to Indian Colonels, all drawn remarkably vividly and somehow fitted into the world's most famous train.

The book's only problem is THAT film. The film is so memorable, the denoument so striking that, wonderful as the book is, it's a bit of a plod.

Other twist novels repay re-reading just to see what's going on. But this one somehow fails as the enormity of what Christie is doing hangs over it like a flashing neon sign saying "Get On With It!".

It rewards perseverance, however, as the subtle knitting of the wool that's being pulled over Poirot's eyes becomes more apparent - sometimes in lines of dialogue so thunderingly obvious you wish you could slap the Belgian for not solving the crime at once... and sometimes in details so gently subtle that you praise Poirot for picking up on them.

The curiosity of the book is that the solution is so ingenious that it is merely Poirot's presence that solves the crime. It would be impossible otherwise... and yet Poirot himself makes some remarkable leaps.

For instance, in a room full of dummy clues he somehow seizes on the one real one and uses it to unpick the case by a bizarre series of flea-like intellectual leaps. As a reader you do sometimes feel like crying "oh, come on now", such as when he unmasks someone as a secret cook.

Poirot is at his most admirably ludicrous in this book. When asked "Do you belong to the United Nations?" he responds "No, I belong to the world." And so it goes on - this remarkable character carefully concealing any impossible leaps of logic under those brilliantly waxed moustaches.

Poirot again acts almost as an agent of fate. When he turns down Mr Ratchett's offer of work ("I do not like your face"), the millionaire's fate is sealed, just as happens to Linnet in Death On The Nile. The difference between the books is that in Death On The Nile, Poirot wants justice. In this book the detective is simply consumed by solving the puzzle - justice comes second to proving his own brilliance.

It's also a remarkable book in that, complex as it is, Christie is able to withhold the solution until a mere five pages from the end with Poirot's genre-tipping exclamation of "This is extraordinary - They cannot..."

And, once Christie has torn up the rule book, she jumps very neatly on the pieces with a final twist that is as morally satisfying as it is unusual, both for Christie and for the golden age of crime. "I have the honour to retire from the case..." remarks Poirot, as though he senses this is his finest hour.

NEXT: Bridget Jones meets James Bond in They Came To Baghdad.

The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)

2009-09-21T07:40:00.000-07:00

PLOT: Divorse! Diamonds! and Dead Heiresses on the Blue Train to Nice.

James: Written when Christie was going through her divorce, this book suffers as a consequence. It's not that it's bad, but that the events were perhaps preying on her mind.

On the one hand it's a dry run for Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile - glamourous setting, a background of intrigue, a doomed millionaire, suspicious supporting artists... and yet...

At heart it's a tale of two heiresses. There's Ruth Van Alden the tough woman of the world. And then there's Katherine Grey (note the name) - the dull one. Is Christie working out her complicated feelings towards her first husband through these two women?

Poor Ruth has been trapped in a messy marriage with a philandering husband and is trying to escape for a little happiness. Of course, she is one of Christie's doomed heiresses, and she won't trouble us for longer than to convince us of her flaws.

By contrast, Katherine has come into some money and is learning how to live. She's almost impossibly saintly and forms an instant rapport with Poirot over romans policier, as he calls them. She's striving to fit into international society but her heart belongs in... St Mary Mead!

St Mary Mead is another strange trace element in the book, which takes a while to get going and then goes all over the place. We open with mysterious jewel thieves and international assassins. Then we've Ruth's domestic drama, then St Mary Mead and the questions over Katherine's inheritance, then the Blue Train and then it's villas and hotels and police stations and beaches and Moonbase Alpha.

Murder on the Orient Express makes much more use of the single setting of the train and the restrained approach makes it a claustrophobic book, whereas Mystery Of The Blue Train plays out rather like a holiday novel with a bit of crime nibbling at the edges.

Similarly, Death On The Nile does all its set up in the first chapter and dumps us straight in Egypt, compared to Blue Train's hundred pages of set up before "And then the train started."

It's full of loose ends, or ideas that will be made more of in later books. The double-whammy of jewel theft and heiress slaying will reoccur in Death On The Nile, but this time as part of a triple twist.

When we next see St Mary Mead, there will be no mention of inquistive Katherine Grey, nor of her old lady friend Amelia Viner, who has a sharp understanding of human nature and a wicked intelligence... but we can see where this one is going. We'll even see Poirot taking on another female sidekick who is an Agatha Christie figure, but we'll have to wait a while for that.

This is nowhere near as bad a book as Christie makes out. Written at a time when she was having understandable trouble trusting men, it does have a strangely dual approach to them. The main suspect is a no-good toy boy who is undeniably attractive - and he's by no means the worst man in the book.

Poirot himself does all right here (even getting the attentions of a lady). He is on fine form, but sadly missing the narrative skills of Hastings, all pomposity without the leavening that Hastings provieds. He's really just there to solve the mystery. He doesn't feel like a super brain with the wings of fate beating at his shoulder. He's simply the world's greatest detective.

NEXT: Shall we have another go at that? It's Murder On The Orient Express

Death on the Nile (1937)

2009-09-14T01:02:00.000-07:00

PLOT: An heiress is slaughtered on a Nile Cruise.

Death on the Nile an obvious place to start a detour onto International Christie, a world of luxurious hotels and outrageous travelling companions.

It's as though Christie has suddenly realised the marvellous variety of people you can meet on holiday (indeed, she even admits so in the preface to the Penguin edition), and that foreign travel allows an easy jamming together of murderers, terrorists and jewel thieves in a way that would seem improbable in St Mary Mead but is somehow excusable on the Nile.

This isn't the first time Christie has tried this, but it's a great place to start as it's just so confident.

We start with a dazzling first chapter that reads like a film script as we leap from scene to vivid scene - hopping across characters and continents, setting everything up like a complicated jigsaw.

When we reach Egypt a sharp reversal has taken place. The loveable heiress has become a man-eater, her bumbling best friend a spiteful stalker. Shcok reversal! What looked to be the story of how Linnet marries the wrong man and covets her best friend's husband has instead become the fallout from Linnet stealing her best friend's man.

This clearly places Linnet as The Victim. She's nice, she's generous, she's clever and witty, but she's made a fatal error in stealing Simon. Curiously, Poirot gives her a chance to confess her sin to him, but she refuses, and so is marked for death.

The first half of the book is full of scenes like this, where Poirot almost begs people not to commit crimes. Whilst priding himself on his deductive brain, he shows himself as keen a student of human nature as Miss Marple. If only they would listen to Poirot then nothing would happen, and this would be the dullest Christie, rather than one of the greatest.

Immense machinery is being wheeled into place that only Poirot can sense. Everyone else is looking at the historical wonders of Egypt, but Poirot is looking at every one of his fellow passengers and thinking Very Carefully about them. Thank god he never flew by RyanAir.

A secretive novelist, a shady lawyer, a communist, a financier, a society boy, a wise traveller... the list of characters rolls out and out, and must eventually be reeled back in at the end of the book in a way that is slightly maddening but also immensely satisfying. This is a book where almost anyone and everyone could have done it... which is an idea for later.

Once the murder actually happens (and it takes forever) a whole whirl of seemingly unconnected events are unleashed, and the buildup pays off greatly. There's an enormous sense of "well, since X and Y can't have done it, then that means..." which is quite thrilling.

An early review demands you read it twice ("Once for enjoyment and once to see how the wheels go round" The Times), and this is as rewarding a read if you know who did it. The first time is about Agatha Christie's intelligence, the second reading flatters the reader's intelligence. The sheer impossibility of the crime plays off against the "no, now hang on, so the maid's actually... ah....".

That said, there is a moment where Poirot is wrong. He claims to have misattributed overhearing the phrase "We've got to go through with it now", but, if you check he hasn't (It's in Chapter 7, and Poirot's recollection is in Chapter 29).

The "funny little man" is seen through the eyes of other characters, as for once, Captain Hastings isn't here. The poor fellow would muddle things too much, and his chances of managing to solve a murder and a terrorist conspiracy are doubtful. But dear old Colonel Race is allowed to show off his intellect, so long as he constantly defers to the cleverness of Poirot, who, in his own quiet way, must defer to the cleverness of Miss Christie.

NEXT: The wheels come off The Adventure Of The Blue Train...

The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side (1962)

2009-09-07T00:40:00.000-07:00

PLOT: A filmstar moves to St Mary Mead, sees something awful, and it's not the lower middle classes.

James: As a Late Marple this is a smart contrast to Murder At The Vicarage, and proves that, whatever telly people think, Christie moved with the times.

St Mary Mead now has a modern housing estate and a supermarket. Jane Marple is forever starting stories about "how this is just like when the parlourmaid..." and then realising that no-one knows what a parlourmaid is.

This isn't a book about nostalgia, it's about the importance of Moving On and Letting Go, both for the murderer and the hero. Miss Marple may be very old, but she's determinedly "with it". Not, perhaps, as with it as Swinging Dame Margaret Rutherford, but quite determined to go and find out about the Housing Development. No sooner has she been introduced than she's off there on a visit and smartly prevents a murder.

Reassured that times may change, but human nature doesn't, Miss Marple sails through the rest of the book. This may be a story where Miss Marple takes a back seat, but she's the best back seat driver in the business.

Dear Dolly Bantree and Inspector Craddock rush around doing her work for her. Where Miss Marple used to rely on spying things from her garden and nipping out for gossip, now she must wait for events to be reported to her over sherry. She barely even meets the principal cast, but that doesn't stop her from Knowing Them.

The story itself (What Did Happen At The Village Fete?) rolls on without her. In another late book we see Miss Marple as Nemesis, and here she is the gentlest kind of Avenging Fury, popping round for a spot of tea and unravelling at the very end when events have played themselves out.

A big joy for the book is Miss Marple's live-in carer, Miss Knight. Jane Marple may have defeated serial killers and gun-wielding lunatics, but she's almost outwitted by dreadfully nice, frightfully mumsy Miss Knight. Against the patronisingly jolly tide of cushion-plumping and forced naps, we see Miss Marple at her most acidly rebellious. Oh, if only she could get away with pinning a murder on Miss Knight...

Miss Marple is as complicated as ever. Like a rural Buddha she dispenses wisdom ("People aren't really foolish. Not in villages"), but she's also not above dismissing best friend Dolly Bantree for extolling the virtues of marriage "with a spinsterish cough". Despite now having a reputation as The Old Lady Who Solves Murders, she's still the same sharp, practical woman, easily sidetracked from solving murder by an interesting dressmaking problem.

Despite being dedicated to Margaret Rutherford, this book is about a film star as unlike Rutherford as possible, the kind of fragile beauty David Niven wrote about. Christie depicts a *very* 60s world of pill-popping filmmakers living on nerves and cocktails. It's a milieu she depicts sharply but without ever going into great detail (Does she ever write about films elsewhere?).

This is also a book with a great number of villains. One doesn't even break the law, another commits a horrific crime accidentally, one goes on a killing spree, and yet another may even get away with murder. Above them all is Miss Marple who sharply and immediately understands each of them - indeed, spends a large amount of the book being oddly cruel about one character who we can only think quite fondly of.

There's some oddness here as well, most of it to try and make a fairly simple mystery more complicated - there's a remarkable coincidence about ex-husbands, abandoned children, some casual racism, and a good deal of talk about interior decorating, but the main thrust of the book is about Miss Jane Marple solving a crime without ever meeting the murderer.

NEXT: All abroad for Death on the Nile

Murder is Easy (1939)

2009-08-31T09:19:00.000-07:00

PLOT: Serial killings! Gay satanists! Sinister villagers! A cat called Wonkey Pooh!

James: How brilliantly unlike Murder At The Vicarage this is - and yet, how also fittingly of the same set. This is the Agatha Christie jigsaw at its best, worked out like a diabolically ingenious game of Cluedo. Valiant hero, Brainy heroine, Kind-hearted Lord of the Manor, Apple-cheeked old lady, Sinister Shopkeeper, Busty Barmaid, Smug Doctor, Grieving Widow, etc... all the pieces are wheeled onto the board, but by making a couple of genius twists, it's a whole new board game.

Just one example is the way that the Lord of the Manor here is ghastly new money. We've had a hint of this before in The Seven Dials Mystery, but the idea is marvellously fledged out here, as we see the many ways in which a little bit of social disorder upsets the entire balance of the village.

The village of Wychwood is halfway between St Mary Mead and the Wicker Man. There's gossip and twinkly old maids, but there's also a sinister tinct of black magic hanging over the villagers. We have a barmaid who is dutifully sluttish, widows who mutter of "something evil" afoot... and we even get... A GAY IN THE VILLAGE!!!

Antiques Dealer Mr Ellsworthy has escaped from The League of Gentlemen. With his hands the colour of a rotten corpse, his strange manners, and his fondness for pagan sacrifice, he's an odd beast indeed, not helped by the epithets "artistic", "mincing", "queer", "Miss Nancy" and even (my! sides!) "gay" that are heaped upon him and his purple-shirted colleagues. It's not even worth trying to reclaim him as a "noble" depiction that clearly belongs to his times - just find him genuinely creepy and disturbing, and quail at the "something unpleasant" which is promised for him at the end of the book. No doubt meted out by God-fearing Christians in a dark alley with hob-nail boots.

Loathe him or loathe him, Mr Ellsworthy is a hint that this is Agatha Christie gone wrong, and marvellously so. The social niceties are barely observed here, as our dim-witted but valiant hero blunders around pretending to research death cults, blithely asking if anyone's raised the dead, missing clanging clues, accidentally falling in love and playing abysmal tennis.

Poor Luke Fitzwilliam makes a great contrast to the Vicar narrator of Murder in the Vicarage. With the Vicar we have, if not an intellectual equal to Miss Marple, at least a decent second, but dear Luke is the fellow Captain Hastings cribbed prep off with mixed results. Forever wandering down lonely lanes, placing himself in jeopardy, and missing big clues, it is, you feel, only his sheer goodness that saves him from being yet another casual victim.

For this is the thing about Murder Is Easy - the death toll is Enormous! Up until this point, we've looked at books with pretty much a single murder and a feeling of brooding menace, but all that's bunged out of the window. This is a gleeful death-a-thon, with the sheer volume of victims adding to the macabre humour of it all. One of the many things wrong with Wychwood is that no-one's really noticed - with people dropping on all sides they're too busy muddling through to think that there's anything wrong. Well, that is apart from a couple of valiant sidekicks and reliable old sorts.

Spoilers:

Of course, the real delight of Murder Is Easy is that it's an Anti-Marple book. Agatha Christie got on to the joke before anyone else - what if the saintly pensioner sleuth committed all the crimes and drove her colleagues to destruction with a merry laugh, a twinkling eye, and a slightly bitter pot of Lapsang Souchong?

Poor crazy Miss Wayneflete is an utter joy. There's really not that much mystery to this book (beyond wailing "How can you not have spotted?" as the hero trots down yet another lonely lane where "anything could happen"), but there's considerable fun in Miss Wayneflete's delight at realising that she's about to get away with it all again. "I know who did it!" Luke will proclaim, causing Miss Wayneflete to give a nervous start, before he announces that it's definitely the earnest young Doctor/ the Lord of the Manor / that Sinister Gay with a fondness for getting cock all over his hands.

There's even a touching psychology underpinning all this. Miss Wayneflete's madness stems from social humiliation, sexual repression and cruelty to budgies, her fragile psyche kept going only by Victorian Values and regular slayings.

This is a joyous, joyous book, and features a welcome cameo from Inspection Battle.

NEXT: The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side

Murder At The Vicarage (1930)

2009-08-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

PLOT: When Colonel Protheroe is murdered in his study, the Vicar must solve a crime with the help of his neighbour, Jane Marple.

"In St Mary Mead everyone knows your most intimate affairs. There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands."

James: Miss Marple is born old. She's a character hard to imagine in her youth (although writer Julian Symons has a young her solving crime with Sherlock Holmes), and she steps straight into The Murder At The Vicarage:

"Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner - Miss Wetherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is much the more dangerous."

According to the novel's earnest narrating vicar, St Mary Mead is a village that thrives on humdrum scandal, where a change in shaving foam is a considerable sensation - but by the end of the book, you've realised that the novel's vicious crones and gossiping servants have all been looking in the wrong direction - for St Mary Mead is a village that contains thieves, impostors, vigilantes, tragic heroines, sinister archaeologists and, of course, a murderer. In some ways you suspect that Miss Marple turns to solving crime merely to clear all of this drama out of the way so that she can go back to detecting pregnancies and infidelities.

For St Mary Mead is a village that finds itself in a detective story. This is mentioned several times, beginning in the very first scene "Makes one think of detective stories" announces lovely Griselda, the vicar's wife, revealing that she's addicted to them. Later on we discover that Miss Marple has been hurriedly educating herself with a steady stock of them from the village library (a tiny, lovely detail which makes its way gloriously into the Margaret Rutherford films, where Miss Marple storms the local library demanding the latest Agatha Christie).

This air of Cluedo hangs around the victim, the safely unloved Colonel Protheroe, who barely appears even in flashback. Whereas the matriach of A Mysterious Affair At Styles was one of the book's more vivid characters, the dead Colonel is more a grotesque vacuum. This is entirely approrpriate for Miss Marple - wheares Poirot is most interested in the mechanics of a crime, the spinster is much more of a psychologist, and the book turns on Miss Marple's acute perceptions of the lively characters that inhabit it, as opposed to Styles' rather sketchier figures. Which makes it all the more curious when you realise that, in many ways, these are very similar stories with very similar solutions.

But everything in the world of St Mary Mead is wonderfully vivid. Remember the BBC's marvellous Miss Marple title sequence? A rolling series of pencil sketches of village life, each Arcadian idyll gradually revealing skulduggery, evil, and the odd corpse on the cricket lawn? That's St Mary Mead captured perfectly. Christie's characters are all marvellous - even her thumbnail sketches such as "Miss Hartnell, who is weather-beaten and jolly and much dreaded by the poor". We get the suspiciously scattter-brained deb Lettice Protheroe, an enigmatic professor digging up a barrows, a slatternly secretary, a louche artist, a rude policeman - it's all in there. And, of course, the servants.

Servants and gossip go together in Agatha Christie like electricity and wiring. Whispers and "it's not my place to be listening at doors to be sure" have figured prominently in earlier books, but it is in this book that the details of the crime are carefully knitted together by Christie's supreme gossip spider. The vicar wryly observes "In St Mary Mead the best authority is always somebody else's servant". "Ah, that explains something the maid said," is a typical comment of Inspector Slack's about a murderous threat overheard. It's all very delicately done - the observation of chance details, the genteely unstated suggestion that an alibi is unpicked by a maid during her afternoon delight with the fishermonger's boy.

This is an assured comedy, where murder must muddle along as best as it can. The vicar and his marvellous wife are as worried about the crime as they are about their awful maid. Miss Marple must similarly manage her audacious deductions whilst being genuinely flustered by her awful nephew, serious novelist Mr Raymond West - "Murder is so crude," he remarks, "I take no interest in it", to which Miss Marple can't resist commenting "Raymond and I have been discussing nothing else all through dinner."

What is a serious novelist doing in this book? His poems may have no capital letters and Miss Marple, while genuinely concerned about his comfort and his pipe tobacco, finds time to say "He writes very clever books, I believe, though people are not nearly so unpleasant as he makes out. Clever young men know so little of life..." Can it be that Agatha Christie is having a wry pop at serious fiction?

The people of St Mary Mead are all flawed, to various degrees villainous, but all of them deeply, vividly human - as seen in the remarkable scene where the vicar suddenly preaches a sermon of fire and vengeance, stripping the village bare with his words. The book is full of moments like this - for all the tea and scandal there is a maniac who slashes portraits in attics...

Even Miss Marple is not quite the sainted avenger that repute would have us believe. She is referred to as "dangerous" and "unpopular" a surprising number of times. She's nice - genuinely much warmer than the other retired Furies of the village, but her sheer acuity is what makes her feared. Nothing, absolutely nothing escapes her notice, and the book sees her settling scores and playing cards she has held close to her chest for years. But even her omniscience is something of a front. It's easy to assume that if the vicar handed over the narration to Jane Marple, this would be a brief pamphlet - but this is a book where, for most of its duration, Miss Marple is wrong. It's a detail that's easy to miss, but an important one - for it makes this wonderful woman all the more human.

NEXT: Black magic mayhem in Murder is Easy

The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)

2009-08-17T01:07:00.000-07:00

Plot: A man is found dead surrounded by seven alarm clocks. Lady Bundle Brent hunts down a sinister international conspiracy.

James: The sequel to The Secret of Chimneys may not be quite the same perfect trifle, but it's doing some interesting things. There are still the Bright Young Things, but they're in it up to their necks. In the first few pages they start dropping dead, and soon it is plucky Lady Bundle Brent against the world, with only a clutch of wise friends aiding her in her mission to stay one step ahead of the machinations of the Club of Seven Dials.

Yet another deft blend of country house murder mystery with John Buchan and PG Wodehouse, this book finds time to fold in an Arnolod Bennett pop at the ex-bicycle salesman Sir Oswald Coote and his wife who just can't handle the servant problem - unlike the capable Bundle and her father, the foggy Lord Caterham. There's also a bit more restrained racism, such as when one character protests at an alias "Short of being described as Rothschild I don't mind" and there's much puzzling of the ways foreigners spell their names - but there's little to trouble the horses.

This is archly self-aware. Bundle frequently says about the sinister Seven Dials things like "They're the sort of crowd I always imagined... only existed in books" - and, as the book ticks on, the sinister club of masked adventurers seems both more menacing and more bizarre, with the theories about who these sinsister schemers could be seeming more and more improbable.

It all leads to a denouement that is both baffling and remarkable. There's no "You may be wondering why I called you here today" scene - instead, the twist is so good we hear "Get a chair for her! It's all been a bit of a shock, I can see." And then... well, what happens next is quite remarkable.

If we are cheated of the "Damn your meddling, Poirot!" unveiling, there's still a lot of unmasking, as Christie explains to us, tactfully and carefully how thoroughly she has deceived us for a couple of hundred pages. It's not unusual to arrive at the end of a Christie mystery with no idea of the villain(s), to have missed most of the clues, and to be pleasantly thrilled at our own stupidity. But this is rather like the Birmingham ferris wheel that gave a merry narration of the Paris skyline. While Christie does not lie to us, we arrive at the end having been constantly misinformed and misdirected, but having had a thoroughly pleasant journey - and with an odd yearning to go round again just to make sure.

The Secret of Chimneys (1925)

2009-08-10T01:06:00.000-07:00

The Plot: Much to the alarm of Lord Caterham, the family seat of Chimneys finds itself the centre of an international conspiracy, with dead royalty, stolen treasure, and master criminals wandering the grounds.

James: This is PG Wodehouse's James Bond novel. Possibly the most rewarding book ever written, this is a giddy whirl of crown princes, foreign locations, hotels, sinister assassins, secret passages, dead foreigners, impassive detectives and blundering young things.

Let's quickly turn to the marvellously dry Superintendent Battle, who is basically Jeeves:

"Detective stories are mostly bunkum... but they amuse people... and they're useful, sometimes."

The entire cast are beautifully depicted - this is a leap on from The Mysterious Affair At Styles. The story has a firm centre with implacable Battle, plucky gal "Bundle" Brent, twinkling adventuress Mrs Revel and international rogue Tony Cade. But beyond that are a wonderfully-depicted collection of baffled gentry and bumbling foreigners.

The Well-To-Do English get both barrels from Christie, especially stuffed shirt politico George Lomax (forever on the point of a fine speech) and his assistant, the lovelorn dimwit Bill Eversleigh. A lot of Christie's casual racism actually emanates from these kind of people - the thoughtless and the pompous, who are conviced the world is off to rack-and-ruin all thanks to Johnny Foreigner. These are lazy, arrogant, wasteful people who deserve everything that's coming to them, yet somehow avoid it.

The true class of the book rests with Lord Caterham and his daughter - the Lord too wisely indolent to care, and dear Bundle crammed full of pluck and stamina and shrewd character judgment.

It is people like this who can take one look at Anthony Cade and decide that, for all his outward roguery, he's got a heart of gold and deserves a stiff cocktail. Cade may be devious and cunning, but he's a good egg - and it's a measure of all the other characters in this book how they react to him. Women adore him, both the wily Battle and the eccentric Baron Lollipop are impressed by him, and there's something about him that turns quiet waiters into cat burglars.

Cade is Christie's first Action Hero. He's full of thoughtful vim in a story where every other man is reserved. Even Supintendent Battle is practically asleep, leaving all leaping to the quasi-comical Surete Expert. Compare Cade's rugged candour to Poirot, and the contrast is remarkable - this is a man with brains and more than two gears.

His only match in the story are the gals, who are all spirited things, quite prepared, if absolutely necessary, to marry a dimwit if it's for the good of their country. But they'd rather do something ripping. Constantly coming over as much smarter than the men, they're all about quick thinking and fast cars and fun. It's what helps makes the book so giddy and clever. How perfectly screaming, as Bundle would say.

In contrast, Inspector Battle is a splendidly self-effacing non-entity. Like Jeeves he is classily classless. He's always there to say just the right thing, or offer a discrete word. His purpose is to save the day, with the minimum of fuss, and then to quietly disappear, the proprieties observed.

The foreigners are mostly there for fun and misdirection. "Talking to foreigners always makes me so thirsty" sighs Lord Caterham at one point. They may carry guns or knives, but they're always the butt of a cheap joke - with their silly names (Mr Hiram Fish), their conversational inelegance, and even their smoky rooms full of sinister plots. It's all good clean fun, and the portraits are pure Wodehouse - grandly-done sketches rather than calculated racism.

This isn't to say that the book gets off without the occasional wince. A comical Baron at one point remarks "Something wrong I knew there would be... He has married a black woman in Africa!" which is regrettable pidgin, to say the least. But, I suppose, it fits with the times.

Christie is actually at her most blistering when she looks at the English lower-middle-classes. Here's her description of daytrippers to Chimneys:

"Bert, the humorist of the party, nudges his girl and says 'Eh! Gladys, they've got two pennyworth of pictures here right enough.' And then they go and look at more pictures and yawn and shuffle their feet and wish it was time to go home."

She's also at her bleakest (understandably) when describing Public Transport: "My belief in the brotherhood of man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room."

As a sentiment it seems to sit oddly in what looks like such a creamy froth of a book - but then, when you step back, you realise this is a dark subversion of Wodehouse: If these upper class fools really are running the country, then who is to save us? That this book manages to offer its own, quietly subversive solution is the real Secret of Chimneys.

And yes - if you're planning on reading just one Christie, please let it be this.

The Big Four (1927)

2009-08-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

Plot: Can Hercule Poirot defeat the Big Four, a mysterious conspiracy with a magnetic death ray and plans for global domination? Blimey.

James: Prepostorous, magnificent tosh. The Big Four is the very last Agatha Christie book you'd expect. It's like Poirot written by a 9 year old. And yet it's also the accomplished work of someone well-read in her field.

This came out in 1927, the same year as the final Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. And here Poirot and Hastings are as close to Holmes and Watson as possible. They even have a long-suffering landlady, a fireplace, and I'm fairly convinced Poirot smokes a pipe.

But if this is a Holmes pastische, then it's Professor Moriarty's sinister conspiracy of The Final Problem, as Poirot must try and elude an enemy as cunning as he is, with eyes everywhere. The book is similarly full of fake notes, plausible messengers and impostors.

It's more than a Holmes pastische, though. The global conspirators come from John Buchan's The Power House and the 39 Steps, which also gives us The Destroyer, the charming master of disguise. There are also elements from Fu Man Chu in the unseen Li Chang Yen who operates through sinister East End Tongs. And then there's an air of Guy Barlow's Dr Nikola - Master Criminal, a master of international kidnap and murder, who is always one step ahead of the game, with his eyes on the prize of Tibetan immortality.

But to go from reading the archetypal country house murder of The Mysterious Affair At Styles to this is eye watering. Originally conceived as a short-story collection, stuff just happens. And keeps happening at a relentless pace that leaves poor Hastings dizzy.

Poirot may solve the individual cases but he frequently loses his opponent. The actual cases are a mixed bag - for every fiendish puzzle that relies on a tiny hole in a rug or a partially defrosted leg of lamb, there are stories that are lame coincidence disguised with sheer dash.

Thus we bump into Poirot's villainous old flame, Countess Rossakoff. Before we can even think it's not the smartest move of The Big Four to employ her, luckily, she tries to drop a tree on our heroes (Brilliant described by Poirot as "Hercule Poirot might now be crushed out of existence - a terrible calamity for the world. You too, mon ami - though that would not be such a national catastrophe.")

Similarly, when our adventurers try and track down that Master of Disguise, Number Four, aka "The Destroyer", Poirot unmasks him through a classified advert as a failed actor called Claude. We would be reeling from the bathos of all this, were it not that Christie introduces Claude's old girlfriend, the splendidly down-at-heel Flossie Monroe. Christie shows a surprising flair for the tart-with-the-heart-of-gold. Flossie is a great creation ("'Ah, you Frenchmen! Naughty, naughty!' she wagged her finger at him in an excess of archness."), and it is a shame that she's an all-too brief cameo.

The rest of the book is given over to dazzling events in dizzying locations. Poor Hastings gets to yell "My god! You fiend! Not that!" to sinister foreigners, is gassed several times, tied up frequently, bamboozled, dangled over rivers and generally treated like Penelope Pitstop. It is a sad oversight that he is not fastened to a railway track.

Oddly for such an unreal book, his relationship to Poirot is at its most fond. Poirot is as dismissive and manipulative as ever of his friend's mental powers, but deeply fond of him. "I hope they will not succeed in masssacring Hastings," he muses, "That would annoy me greatly."

You have to wonder why a genius would go around with such a bumbler. I guess it's similar to the way that pretty people have a plain friend, just to make sure they stand out.

But the relationship also allows the book's greatest coup - that of the introduction of the marvellously named Achille Poirot. Yes, Poirot has a twin brother. As he admits archly, all detectives have a cleverer brother.

Spoilers:

And it is to Achille that the last third of the book belongs. With Hercule dead, we find ourselves in a rerun of The Empty House, only with Mycroft Holmes making a reluctant appearance. Of course, Achille turns out to be a trick. Then he doesn't. Then he does again, in a switch of events that's breathless and cunning but also a bit of a cheat. Poor Hastings.

The resolution is disappointing. Naturally it takes place in the villains' secret lair, but after all of the build up, it is rather brief, no matter how explosive.

But overall, this is is a thrilling book, not short on incident, although oddly impersonal. It's refreshing, if disconcerting, to see Poirot so out of his normal setting. As the dastardly Number Four comments at one point: "Return to your former avocations, and solve the problems of London society ladies."

Kate:I shall start by ‘fessing up that I remember very little about this one and get it confused with The Seven Dials Mystery (which we’ll be covering in the not too distant future).

But passing over that for a moment….it’s almost impossible not to read Poirot and Hastings as a response to Holmes and Watson, albeit with the dashing man of action transformed into a neat little man with tisanes and moustache wax. The travel sick Poirot is ill-equipped for the sort of jet-setting international thrillers demand, and it does seem like a strange segue for the Christie of country house mysteries and village gossip. But she’d obviously done her research among the works of other crime writers; this definitely has the air of Conan Doyle about it and later short story collection “Partners in Crime” sees Tommy and Tuppence very much playing detectives in a series of affectionate parodies of other authors.

“The Big Four” has a sheer adventurous bonkerness that isn’t common in Christie; Poirot’s known for solving mysteries sitting in his chair, moustaches in perfect order, but in this story he’s a much more active detective. Trains and escapes from them feature heavily, in a very Sherlockian fashion, with Poirot and Hastings leaping off a train in the opening chapter and using the emergency cord to sneak away in “Radium Thieves”.

There’s a definite note of melodrama; any novel in which Hastings can describe the villain (with no irony whatsoever) as “Mad – mad - with the madness of genius!” is clearly to be taken with a pinch of salt. Christie uses the clichés of mystery fiction with great verve, from a dying victim leaving a clue to their killer, to a curare blowpipe and transparent disguises. Hastings as a proxy for the slow-witted reader is a common theme in the series, and here he is repeatedly lead right up the garden path by Poirot, on the excuse that he has “a nature so beautiful and so honest….unless you are yourself deceived, impossible for you to deceive others!”.

When the book was written in 1927, genuine international conspiracies and espionage must have been a fairly recent memory, but these sinister Chinamen and mysterious Russians inhabit a completely different fictional universe. Either Christie or her readers must have been quite fond of the colourful Countess Rossakoff, since she reappears in “Poirot’s Early Cases” and “The Seven Labours of Hercules”, and is the closest eternal bachelor Poirot ever comes to romance.

The book’s origins as a short story collection are evident in the sheer number of different problems and villains presented to us, and the speed at which they’re dealt with. “Radium Thieves” is a prime example of this, wit Poirot detecting a dastardly plot, the real plot behind the fake plot, being captured, discovering the villain and moving swiftly on – all within 40 pages. In the bigger picture of saving the world from A Fate Worse Than Death, none of this seems to achieve much, but it’s certainly a fun way to pass the time.

Next book: following the theme of international intrigue, I offer you The Secret Of Chimneys (almost certainly to be followed by The Seven Dials Mystery.

The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1920)

2009-07-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

JAMES: We're starting at the beginning. And it's already archetypal Agatha Chrisite - Poirot investigates a locked-room mystery in a country house. But this book is about so much more than that.

For a start, it's a war novel - a First World War novel. And there aren't many of those. This genteel murder takes place while the guns go crump at The Front, which lends the book an odd air. Why should this single death matter when thousands are dying every day? And yet it is made to matter, due to Poirot's great humanity. While everyone else tuts about rationing, reads war poems, or decries the state of the gardens now that the servants are dead, it is Poirot who is the human centre.

We first meet him as a refugee. He's a dispossesed pensioner, limping from a war wound. Once Poirot was the world's greatest detective, but he's clearly on his last legs here. Even living in poverty-stricken solitude, he's still a commanding presence. And yes, he's an ecentric, fussy oddity right from the start, with his enormous egg of a skull and his precise manners - and yet he's the one person who cares the most about the murder victim, and about ensuring a happy outcome for the rest of the family. He even refers to himself as "Papa Poirot", asking the strange ragbag of ciphers to confide in him.

Because, yes, the guest cast are a strangely lifeless bunch. There's two plucky gals, two poor gentlemen, a bounder and a foreign doctor. Plus a dippy maid and a no-nonsense housekeeper. It's a little hard to differentiate them at times. The victim's boon companion, Miss Howard, is all guts and thunder and enormous fun, and that's about it. Oddly, some of the cameos, such as the out-of-breath chemist or the excited housemaid come across more sharply than some of the suspects.

Much is made of the "unreliable narrator" in her later work, but Christie gets right down to it with Captain Hastings. In the beginning he appears to be the detective who "came across a man in Belgium once. A very famous detective. My system is based on his, though of course I have progressed rather further". We see Christie at her funniest as we gradually realise how inept Hastings is, deliberately unleashed on the household by Poirot as an enormous distraction.

This device is oddly similar to Christie's contemporary PG Wodehouse. While Poirot solves all problems and mends all broken hearts with the tact of Jeeves, Hastings is poor old Bertie Wooster, blundering about, making disastrous proposals of marriage, and coming up with harebrained scemes. Actually, look at Right Ho, Jeeves (1934) - it's practically the same book. Only with less murder and more newts.

If Hastings is an enormous red-herring, then so too is much of the book. Suspects are ruled out in quick succession, there's much business with various different bottles of poison, amateur dramatics, and even a whole plot about spies. What's so clever is that each red-herring is actually not the complete distraction it seems, building up to a brilliant denoument, which makes you think "oh, now, hang one a minute... that's not playing fair".

It's an unusual ending. It's suddenly a courtroom drama (which will crop up in stuff like Witness For The Prosecution), but it's handled with admirable skill by Christie - all bullying baristers and alarming retelling of evidence in a suddenly damning light. Will the case end in court, you start to think? Oddly, this is a formula used in every Perry Mason novel, but here it's just a fourth-act distraction before Poirot slaps his forehead and summons everyone into a drawing room for the "You may be wondering why I called you here today" denoument that we know, love and expect.

Finally, a lot of noise is made about Chrisite the racist/ anti-semite, which I hope to find out more about as we go on. But here, oddly, the one Jewish character is treated with surprising sympathy, even with admiration by Poirot. I'm prepared to be wrong (and I'm sure The Book With The N-Word will get me), but I'm going to advance the theory that while Christie may make the odd incidentally insensitive comment, her overall view of foreigners is sympathetic. My big reason for this is amazing Poirot. He's the constant butt of snide, sour racial intolerance, but he triumphs over it. If anything, Christie's approach seems to be that the British are simple-minded buffoons, all manners and no thought. Hastings and his friend Cavendish are true members of the Drones Club - frequently lost for words, emotionally stunted, and incapable of independent thought. It is this staid quality that nearly lets the murderer get away with it - and proves that England really does need outside help. Even if from a damned Belgie like Poirot.

With hindsight, it's hard not to draw parallels here with the senseless slaughter going on on the continent. The survivors of that Great War will provide much of the guest cast for the rest of Christie's oeuvre. And frequently, they're not valiant heroes, but blundering old salts and stuffy sahibs. Which makes you wonder what point's being drawn there too.

KATE: This first Christie novel is both completely typical (country house murder, limited cast of suspects, collection of slightly stock characters from faithful servant to winsome young love interest….) and quite atypical in its use of courtroom drama and the legal technicality the ending hinges on.

Outside ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, legal procedures rarely impinge on Poirot’s deductive process. Not only do we rarely see the inside of a courtroom, but in many of the novels, Japp and his slow-witted colleagues never get as far as an arrest. As the series develops, Christie sometimes goes out of her way to exclude the police from the action, setting plots on islands, in snow-bound trains and at remote archaelogical digs where Poirot is on his own to solve the case without official support or forensic evidence.

While I’d agree that Christie’s treatment of Poirot is sympathetic, especially in contrast to the wooden English gentry who surround him, he is always an isolated figure. Ever the foreigner who sticks out like a sore thumb in this green and pleasant England, not only is he the stranger who intrudes on family crises, but a solo private detective who is unable to confide fully in sidekick Hastings, who would inevitably give the game away. He appears at his most pitiful and most foreign in ‘Mysterious Affair at Styles’, a refugee, living on charity, who couldn’t be more different from his benefactors the Inglethorpes. As Christie’s portrayal of Poirot develops, he starts to use that foreignness strategically, knowing that the average Englishman will assume anyone with a foreign accent must be a halfwit.

I think you’re bang on in comparing this to Wodehouse; in much the same way as he presents light, diverting tales of upper-class life, Christie’s writing intellectual jigsaw puzzles that barely graze the surface of real life. Sympathy for the victim is almost beside the point – their death isn’t a human tragedy, just the jumping-off point for the puzzle that has to be solved. In a stoicism perhaps borrowed from the bloody front of the First World War, the victim’s relatives and friends never seem so much devastated by death as inconvenienced by it. Unlike most contemporary crime, it’s not unusual for Christie’s victims to be the least likeable characters in the story, for whom you’d struggle to feel much regret.

Murder in the house means delaying dinner and the delicate social problem of how to feed visiting policemen (usually with beer and sandwiches in the butler’s pantry). Even Poirot “does not approve of murder” and, habitually neat as he is, seems driven to tidy up the mess more than to punish the killer or avenge the dead. Littered with comic relief (mainly provided by the blundering Hastings), these are stories intended to divert the reader and impress them with Christie’s cleverness, not set them musing on the human condition.

Speaking of victims, what did you think of Mrs Inglethorpe – innocent victim, or dominating matriach who brought it on herself?

JAMES: Ooh, she's curious, isn't she? She's a figure of great charity, but she's also shown as vain, domineering and capricious, who loves using her money as power over those close to her.

NEXT: Poirot in a valiant thriller, The Big Four

What is The Agatha Christie Reader?

2009-07-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

It's an unofficial project to read, review and comment on all of Agatha Christie's books. At about one a week. The way it works is that there are two of us. Kate's read them all. She'll suggest a book to James and he'll then read it, and write about it, and Kate will point out where he went wrong. And then suggest another book. Not necessarily in chronological order, but hopping around by theme.

Please do join in. We'll try not to give away endings or annoying things like that.