Tag Archives: writer: agatha christie

The Big Four, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Mon ami,” he said, “if you wish you may wait in to put salt on the little bird’s tail, but for me I do not waste my time so.”

Well. I thought this was rubbish when I read it at thirteen, and I still think it’s rubbish now that I am almost 59. Poirot and Hastings become involved in an effort to uncover the “Big Four”, who are secretly running the world, or trying to take it over, or something. They include a stereotypical Chinese oligarch, a stereotypical American squillionaire, a French scientist who is in no way at all based on Marie Curie, and the mysterious fourth man, who is English and a master of disguise. We also have Hercule Poirot’s twin brother Achille, though (SPOILER for a book published 99 years ago) he turns out to be one of Poirot’s disguises.

Apparently this is a fix-up of a dozen individually published stories, and it shows; very episodic, with a corresponding lack of internal continuity. Every adventure sees the Big Four’s implausibly convoluted plans confronting Poirot’s even more implausibly convoluted plans. There is a comedic has-been actress who gets bumped off mercilessly. There is a grand explosion in Switzerland at the end. The basic concept is the same as The Secret Adversary from five years earlier, but not executed as well. Agatha Christie herself called this a “rotten book” and it is difficult to disagree with her. However, you can get The Big Four here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

Appointment With Death, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

He had at first been amused by the English girl’s interest in this American family, shrewdly diagnosing that it was inspired by interest in one particular member of the group. But now something out of the ordinary about this family party awakened in him the deeper, more impartial interest of the scientist. He sensed that there was something here of definite psychological interest.

This came to the top of my list of books set in Jordan a few weeks back; the first few chapters are set in 1930s Jerusalem, but the scene then moves to Petra, where the actual murder takes place, and then to Amman, where Poirot spends about half of the total page count solving it. The victim is a horrible character who has bullied her entire family into terrified submission; the question is, which of them bumped her off and how? There’s some very well done Christie-style deflection, where they try to cover for each other, though the actual solution to the crime is not really flagged at all to the reader, so I think it counts as one of the less fair whodunnits in her oeuvre. But the family dynamics are very well depicted.

There is a happy flashforward at the end to show all of the survivors living happily ever after. The book was published in 1938, and we are meant to think that 1943 will be the same only a bit better.

I looked into the setting of the King Solomon Hotel in Jerusalem; it’s pretty clear that this is meant to be a fictional version of the King David Hotel (though in fact today there is a King Solomon Hotel on the same street). There is a little local political commentary in that Mahmoud the dragoman (guide/ translator) keeps boring the Western tourists by going on about the Zionists / Jews. (Nice and a little surprising to see anti-Semitism portrayed as a negative character trait for a change.) But in terms of politics, a much more interesting character is Lady Westholme.

Lady Westholme was a very well-known figure in the English political world. When Lord Westholme, a middle-aged, simple-minded peer, whose only interests in life were hunting, shooting and fishing, was returning from a trip to the United States, one of his fellow passengers was a Mrs. Vansittart. Shortly afterwards Mrs. Vansittart became Lady Westholme. The match was often cited as one of the examples of the danger of ocean voyages. The new Lady Westholme lived entirely in tweeds and stout brogues, bred dogs, bullied the villagers and forced her husband pitilessly into public life. It being borne in upon her, however, that politics was not Lord Westholme’s métier in life and never would be, she graciously allowed him to resume his sporting activities and herself stood for Parliament. Being elected with a substantial majority, Lady Westholme threw herself with vigor into political life, being especially active at Question time. Cartoons of her soon began to appear (always a sure sign of success). As a public figure she stood for the old-fashioned values of Family Life, Welfare work amongst Women, and was an ardent supporter of the League of Nations. She had decided views on questions of Agriculture, Housing and Slum Clearance. She was much respected and almost universally disliked! It was highly possible that she would be given an Under Secretaryship when her Party returned to power. At the moment a Liberal Government (owing to a split in the National Government between Labor and Conservatives) was somewhat unexpectedly in power.

You don’t read Agatha Christie for sophisticated political commentary – the notion that the Liberals could have formed a minority government in the 1930s was ludicrous. (In the 1935 election they had lost half their seats and were reduced to 12 MPs.) We are clearly meant to read Lady Westholme as a direct parody of Nancy Astor, who was also American, had an aristocratic husband, was the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons and was an outspoken Conservative (and anti-Semite and anti-Communist). One can only take those comparisons so far, of course, because…

Spoiler

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A

Book

Published

In

1938

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Country Christie, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third story (“The Case of the Missing Will”):

She arrived punctually—a tall, handsome young woman, plainly but neatly dressed, with an assured and business-like manner. Clearly a young woman who meant to get on in the world. I am not a great admirer of the so-called New Woman myself, and, in spite of her good looks, I was not particularly prepossessed in her favour.

The subtitle here is “Twelve Devonshire Mysteries”, but in fact several of them are set in Cornwall rather than Devon – just warning anyone who is expecting Dumnonian exactitude. The stories were originally published between 1923 and 1940 – Agatha Christie’s peak – in a variety of different magazines and collections, and they feature individually Poirot, Miss Marple, Parker Pyne and Tommy and Tuppence, so a decent sampling from across the spectrum of her protagonists. The collection was assembled between hard covers only last year.

One story, “The Hound of Death“, is not about crime at all but a horror story involving a Belgian nun in Cornwall. There is a foreword, extracted from her autobiography, about Agatha Christie’s love of Torquay. Some of the short stories depend on an obvious twist, but the point is more about Christie’s convincing portrayal of the West Country’s landscape and society than the actual plot. Worth it for the Christie fan.

You can get Country Christie here.

Cards on the Table, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Who plays bridge?” asked Mr. Shaitana. “Mrs. Lorrimer, I know. And Doctor Roberts. Do you play, Miss Meredith?”

A mid-period Christie, in which the murder is carried out during a bridge game, in the presence of Hercule Poirot and three of Christie’s other regular characters. Since we know none of them can have done it (spoiler: indeed, none of them is the murderer), suspicion turns to the four bridge players, who are characterised in detail to help us pick and choose the potential baddie. The plot is a little improbable, as each of the suspects has their own history of causing death; did they do it again? And solving the mystery involves several more deaths. But it’s classic Christie, and it’s no harm for Poirot to be forced to share the stage with some of her other characters (including Colonel Race, previously seen in The Man in the Brown Suit). You can get Cards on the Table here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

Peril at End House, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

And this attitude baffled Poirot. To begin with, his vanity suffered. It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not. Very good for him, I could not but feel-but not precisely helpful to the object in view!

This is the seventh Poirot novel, written and set in 1932, with Poirot and his friend, Hastings the narrator, becoming entangled with a naïve socialite who lives in a decaying seaside mansion. She appears to be the target of a series of assassination attempts, and after someone else is killed apparently in mistake for her, things get very serious. Lots of good plot here, with some red herrings and some totally fair clues, and Christie turns the tables on the reader very neatly at the end. Not especially memorable perhaps, but classic Christie.

There are a couple of less good bits. A random bloke turns up at the end, starts shooting at people, and is bundled away while Poirot explains that he had nothing to do with the actual plot. There’s casual anti-semitism about another minor character. The ending sees natural justice rather than state justice meted out. But again, this is classic Christie, warts and all.

You can get Peril at End House here. I think the next of these that I read will be Cards on the Table.

The Secret Adversary, by Agatha Christie; and Agatha on Ireland

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“I think you’ve given him too much, Tommy,” said Tuppence innocently. “I fancy he wants to give some of it back.”

This was Agatha Christie’s second published book, in 1922. Tommy and Tuppence, a young man and a young woman recently relieved of war duties, start their own business called “The Young Adventurers”, and are hired by the British secret service to thwart the shadowy mastermind behind various political agitations, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, and who threatens to unleash upon the United Kingdom the ultimate horror: a Labour government.

They go through various adventures including a vastly rich young American and a wily Scottish lawyer and MP, and eventually the Secret Adversary is unmasked, his identity not being a surprise to the attentive reader (there’s a moment at the end of Chapter 12 which narrows it down considerably). The motivation of the villain is fairly clear, but his means seem to be as fiendish as might be convenient for the plot. There is a romantic subplot also, which again won’t come as a surprise to the reader, and it gets the two protagonists to where they need to be.

I thought The Secret Adversary was very silly when I first read it at the age of twelve; and I still think it is very silly now that I am fifty-eight. You can get it here.

The book did make me wonder about Agatha Christie’s knowledge of Ireland. Clara Boehmer, Agatha Christie’s mother, was born in Dublin in 1854, but to a career army officer father (born in Martinique, died in Jersey) and and English mother (born and brought up in Chichester), and her father’s regiment moved to Malta, along with the infant Clara, before she was a year old. So I don’t think we can look for Irish sensibilities from that source.

The background incident which sparks the action of the plot of The Secret Adversary takes place on the Lusitania as it is sinking off the coast of County Cork in 1915, and there is then a hurried shuffle without incident across Ireland until Holyhead is reached and some action actually happens. The Secret Adversary is funding Sinn Fein in Chapter 8, and in Chapter 17 it turns out that he also has a prominent Irish Unionist MP on the team. As with the Bolsheviks, and as with labour disputes in England, in the world of The Secret Adversary the political problems of Ireland are entirely generated by external troublemakers.

Of course when Christie was writing The Secret Adversary in 1921, with its 1920 setting, the Irish situation would have been frankly confusing to the English newspaper reader. The War of Independence was in full flow, and the government was desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully trying to spin the situation in its favour to the British and international public.

In April 1921, in fact, the Lloyd George government attempted to discredit Sinn Fein by publishing a dossier “proving” that they were tools of the Bolsheviks; this failed to convince anyone, and King George V was asking the Irish for peace two months later. But that episode obviously resonated in Christie’s mind for the incident with the Sinn Feiner in Chapter 8. I did wonder if the wily Scottish lawyer and MP character was based partly on Edward Carson, but I think Christie would have been too sympathetic to Carson to create such an unflattering literary portrait.

More broadly, over the next fifty-plus years of her writing career, the Agatha Christe wiki lists only one short story, “The Apples of the Hesperides”, as actually set in Ireland (see analysis here), and another dozen characters across her entire œuvre as having Irish connections. The garden in Hallowe’en Party is explicitly based on the Italian sunken garden on Ilnacullin island in Bantry Bay. According to Irish expert John Curran, she did a tour of Great Gardens of Ireland in the 1950s (and Miss Marple then goes on a smilar tour of Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain in the late novel Nemesis).

But it rather looks like Ireland is a mere background detail for almost all of Agatha Christie’s work. There’s no reason why it should be more than that, of course, and no evidence that it could have been either.

I’m hopping through the Agatha Christie novels in my own special way. Next will be Peril at End House. Probably.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

The Mystery of the Blue Train, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Pleased to see you back again, Mr Van Aldin,” he said.”

Yeah, I’m working through the less celebrated novels of Agatha Christie (having read all the best known ones in 2013). This one dates from 1928, and features Poirot dragged into the investigation of a murder and jewel theft on Le Train Bleu, which used to run direct overnight from Calais via Paris to the French Riviera. (No point in such a route now that you can get from Paris to Nice in five hours by TGV, or a bit less by air.)

Some of this environment has become familiar to me as I work through my grandmother’s memoirs. The victim here is a rich young American woman moving between England and France (as was my grandmother), and there is another older rich woman living in the Riviera who ran a hospital during the Great War (as did my grandmother’s aunt). It’s also notable that all characters are expected to be fluent if not perfect in French.

Agatha Christie herself was reportedly dissatisfied with this book, and I can see some of the flaws that she possibly was conscious of, and some that she possibly was unaware of. There’s some gratuitous anti-semitism. She doesn’t have a good ear for names – “Van Aldin” doesn’t work for a New Yorker with Dutch ancestors; nor does “Papopolous” for a Greek, especially a Greek Jew. The actual murder plot is hilariously convoluted and Poirot’s solution to it is spun almost out of thin air.

But there’s one very well drawn character, Katherine Grey, who benefits from a recent inheritance and gets sucked into the mystery on her way to the Riviera – she reminded me a bit of Anne Beddingfeld in The Man in the Brown Suit, who heads off to Africa in similar circumstances, but a bit older and perhaps more rooted in reality. She is romantically pursued by The Wrong Chap but ends up with The Right Chap, to the frustration of the Teenage Girl – who herself is a standard Christie trope, done a bit better than usual here.

So it’s unusual for me to say this, but I think it actually works better as a Bildungsroman about Katherine than as a detective story. You can get The Mystery of the Blue Train here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

Five Little Pigs, by Agatha Christie; and Bloody Sunday

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Have I convinced you that it was a straightforward case?” he said.

You’ll have noticed that I’m going through a bit of an Agatha Christie thing recently. I read maybe half of the total œuvre when was twelve or thirteen, and am fairly sure this was one of them, but I had completely forgotten the details. Poirot is called in to re-investigate a murder of sixteen years earlier (the book was published in 1942, so that would be 1926), by the daughter of the woman who was jailed for the crime. The murder weapon is hemlock, strictly speaking coniine, used to dispatch an unpleasant artist who was flaunting his affair with his latest model in front of his wife and their house guests.

Poirot gets each of the five suspects to write down their memories of the day of the murder. Christie breaks each of those accounts across chapters, which is convenient for keeping up the narrative pace but a bit annoying for the historically trained reader whose instincts are to give each source its own place in the sun. In a dramatic denouement he reveals why the artist’s widow allowed herself to be convicted for a crime she did not commit, and also who the real murderer was, though there is a strong implication that justice will never be served due to the passage of time and paucity of firm evidence.

I have to admit that it did make me go back to the court ruling quashing the prosecution of Soldier F for several of the Bloody Sunday killings, on the grounds, similarly to the witness statements in Five Little Pigs, that the statements of F’s fellow soldiers made at the time and to the Savile Inquiry were not admissible evidence – although the judge condemns Bloody Sunday in the strongest terms. It still doesn’t explain to me why Soldier F was prosecuted for the wrong crimes.

You can get Five Little Pigs here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

The best known books set in each country: Jordan

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See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Jordan under today’s boundaries. 

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
Appointment with DeathAgatha Christie68,5804,513
Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected LifeQueen Noor10,2271,459
Mrs. Pollifax, Innocent TouristDorothy Gilman4,792859
Married to a BedouinMarguerite van Geldermalsen 3,786261
Forbidden Love / Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern-Day JordanNorma Khouri 1,688313
Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of PerilAbdullah II of Jordan935169
Fencing with the KingDiana Abu-Jaber 1,08883
Pillars of SaltFadia Faqir 710110

Starting the year with a colonial adventure, in which Poirot is summoned to the rose-red city of Petra to solve the murder of a tourist. Agatha Christie also featured on the lists for Syria, Morocco and Iraq (twice), and topped the Egypt chart, though I disqualified her from Zimbabwe.

It is striking how many books on the list are about foreign women encountering Jordan. Queen Noor is an American who married a Jordanian in 1978, Marguerite van Geldermalsen is a New Zealander who also married a (less prominent) Jordanian in 1978, Norma Khouri is another American (and her supposedly factual book was exposed as a hoax), and Diana Abu-Jaber was also born and brought up in America to a Jordanian family. The fictional Mrs Pollifax is an American secret agent pretending to be a tourist.

The top author on the list who is actually from Jordan is King Abdullah II, and the top woman author from Jordan (given my caveats about the others) is Fadia Faqir.

If I have counted correctly, this is the seventh country where seven out of eight books are by women, following on from Côte d’Ivoire, Canada, South Korea, Kenya, the United Kingdom and Iran.

I disqualified all of Robert Jordan’s books, which are frequently tagged “jordan” by Goodreads and LibraryThing users. I also disqualified Six Days of War, by Michael Oren, because most of the then Jordanian territory where the 1967 war was fought is no longer regarded as Jordanian, including by the Jordanian government. There is additionally some confusion about other Middle Eastern countries, with books set in Syria and Lebanon (and possibly Saudi Arabia) popping up too.

Three of the next four countries will be Caribbean: we head to the Dominican Republic next week, then back to the Middle East for the U.A.E., then back over again for Honduras and Cuba.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

“He had a nasty cold,” said Hercule Poirot, “and no doubt, in spite of the remedies that I have handy here, he would probably have given it to me. It is better that he should not come. Tout de meme,” he added, with a sigh, “it will mean that now I shall pass a dull evening.”

A late Agatha Christie novel, set in a dormitory village in the 1960s. The young people are awful, with long hair and drugs, and the moral fundament of society has been undermined by the abolition of the death penalty (this is mentioned several times). Meanwhile a ten-year-old girl is drowned in a tub at a Hallowe’en party, and Poirot is called in to solve the mystery. Bear in mind that Poirot was already an old man in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written fifty years earlier. But his moustaches endure.

The murderer’s identity is established by a massive clue which we are given at quite an early stage, and at first I felt that this made it a fair puzzle. but having said that, the hapless police had access to the same information, and could surely have put the pieces together a bit more quickly; and the connection of the crime to other recent murders and disappearances leads us to an improbably convoluted plot, with secret identities a plenty.

As well as casting aspersion on the moral decay of the 1960s, there’s quite a lyrical passage describing the Italian sunken garden on Ilnacullin island in Bantry Bay. It obviously inspired one of the strands of the overall plot.

A book that is interesting for reasons the author may not have considered. You can get Hallowe’en Party here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

There was no beauty in her careless, haggard face, but it had distinction. Her voice was charming.

For the day that’s in it, Happy Christmas everyone! And let me take you back to 1938, where Hercule Poirot is called in by the local police to solve the spectacular murder of a patriarch whose children, both acknowledged and unacknowledged, are all conveniently clustered around the crime scene, as the Christmas season unfolds around them.

Agatha Christie’s characterisation isn’t always her strong point, but she has some memorable bit players here – the insecure oldest son who is now an MP, the black sheep who has returned to the fold, the daughters-in-law, the Spanish granddaughter escaping the Civil War.

The actual solution to the crime bends the usual rules a bit, in a way that Christie also used elsewhere, but vital clues are given to the attentive reader from quite an early stage, so it’s fair enough. If you need something to take you out of your own holiday environment, you can get Hercule Poirot’s Christmas here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

The Man in the Brown Suit, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

I listened and contained myself with difficulty. Most of these women were rich. The whole wide beautiful world was theirs to wander in and they deliberately stayed in dirty dull London and talked about milkmen and servants! I think now, looking back, that I was perhaps a shade intolerant. But they were stupid – stupid even at their chosen job: most of them kept the most extraordinarily inadequate and muddled housekeeping accounts.

I came across this when researching my list of books set in Zimbabwe, and was sufficiently intrigued by an Agatha Christie book with an African setting to search it out. It didn’t make my list in the end, as less than a third of it is set in what was then Southern Rhodesia, the other settings being London, a ship on the Atlantic, and South Africa. And I don’t think it is classic Christie, but I enjoyed the diversion.

The protagonist, Anne Beddingfeld, is the daughter of a famous archaeologist / anthropologist, her father dies in the first chapter, leaving her free to have adventures on a budget. She gets involved with investigating two mysterious deaths in London; the trail takes her to Africa for mortal peril and romance. Agatha Christie had visited South Africa in 1922, during a political crisis, and clearly she observed and noted her surroundings. There’s some great description and characterisation, especially of the heroine – apparently Agatha Christie’s own preferred title for the book was Anna the Adventuress.

Of course, the whole book is permeated with casual racism – it almost goes without saying, but it must still be said. The plot is utterly bonkers, with a sudden-yet-inevitable betrayal at the end and an unreliable secondary narrator. It’s much closer to the thriller genre than to Christie’s home turf of determined detection. But it was only her fourth novel (after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Secret Adversary and The Murder on the Links) and she was entitled to a bit of experimentation. An interesting variation from a familiar writer. You can get The Man in the Brown Suit here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

The best known books set in each country: Syria

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See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Syria.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
As Long as the Lemon Trees GrowZoulfa Katouh91,116890
Sea PrayerKhaled Hosseini 59,241818
L’Arabe du futur 2Riad Sattouf11,251430
Come, Tell Me How You LiveAgatha Christie Mallowan4,918965
Death Is Hard WorkKhaled Khalifa4,548291

Only five this time. As with Niger a few weeks ago, I had to disqualify a lot of books (sixteen in this case) which are (at least in part) about Syria, but not actually set there, most of which dealt with the experience of Syria refugees trying to make their way to and in other countries during the recent war. My rule is that if I have had to disqualify a large number of books before I reach the fifth that is actually set in the country, I leave it there. Normally I would list the top eight books.

I’m glad to see a novel by a Syrian woman actually topping the chart this week, though it does way better on Goodreads. You may be surprised to see Agatha Christie making an appearance; this is a non-fiction account of her experiences observing her husband’s archaeological digging, and it is the top book set in Syria on LibraryThing, though much further behind on Goodreads.

I ruled out the first volume of the graphic novel series L’Arabe du future, which is set in several different countries. However the second volume does seem to be mainly set in Syria, so it’s on the list. Both are on my list of BDs to buy.

The top book on Goodreads with ‘Syria’ tags was Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers, and the top on LibraryThing was The Golem and the Jinni, by Helene Wecker, both of which are about the experience of Syrian immigrants in the USA; one non-fiction, the other fantasy. There were a few other non-fiction books looking at the region as a whole. I won’t list them all.

Coming next: Mali, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka and (edge case, but it’s listed as a separate country in most lists) Taiwan.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

The best known books set in each country: Morocco

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See here for methodology. I am excluding books of which less than 50%, as far as I can tell, is actually set in Morocco. (It doesn’t help that Morocco is illegally occupying the country immediately to its south.)

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
The Sheltering SkyPaul Bowles 29,4994,508
The Time in BetweenMaría Dueñas 47,8941,992
Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert JailMalika Oufkir24,2652,103
Destination UnknownAgatha Christie 16,2972,394
TangerineChristine Mangan 33,388935
Who Is Maud Dixon?Alexandra Andrews 39,137651
Garment of Shadows Laurie R. King 10,2591,039
This Blinding Absence of LightTahar Ben Jelloun 13,106569

It’s interesting that the only two books on the list by Moroccan writers (Stolen Lives and This Blinding Absence of Light) are about being imprisoned in the same jail at the same time, though one is autobiography and the other fiction.

There are several of these that I’m not completely certain about, either because (eg The Sheltering Sky) it’s not 100% clear that the North African setting is Morocco, or because (eg The Time In Between) it’s not 100% clear to me that the Moroccan setting amounts to more than half of the book, but in those cases and a couple of others, I gave the one on the list the benefit of the doubt.

I excluded the top four books which came up in my calculations, and another two lower down. Top was Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, where it’s not clear that the desert setting is in Morocco; then Less by Andrew Sean Greer, which is about a man who goes around the world and visits Morocco; then Chanson Douce / The Perfect Nanny / Lullaby, by Leïla Slimani, set in Paris; then King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian, by Marguerite Henry, which is about a horse that actually (as far as I can see) spends most of its life outside Morocco.

The other two books that I disqualified ranked between Who Is Maud Dixon? and Garment of Shadows, both by Leïla Lamani (as opposed to Laila Slimani): The Other Americans and The Moor’s Account, both of which are set in the Americas.

Coming next: Angola, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Malaysia.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

The best known books set in each country: Iraq

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See here for methodology. I am excluding books not actually set in the current borders of Iraq, but there was only one of these this time.

TitleAuthorGR
raters		LT
owners
The Epic of Gilgamesh(Anonymous)109,10210,282
American SniperChris Kyle135,0613,557
Murder in MesopotamiaAgatha Christie62,8764,129
They Came to BaghdadAgatha Christie22,8142,852
The Yellow BirdsKevin Powers26,1631,880
Pride of BaghdadBrian K. Vaughan 25,1321,704
RedeploymentPhil Klay24,6411,510
Generation KillEvan Wright19,3301,626

Well, I was worried that this list would be completely dominated by war porn, telling the story of people who know Iraq only through having been been sent there in a brutal and illegal invasion, but in fact I am delighted that a real indigenous epic, possibly the earliest known work in the sff genre, wins this week; also amusing to have two Agatha Christies in the top four.

I disqualified Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, because although it is about the recent Iraq war, it is mostly set in Texas, as is the film.

The top book on my list by an Iraqi writer is Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi, which sounds rather good. (Gilgamesh was probably written by a local, but millennia before the concept of ‘Iraqi’ had any meaning.)

Next up: Argentina, Afghanistan and Yemen. (Yep, despite everything, Yemen has a bigger population than Canada or Poland.)

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

The best known books set in each country: Egypt

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See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in Egypt.

TitleAuthorGoodreads
raters		LibraryThing
owners
Death on the NileAgatha Christie265,6929,033
Cleopatra: A LifeStacy Schiff 118,0054,427
Crocodile on the Sandbank Elizabeth Peters74,9544,623
Mummies in the MorningMary Pope Osborne23,3499,152
River GodWilbur Smith41,1533,208
NefertitiMichelle Moran 39,3231,882
The Curse of the PharaohsElizabeth Peters24,5422,753
Palace WalkNaguib Mahfouz20,2662,822

Egypt has obviously been a source of fascination to Western writers for centuries, though not always in a good way. Death on the Nile is entirely set in Egypt, but not a single Egyptian character is actually named. Elizabeth Peters has done well out of our collective obsession with the country. At least an actual Egyptian writer makes the top eight, with Palace Walk, by Nobel laureate Mahfouz.

Disqualified because less than half of the book is set in Egypt: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (which I hated); The Red Pyramid and The Throne of Fire, by Rick Riordan; The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty (which I loved); and The Egypt Game, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder.

Next up: the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Asia: India | China | Indonesia | Pakistan | Bangladesh (revised) | Russia | Japan | Philippines (revised) | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Thailand | Myanmar | South Korea | Iraq | Afghanistan | Yemen | Uzbekistan | Malaysia | Saudi Arabia | Nepal | North Korea | Syria | Sri Lanka | Taiwan | Kazakhstan | Cambodia | Jordan | UAE | Tajikistan | Israel
Americas: USA | Brazil (revised) | Mexico | Colombia | Argentina | Canada | Peru | Venezuela | Guatemala | Ecuador | Bolivia | Haiti | Dominican Republic | Honduras | Cuba
Africa: Nigeria | Ethiopia (revised) | Egypt | DR Congo | Tanzania | South Africa | Kenya | Sudan | Uganda | Algeria | Morocco | Angola | Mozambique | Ghana | Madagascar | Côte d’Ivoire | Cameroon | Niger | Mali | Burkina Faso | Malawi | Zambia | Chad | Somalia | Senegal | Zimbabwe | Guinea | Benin | Rwanda | Burundi | Tunisia | South Sudan | Togo
Europe: Russia | Türkiye | Germany | France | UK | Italy | Spain | Poland | Ukraine | Romania | Netherlands | Belgium | Sweden | Czechia | Azerbaijan | Portugal | Greece | Hungary | Austria
Oceania: Australia | Papua New Guinea

Murder in Mesopotamia, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

Mrs. Kelsey was settling into her house at Alwiyah, and I was glad to be able to take a few things off her shoulders.

This came up in conversation a couple of weeks ago, and I realised that I have it in my vast store of unread Agatha Christies, and pulled it out to see for myself. It was not one of the Christies that I had consumed as a teenager. It’s mainly remembered for the story behind the story; the first murder victim is based strongly on the real-life Lady Katherine Woolley, wife of Sir Leonard Woolley who led the 1930s excavation at Ur where Agatha Christie met her second husband, Sir Max Mallowan.

Massive spoilers: The various European and American characters in the book are vividly drawn. But the murder part of the plot is frankly ridiculous. It requires the first victim to have forgotten crucial details of her own previous marriage, and also requires that she remains strangely silent at the crucial moment of being murdered. The second murder is very poorly planned and could easily have failed. The murderer is very lucky that they actually off their victims. They are unlucky that Poirot is there to catch them out.

Despite my frustrations with the narrative, I found the context really fascinating. It’s a thoroughly racist book – Iraq was basically under British military occupation at the time, and the Arabs get barely a mention – and certainly not a positive one – in the narrative.

It was the workmen that made me laugh. You never saw such a lot of scarecrows – all in long petticoats and rags, and their heads tied up as though they had toothache. And every now and then, as they went to and fro carrying away baskets of earth, they began to sing – at least I suppose it was meant to be singing – a queer sort of monotonous chant that went on and on over and over again. I noticed that most of their eyes were terrible – all covered with discharge, and one or two looked half blind. I was just thinking what a miserable lot they were when Dr. Leidner said, “Rather a fine-looking lot of men, aren’t they?”

I was struck by a couple of other points too. The narrator’s name is Amy Leatheran; that surname simply doesn’t exist in real life. (She pops up again in the 1970 Agatha Christie novel Passenger to Frankfurt, nursing the narrator’s great-aunt, but does not appear to have aged 35 years in the meantime.) I’m wondering what significance the name has. If you swap “leather” for “mallow”, you get A. Mallowan, which was Agatha Christie’s married name, but maybe that’s stretching a bit.

I love lists of books, and here Poirot looks at the victim’s bookshelves and draws some drastic conclusions:

“In her bedroom I noticed the following books on a shelf: Who Were the Greeks? Introduction to Relativity, Life of Lady Hester Stanhope, Back to Methuselah, Linda Condon, Crewe Train.
“She had, to begin with, an interest in culture and in modern science – that is, a distinct intellectual side. Of the novels Linda Condon, and in a lesser degree Crewe Train, seemed to show that [the victim] had a sympathy and interest in the independent woman – unencumbered or entrapped by man. She was also obviously interested by the personality of Lady Hester Stanhope. Linda Condon is an exquisite study of the worship of her own beauty by a woman. Crewe Train is a study of a passionate individualist. Back to Methuselah is in sympathy with the intellectual rather than the emotional attitude to life. I felt that I was beginning to understand the dead woman.”

I thought it worth seeing which of these books, familiar to a fictional 1930s Belgian detective, has stood the test of time, and apply my usual test of Goodreads and LibraryThing users. It turns out to be about half and half. (I’m assuming that Max Born’s book on relativity is meant, rather than any other.)

TitleAuthorGR ratersLT owners
Back to MethuselahGeorge Bernard Shaw291352
Crewe TrainRose Macaulay323216
Einstein’s Theory of RelativityMax Born157308
Linda CondonJoseph Hergesheimer716
Who Were the Greeks?Sir John Linton Myres23
Life and Letters of Lady Hester StanhopeThe Duchess of Cleveland11

Anyway, it’s a book of its time and you can get it here.

Bechdel pass – the narrator is a woman and has been hired to look after a woman, and their first conversation is mainly about the latter’s health (the husband is mentioned a couple of times but he is not the main subject).

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

Top books of 1923, #3: The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie

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As reported on Sunday, the three top books published in 1923 as measured by ownership on LibraryThing and Goodreads, a barometer of their staying power (in the English-speaking world in particular), are The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie, Whose Body? by Dorothy L. Sayers and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I had not read The Murder on the Links or The Prophet before, and decided to do a triple reading with a welcome return to Whose Body?.

NB that this reviews below includes MASSIVE SPOILERS for a mystery novel published a hundred years ago.

The Murder on the Links was Agatha Christie’s third novel (of 66) and second Poirot novel (of 33). It’s just outside her top ten books on both LibraryThing and Goodreads. The second paragraph of the third chapter, gloriously, is:

“What is that you say? Murdered? When? How?”

Poirot, an elderly retired Belgian detective, and the narrator, the young Captain Hastings, are invited to France by Paul Renauld, a Canadian millionaire who has earned his fortune in Chile and Argentina, and writes that he is in fear of his life. They arrive in France to find that he has just been murdered. The case involves many beautiful women and Renauld’s son. It turns out, after much complex investigation and many false leads, that…

MASSIVE SPOILERS

…Renauld had planned to fake his own murder, but one of the beautiful women decided to kill him anyway. She conveniently dies before being arrested; another of the beautiful women marries Renauld’s son, and another marries Captain Hastings and takes him to Argentina.

The war looms over this book, as over the other two which I will come to. In the very first chapter, Hastings introduces himself to the reader by way of conversation with the girl he has just met (and will marry at the end of the story):

We passed through Amiens. The name awakened many memories. My companion seemed to have an intuitive knowledge of what was in my mind.

“Thinking of the War?”

I nodded.

“You were through it, I suppose?”

“Pretty well. I was wounded once, and after the Somme they invalided me out altogether. I had a half fledged Army job for a bit. I’m a sort of private secretary now to an M. P.”

“My! That’s brainy!”

“No, it isn’t. There’s really awfully little to do. Usually a couple of hours every day sees me through. It’s dull work too.”

All of the dialogue in the book is reported in English, though with a distinctly French idiom to let us know when Christie’s characters are speaking French. It is taken for granted that Hastings, like all properly educated people in 1923, is completely fluent and comfortable in French. No difficulties of linguistic comprehension are reported.

The murder plot is intricate beyond belief, but Christie carries it off by having Poirot show off his talent to the sympathetic Hastings and the unsympathetic official detective from Paris. One feels at the end that the elaborate set-up was just about worth the payoff, and it is a more confident and comfortable book than The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie’s first novel, which also featured Poirot. You can get it here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

4.50 from Paddington, by Agatha Christie

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Second paragraph of third chapter:

She looked defiantly at Miss Marple and Miss Marple looked back at her.

Looking back at my old reviews, I spotted this as a gap in my write-ups of Agatha Christies and decided to fill it. I actually think it’s one of the better ones. A friend of Miss Marple’s sees a murder happening on a train running parallel to her own; Miss Marple sets out to find the murderer, with the help of a star Oxford graduate who has decided to devote her life to skilled domestic work (er… it must be admitted. one of Christie’s few solid independent woman characters) and the hindrance of a confused family situation which seems to be at the heart of it all, as the story evolves into a country house mystery. There are throwaway remarks about the evils of socialism, but generally made by the less pleasant characters which makes one wonder where the author’s own sympathies lay. The new National Health Service features as a topic (new-ish in 1957), as does the easy availability of abortion services in France. I had read it as a teenager and remembered only that the actual murderer turned out to be someone rather unlikely, as indeed is the case. The reader is not given quite enough information to make the solution fair, but does get enough to make it interesting, and there are some excellent twists along the way. You can get it here.

I don’t think I will revive my Agatha Christie project, but if I do, the next in sequence will be Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

September Books 12) Evil under the Sun, by Agatha Christie

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[the murderer] had risen. His handsome face was transformed, suffused with blood, blind with rage. It was the face of a killer – of a tiger. He yelled: “You damned interfering murdering lousy little worm!”
He hurled himself forward, his fingers stretching and curling, his voice raving curses, as he fastened his fingers round Hercule Poirot’s throat…

I found this Christie story really disappointing, to the extent that I am going to curtail my Agatha reading project. The murder takes place in an isolated location, and there’s a locked-room element in the sense that it takes place on a deserted and inaccessible beach. There is some nice character stuff, particularly the victim’s troubled step-daughter. But the solution depends on crucial misdirection of the reader by the author, and the motivation for the crime is pretty obscure. Enough Agatha for me for the time being.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

September Books 7) A Murder Is Announced, by Agatha Christie

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[Miss Marple said:] “Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house – and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys… They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served on the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new – really new – really a stranger – came, well, they stuck out – everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out. But it’s not like that any more. Every village and small country place is full of people who’ve just come and settled there without any ties to bring them. The big houses have been sold, and the cottages have been converted and changed. And people just come – and all you know about them is what they say of themselves. They’ve come, you see, from all over the world. People from India and Hong Kong and China, and people who lived in France and Italy, in cheap places and quaint islands. And also those who made some money and could retire. But no one knows any longer who’s who…”
And that, thought [Inspector] Craddock, was exactly the source of his trouble. He didn’t know. They were all just faces and personalities vouched for by rationing and I.D. cards… well-printed but without photographs or fingerprints. You could get an I.D. for the asking – and partly due to this the subtle ties that hold the structure of the rural society together were loosening. In a city nobody knows their neighbours; neither in the country, but sometimes you have the illusion that you do.

In my current run of Agatha Christies, this is the first I’ve read from after the second world war, and I must say I found it very interesting. It combines a particularly ingenious plot with some fascinating, if somewhat wrong-headed, social commentary. Christie puts words in her characters’ mouths which suggest that she feels the world is going to pot as a result of the upheavals during and after the war (in a way that she doesn’t do so much for the aftermath of the First World War; she was born in 1890 so experienced both in adulthood), and the story – the first murder being that of a Swiss immigrant – seems to be an indictment of how the general decay of morals in society works itself out in a specific case of corruption of the outwardly very respectable murderer. There is also another character who is a refugee from Nazi atrocity, and appears at first to be a complete stereotype but actually turns out to be one of the most helpful in solving the mystery.

Another point which is very deserving of note: the book features what I understand to be the most overtly gay couple in any of Christie’s works. The omniscient narrator speculates as little about the sex lives of Miss Hinchliffe and Miss Murgatroyd as about any of the other characters, but it’s pretty obvious what is going on, and it really takes some colossal blinkers to claim otherwise. And it’s an absolutely clear statement from Christie, in 1950; true, the characters are somewhat stereotyped (though nothing like as badly as Mitzi the maid) but their treatment by the author is entirely sympathetic, and their relationship is accepted without comment by everyone else in the village.

This is also the only Agatha Christie novel which I’ve seen adapted for the stage. (I have seen The Mousetrap, but that is based on a short story which has not been published in the UK.) Back in February 1981, the newly reopened Grand Opera House in Belfast hosted the stage adaptation by Leslie Darbon, starring Hazel Bainbridge (mother of Kate O’Mara) as Miss Marple. I remember that both she and Margaret Ashcroft (niece of Peggy Ashcroft) who played the lady in whose living-room the murder takes place, were pretty impressive to my thirteen-year-old judgement. I didn’t remember the names of the actresses, but was delighted to find that the programme book is preserved online. I see that the lesbian couple are dropped from the stage play, along with a number of other extraneous characters; my memory is that the climax is Miss Marple snatching away the covering for the murderer’s embarrassing scar, and then explaining it all at slightly too great a length to maintain the dramatic tension.

Gosh, it’s interesting to look at advertisements in a Belfast theatre programme in 1981. It’s very nostalgic to see that Robinson and Cleaver have the best spot, inside the front cover, but it didn’t stop them closing three years later. I see that the Carriage Restaurant, located in the railway station at Helen’s Bay, was offering “French, Jewish and Italian” specialties; I wonder how adventurous the Grand Opera House’s clientele were in those days. (In a fit of curiosity I googled what had happened to the chef; he moved to Gloucestershire to breed Afghans, and the business was taken over by Michael Deane, who is still one of Belfast’s best known restaurateurs.)

In 1950, “fifteen years ago” seemed like a completely different era (as Miss Marple actually says). The stage adaptation specifies the setting as being not 1950 but “Agatha Christie time”. It’s very weird to reflect that the story, published in 1950, was less than half its present age when I saw it at the Grand Opera House in 1981. Has the world changed more since 1981 than in the previous 31 years? I think so.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

September Books 4) The Body In The Library, by Agatha Christie

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Out of the dull green light Mary’s voice came, breathless, hysterical.
“Oh, ma’am, oh, ma’am, there’s a body in the library!”
…
Mrs Bantry reflected a minute and then applied an urgent conjugal elbow to her sleeping spouse.

The second Miss Marple book, with a certain humour but, alas, relatively predictable, where it is simply a matter of working out how the obvious suspect(s) have constructed his/her/their alibis, and reflecting on whether or not to believe the absurdly convoluted plot. Miss Marple is consulted by no less than two Chief Constables and a former Metropolitan Commissioner, which shows that her reputation is spreading (there is reference to some of the short stories as well). We also travel from her village to a nearby seaside resort, not the first time Christie has used this venue (see Bexhill in The A.B.C. Murders). The climax is a little rushed though.

Poisoning count: one victim not poisoned, one drugged but done away with by other means, one attempted poisoning which fails.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

August Books 30) The Murder at the Vicarage, by Agatha Christie

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This is my seventh Agatha Christie novel, and the first Miss Marple book – both the first I have come to as I work through the Christie canon in order of LibraryThing popularity, and the first published of the twelve. Coming to it so soon after the first Poirot mystery, which was also Christie’s first novel, written fourteen years earlier, I felt that she was deliberately revisiting and reversing some of the elements from the previous book – the victim is the gentleman of the Big House, rather than its lady, and is shot, rather than poisoned; there is a similar gender reversal in the identities of the obvious suspects (victim’s unfaithful spouse, victim’s spouse’s lover); the detective is a long-term resident of the village who emerges almost from nowhere to put the solution together rather than a celebrity detective who happens to be on the scene and whose every move is tracked by the narrator. I don’t know if Christie always intended to make Miss Marple a long-term investment, but I do get the feeling that she was wanting to set up a new central character and do it better this time.

The above differences apart, the story is largely the same as Styles, only now much more polished and rounded, with a certain amount of humour – vicars and old ladies are intrinsically humorous, after all, yet it takes a fairly practised touch to merge them with the gruesome details of homicide as Christie does here. The narrator is the vicar, and there is a nice contrast between his well-meaning but not terribly effective efforts at pastoral care of his village (and indeed his own household) and the more knowledgeable guardians of the village, led by Miss Marple. The only flaw is that the climax is somewhat muffed, in that the perpetrators are whisked demurely off-stage, before one can get into such ungenteel topics as the justice system. But overall this was better than I had expected.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

August Books 22) The A.B.C. Murders, by Agatha Christie

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I have to say that after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I was getting a bit dismayed by the Christie formula, and wondering how many more genteel tales of homicide I could take. But The A.B.C. Murders is a cut above any of the other Christies I have recently read, apart from the superlative Ackroyd.

There are several very attractive points to the book. First, the case takes Poirot and Hastings out of their usual socio-economic comfort zone: three of the four murders are in lower middle class or working class settings, and Christie largely reverses her usual view of the universe where poor people are normally invisible. Second, the fact that the villain sets the story up as a battle of wits with Poirot from the start of the book gives it a completely different dynamic: it’s not a case of Poirot inserting himself into someone else’s tragedy, instead he is dragged into a nefarious plot from the very beginning, and it is a little gratifying to see him lose the initiative (though of course we cheer when he regains it). And finally, the speculation on the mind-set of the serial killer, in a novel written and set in the mid 1930s, reminds us that this is a topic of horrified fascination that has been around for a long time. Oh yes, and the plot is well constructed and the solution reasonably fair.

This was one of the ones I had read as a teenager and had fond memories of; and I was not disappointed to return to it.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

August Books 19) The Mysterious Affair At Styles, by Agatha Christie

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Written in 1916, set in 1917, published in 1920, this was Agatha Christie’s first murder mystery and also the first novel starring Hercule Poirot – already described as old and a refugee from occupied Belgium, yet with another fifty years of detecting ahead of him. It’s a little rough around the edges – in particular, the narrator’s infatuation with one of the suspects is a bit overdone – but as John Curran says in the foreword to my edition, it has a lot of the ingredients of Christie’s future success in place: “an extended family, a poisoning drama, a twisting plot, and a dramatic and unexpected final revelation.” Still, I suspect its popularity rests on its crucial place in the chronology of the Christie canon and on a couple of decent screen adaptations rather than on general quality. I had read it as a teenager but completely forgotten any of the details.

My edition also includes the deleted original version of the final scene, where Poirot would have unfolded the solution while testifying in court; Christie’s publisher told her that this was too implausible (this, in a novel with time-travelling robots a Martian invasion three different people accessing strychnine the day the victim decides to change the terms of her will) and she opted instead for the grand revelation scene in the drawing room for which she was to become famous. It’s also notable that the story is illustrated with maps and handwriting samples, to add verisimilitude, a bit reminiscent of the way we are told that Tintin in the Land of the Soviets is a montage of our hero’s own photographs; there’s probably a micro-study to be done of how and why Christie moved away from that technique.

This is the fifth most popular of Christie’s novels on LibraryThing, and the fourth starring Poirot, but only the first in which the perpetrator(s) of the crime are actually handed over to the police and judicial system at the end. And for all that Christie is seen as the poison queen, this is also the first which solely features poisoning – Roger Ackroyd is not poisoned, nobody in Death on the Nile is poisoned, and the victim on the Orient Express is drugged but done away with by more physical means. I shall keep tracking these statistics (if I keep up my Christie reading).

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

August Books 8) Death on the Nile, by Agatha Christie

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…it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.

Another of the great Poirot novels that I had not previously read, here we have a nicely classic situation of a series of killings on a tourist steamer in Egypt, with the people who might reasonably be suspected of the first murder on emotional grounds ruled out from the start; the solution depends a bit on good luck and excellent planning, and while Christie has given us the same information that she gives Poirot, it is a little implausible (though not quite as implausible as Orient Express). It is noticeable that, once again, Poirot enables an ending where natural justice rather than the Egyptian state has the last say.

It is also noticeable that, apart from one engineer, none of the steamer’s crew is even named, and the actual Egyptians are barely identified as people at all; the cast includes a stereotypical German doctor and a leftist revolutionary who is not what he seems; there are two old ladies with different embarrassing secrets; there is a slightly subdued romantic subplot involving minor characters. The Nile settings are described competently but not in detail. I am a bit surprised that this novel is quite so popular; I guess the various screen adaptations will have helped.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

August Books 1) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie

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I remember when I first read this, a third of a century ago, and my shock at the twist ending, one of the best ever executed in crime literature. I reread it last week, for the first time since then, assessing whether Christie is “fair”; is the solution pulled out of thin air for gratuitous effect? Or are there in fact clues that the alert reader might pick up?

And my conclusion is that it’s pretty fair. The are a couple of important clues in the early chapters right up to the discovery of Roger Ackroyd’s body; we are then misdirected by the seething discontent and deceit of the Ackroyd household, which presents several sub-plots which have to be resolved one by one, until we are left only with the original question. Unlike And Then There Were None and Murder On The Orient Express, this is a pretty ordinary crime, done for ordinary reasons, extraordinary only in the way the solution is revealed, and I think all the stronger for it.

Roger Ackroyd is not poisoned, but there has been a poisoning shortly before the story starts, and it ends with another. In fact I believe that poison is a relatively rare method of murder, both in real life and in fiction (for Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures are often, like Ackroyd, narrated by a doctor, I can remember only A Study in Scarlet; for Ian Rankin, I can’t remember any at all). Unfortunately we have killing and death constantly with us; Agatha Christie’s genius is to isolate these fears by using bizarre methods and nested circles of isolation where these events take place – the secluded village, containing Ackroyd’s house which is in it yet distanced from it, in turn containing Ackroyd’s study where he must not be disturbed.

I’m watching Poirot with interest for signs of Belgicity. (Saying septante instead of soixante-dix, that kind of thing.) Nothing yet to indicate that he is other than an eccentric Frenchman, alas. The least plausible parts of the novel are the rapidity with which he takes the narrator and his nosy sister into his confidence, and his decision (as in Murder On The Orient Express) to thwart state enforcement of justice in favour of his own interpretation of natural justice. Perhaps the second of these is a case of implementing the famous Belgian saying, on s’arrange, but I don’t really think so.

Anyway, I’m enjoying these much more than Lovejoy. The only problem is that murder mysteries are not great as insomnia reading…

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

July Books 20) Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

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Poirot was silent a minute. Then he said: “If you will be so good, M. Hardman, assemble everyone here. There are two possible solutions of this case. I want to lay them both before you all.”

I had not actually read this Agatha Christie novel before, though of course I knew whodunnit as it has been widely spoilered in popular culture. There is still a thrill in watching the insanely convoluted plot (both story and conspiracy) come together, and I patted myself on the back for picking up the one clue that Poirot misses (the monogrammed handkerchief). It’s also interesting for just how much the backstory draws on the real-life Lindbergh kidnapping, which had happened two years before the book’s publication; the similarities will not have been lost on the contemporary audience. The resolution does require impressive ability to deceive Poirot, at least initially, on the part of those responsible, and his moral choice at the end is a bit questionable (though not the only time this happens; I shall be keeping count).

But there is extra fascination for today’s reader in the locations described. The opening scene of the book is the railway station in Aleppo, where Poirot is joining the train that started in Baghdad (with a break between Kirkuk and Nisibis). It’s extraordinary for us now to imagine that route being a relatively unremarkable train journey, the year after Hitler took power in Germany. (Agatha Christie of course knew it well because of her visits to husband’s excavations near Nineveh.)

For me the setting came even closer to personal experience when I realised that the actual murder takes place just outside Vinkovci, which I knew in 1998 as a traumatised frontline town recovering painfully from the recent conflict. In December of that year, with wife and small child, I drove past Vinkovci on the former Highway of Brotherhood and Unity through heavy snow, got turned back at the Serbian frontier after navigating the minefields, and finally found a hotel bed in the smashed urban moonscape of Vukovar. So although the area around the likely scene of the crime is actually fairly densely populated, I did feel shudders of sympathy. (See also Saki’s short story, “The Name Day“, for another creepy story of being stuck in a snowbound train carriage in the future Yugoslavia.)

I think as a mystery novel this is actually better than And Then There Were None; the story is more representative of the genre, there is somewhat less overt racism (gosh, a sympathetic Jewish character!), and the plot is slightly less implausible. I admit that these are fairly fine grades of distinction.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party

July Books 13) And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie

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Sir Thomas Legge said: “Damn it all, Maine, somebody must have killed ’em.”
“That’s just our problem, sir.”
“Nothing helpful in the doctor’s report?”
“No, sir.”

I’m getting a bit bored with Lovejoy as my bedtime reading and might give Agatha Christie a try, working scientifically through her books in order of popularity until I get tired.

I went through an Agatha Christie phase when I was about 13 and had read And Then There Were None at that time. It’s quite far from the normal format of murder mystery: ten people on an isolated island (whose name varies with the edition of the book), all invited because of a fatal incident in their personal past, are bumped off one by one. One of the ten must be the murderer; but who? The solution is just barely credible in the context of the story (requires some impressive good luck from the murderer, and failure to observe some obvious clues from his victims). But it is tautly constructed, and must have been very appealing when first published in late 1939 – no mention of the imminent war, but the previous war’s shadow lies across all the characters.

The book is of course notorious for the racism of its original title. It’s interesting that the two characters, who become the (largely sympathetic) viewpoint for the climax of the story proper, are also the most obviously racist – one of them has explicitly carried out a racist multiple murder as a colonial officer in Africa, the other is the only person to defend him. But it’s also interesting that the murder confesses to inflicting “prolonged mental strain and fear” on “the more cold-blooded offenders” who die last, so the author’s message is ambiguous. There’s a much less ambigous anti-Semitism directed at a minor character, which is not queried in the same way.

I shall persevere with this project. Murder on the Orient Express is next, and I haven’t read it or seen any of the screen adaptations (though, thanks to the spoilers generally abounding in popular culture, I do know whodunnit).

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party