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.)

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).

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.