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

Posted on 23 August 2013 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

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

Posted on 18 August 2013 by fromtheheartofeurope

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).

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

Posted on 11 August 2013 by fromtheheartofeurope

…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.

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

Posted on 4 August 2013 by fromtheheartofeurope

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…

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

Posted on 27 July 2013 by fromtheheartofeurope

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.

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

Posted on 21 July 2013 by fromtheheartofeurope

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).

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