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.
