Var. books by Agatha Christie
Jan. 12th, 2012 10:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meganbmooreA fairly random selection of Christies I've been reading for the last few months. A few Poirots (apparently, I love him on screen but am annoyed with him in print) but mostly standalones. I largely liked them when Christie's racism and xenophobia weren't running rampant. Well, that and the fact that I don't think I like her view of families-at least in fiction-very much.
The Circular Staircase: This was largely a nice country house mystery with an "old maid" aunt trying to figure out what troubles her niece and nephew were getting into and untangled their love lives. Sadly, it was rather ruined by some rather virulent racism, bigotry and classism, above and beyond other Christie's I'd read at that point.
The Man In Lower Ten: This starts out a train mystery in which the narrator finds someone asleep in his berth and, unable to wake the intruder, he sleeps in what he assumes is the intruder's bunk. The next morning, the other man is dead and all his own possessions are stolen, and the narrator is the prime suspect. Then there's a trainwreck and suddenly everyone is running around New England and there's a love triangle and thwarted bigamy. No objections to this particular love triangle or the plot in general, but I think I would have rather it remsained a train mystery.
Why Didn't they Last Evans? This book reminded me a lot of the Tommy and Tuppence books, which are my favorites of Christie's books so far. (And I seem to recall seeing and liking a version of it some time ago, but all I really remembered was Frankie pretending to crash her car so she could stay at the suspect's house. I think one of the recent Marple's might have hijacked it, too, but I'm not sure.) Boy finds corpse. Boy's upperclass gal pal from when they were kids decides foul play would be more fun than accidental death, HIJINKS! Including cosplay, multiple false identities and wait-was-that-one-suicide-or-was-it-an-accident-wait-what-are-that-boy's-insides-made-of-anyway?
The Mysterious Mr. Quin This is a collection of short stories about an elderly msn named Satterthwaite who keeps stumbling across dead bodies with Doomed/Suspicious Lovers accompanying them, along with an ever so subtly named Mr. Harley Quin. Usually, Satterthwaite finds the mystery first and then Quin shows up to help figure things out. At one point, between satterthwaite's fanboying and Quin's ever convenient proximity, I decided it was too bad they wouldn't live long enough for gay marriage to become legal. That never really went away. As the stories continued, there were more and more hints that Quin might be supernatural, and more frequently pointed out that, in addition to solving a crime, all the cases helped clear the way for a pair of lovers to get together. Christie was clearly having a lot of fun with these, and it shows. I wouldn't have minded reading more stories about them.
The Unexpected Guest: This one starts with a stranded motorist helping a woman who has apparently murdered her husband disguise how he died, and soon escalates into everyone thinking they're covering for someone else's murder. This was actually pretty interesting and I wish I'd encountered it earlier in my mystery-consuming life because I guessed the killer's real identity and how it was done as soon as s/he was named and hir relationship with the victim was explained, and I'm pretty sure that has more to do with genre-savvyness and umpteen billion A&E (and BBC) adaptations under my my belt than my cleverness.
The Clocks: Oh, Agatha Christie. One minute, it's all "the marine biologist who moonlights as a secret agent is having Awkwardness with the communist spy because the communist spy is actually the long-lost-supposedly-dead blind mother of the compulsive liar he's in love with" and the next its "foreign au pairs are so dumb and can't cook and are so irresponsible DURNED FURRINERS ARE RUINING THE COUNTRY!" and I'm all "BUT WHY?" Aslo, I didn't realize this was a Poirot book. He wasn't in it much, but while I apparently like him as a character in the A&E series, he annoyed me a lot here. I was all "stop going on about your brilliance and just say it already!" Also, he solved the mystery using information that literally no one else but him had access to, so it kinda felt too convenient, and even a bit like cheating.
They Came to Baghdad: Were this book not primarily set in Baghdad with the setting purely exotic flavoring and every important character but one a white English(wo)man , and that one character being the evil POC girl who hates our heroine, this would have been rather fun. The heroine is a compulsive liar who is...not exactly particularly smart, but who is amazingly competent at always landing on her feet no matter what situation she finds herself in. Which involves communist plots and spy rings. She also decides that she is In Love For Life after a single lunch conversation with a guy and finagles her way from England to Baghdad despite being broke, and keeps comparing herself to Juliet for some reason. Normally that would really bug me, but it didn't here, I suppose because I suspect she does that sort of thing all the time and the guy was just her latest excuse to run off somewhere on an adventure. But fun, aside from the racism and colonialism. (By this point, I think I was starting to be a bit deadened to some of Christie's classism, even though it's still pretty obvious.)
Spider's Web: And...another where the main female character is a habitual liar. Though this one didn't seem to fall into it as a lifestyle as much as she's a regular prankster who finds it easy to start spinning stories at the drop of a hat. Still, a rather...interesting trend. Reading this, I suspected it was based on a play (and novelized by Charles Osborne in 2000, which might explain the lack of xenophobia and less classism), and I was right. The whole thing takes place over just a few hours and in only a couple of rooms, and the prose still reads like stage directions at times. I liked this largely because a goof chunk of the plot revolved around the heroine trying to protect her stepdaughter, who was possibly sexually abused by her stepfather, and may have killed him when he came to her father's (and the heroine's) house. Because the the stage-direction-like prose, what characters were up to was a little more obvious than it really should have been, but it was still fun.
Peril At End House Another Poirot, in ehich I spent most of the book going "Poirot! Shut up about how brilliant you are!" I'm pretty sure I've seen a David Suchet adaptation of it, but don't remember it. This one involves Poirot trying to solve a murder before it's actually committed. I enjoyed it mostly until the end, when I started to wonder what was with Christie having her killers kill themselves rather than going to jail and everyone just letting them. Also, another female lead known for being a liar.
Destination Unknown: More a light thriller than a mystery, really. Agatha Christie seems to have spent a certain block of time all but obsessed with Secret Communist Plots, even when it doesn't actually turn out to be a Secret Communist Plot. Though, I suspect that was fairly common at the time. In this one, a suicidal divorcee whose daughter recently died is offered the opportunity to have a more fun and creative suicide than overdosing on sleeping pills by impersonating the dying wife of a suspected defector to find an infiltrate a camp of suspected defectors. The plot is a bit much, but fun aside from the treatment of "natives" in various locales, and the brownface.
Ordeal By Innocence: Good: Interesting concept where, years after a man is convicted of his mother's murder and dies in prison, a man who gave him a lift while he was supposedly committing the crime, and who has been out of the country ever since, returns to England and realizes that he was the alibi. Family, instead of being greatful, is horrified because now they knows they've been cozying up to a killer all this time and everyone suspects everyone else. Bad: OMG Agatha Christie, why so antagonistic to the very idea of adopted families? Also, being "foreign" really isn't something strong evidence of guilt. Sadly, the bad rather devoured the rest. I actually enjoyed the very gutted version of this that ended up one of the recent Marple adaptations, aside from Richard Armitage's character being a jerk and having an affair with his wife's sister (note: In the book, he's nice and not having an affair with his wife's sister. Also, the convicted son is less noble in the book, and it's a man who dies later on, not a woman.) and I am very pleased they removed all the anti-adoption sentiments.
The Pale Horse: This one is a bit odd for me, I think because we have two detectives following completely different paths on the same case, but with no interaction for most of the book. But I like "find the reality behind the supernatural" plots, and things obsessed with MacBeth and the three witches (not just there, but in various forms and mythologies) is usually fun for me. I wish there had been more of Ariadne Oliver, though.
The Mystery of the Blue Train: This is another Poirot, and I liked Poirot a lor more than I did in the other books with him that I've read. This one had lots of secret identities and double crosses and conartists and I predictably wished the main character was the 30-something companion who inheritted money and was very quiet and smart and observant. Too bad Christie kept going "that class" and "that race" every chance she got.
Crooked House: Gosh, Agatha Christie certainly had a fascination with Constance Kent, didn't she? I think this is the third book I've seen it come up in conversation, though this is the first one where that interest contributed to the plot. Like Ordeal By Innocence this has a whole family as suspects for a murder with an outsider for the detective, with a very convenient killer being obvious that would satisfy everyone, except they didn't do it so now they have to suspect people they don't want to be guilty, with the victim's generosity seeming to actually work against the growth of family members. I think it worked better here? I'm not sure. in the end, I was a bit uncomfortable with it, though I suppose I was meant to be.
Sparkling Cyanide: This is one in which a man whose wife supposedly committed suicide begins to suspect she was murdered, and attempts to recreate the murder scene. The beginning was a bit too scattered for me as it hopped between 6 POVs in rapid succession, much of which took place inside their head, but was fun once it got going. Many years and imitators later, both the reveal in the romantic subplot and the villain were fairly obvious early on, but that didn't really detract from the entertainment value.
Endless Night: This is basically about a young couple from different classes moving into their dream home, with possibly sinister relatives. I was enjoying it until the last leg, when The Twist kind of turned me off it. I actually guessed The Twist early on (I suspect it was unique at the time, but is more common now) but dismissed it because, uhm, I didn't like it. Still, a decent bit different from the other Christies I've been reading.
And Then There Were None: This is, I believe, one of Christie's most famous books, and one that was probably very unique at the time. Sadly, reading it 70 years later lacks that element, and so while it can be appreciated, the fact that there isn't a single likable character (and, for me, none fascinating enough to make up for it) interferes with enjoyment.
The Man In the Brown Suit: My introduction to Christie was the TV movie based on this with Stephanie Zimbalist. Based on my recollections, I suspect I would find it a hopeless jumble, but when I was young, it was the best thing ever. She has adventures around the world! Saves herself from Dire Peril! Has a boyfriend who is a mysterious and tortured dude who eventually whisks her off to a private island! Then I read the book, which I also liked a lot, but Christie's prose didn't work for me when I was a wee teen. But! She has adventures! And thinks scientifically when she isn't comparing her life to "The Perils of Pamela"! (Is that show real?) She saves herself even more! And her love interest is still a tortured and mysterious dude. But my adult self notices how incredibly prone to manhandling her he is, and there are conversations about how he's hot because he's scary and violent. Sigh. (Sadly, if it weren't for Questionable Conversations and the manhandling, they would be awesome.) So, lots of nostalgic value for this, but I notice so many things I didn't when younger.
The Sittaford Mystery: There was lots of snowsnowsnow? Actually, it was pretty good (though I didn't care for parts of the ending) but I had a hard time really focusing on it, aside from the parts with Emily.
The Circular Staircase: This was largely a nice country house mystery with an "old maid" aunt trying to figure out what troubles her niece and nephew were getting into and untangled their love lives. Sadly, it was rather ruined by some rather virulent racism, bigotry and classism, above and beyond other Christie's I'd read at that point.
The Man In Lower Ten: This starts out a train mystery in which the narrator finds someone asleep in his berth and, unable to wake the intruder, he sleeps in what he assumes is the intruder's bunk. The next morning, the other man is dead and all his own possessions are stolen, and the narrator is the prime suspect. Then there's a trainwreck and suddenly everyone is running around New England and there's a love triangle and thwarted bigamy. No objections to this particular love triangle or the plot in general, but I think I would have rather it remsained a train mystery.
Why Didn't they Last Evans? This book reminded me a lot of the Tommy and Tuppence books, which are my favorites of Christie's books so far. (And I seem to recall seeing and liking a version of it some time ago, but all I really remembered was Frankie pretending to crash her car so she could stay at the suspect's house. I think one of the recent Marple's might have hijacked it, too, but I'm not sure.) Boy finds corpse. Boy's upperclass gal pal from when they were kids decides foul play would be more fun than accidental death, HIJINKS! Including cosplay, multiple false identities and wait-was-that-one-suicide-or-was-it-an-accident-wait-what-are-that-boy's-insides-made-of-anyway?
The Mysterious Mr. Quin This is a collection of short stories about an elderly msn named Satterthwaite who keeps stumbling across dead bodies with Doomed/Suspicious Lovers accompanying them, along with an ever so subtly named Mr. Harley Quin. Usually, Satterthwaite finds the mystery first and then Quin shows up to help figure things out. At one point, between satterthwaite's fanboying and Quin's ever convenient proximity, I decided it was too bad they wouldn't live long enough for gay marriage to become legal. That never really went away. As the stories continued, there were more and more hints that Quin might be supernatural, and more frequently pointed out that, in addition to solving a crime, all the cases helped clear the way for a pair of lovers to get together. Christie was clearly having a lot of fun with these, and it shows. I wouldn't have minded reading more stories about them.
The Unexpected Guest: This one starts with a stranded motorist helping a woman who has apparently murdered her husband disguise how he died, and soon escalates into everyone thinking they're covering for someone else's murder. This was actually pretty interesting and I wish I'd encountered it earlier in my mystery-consuming life because I guessed the killer's real identity and how it was done as soon as s/he was named and hir relationship with the victim was explained, and I'm pretty sure that has more to do with genre-savvyness and umpteen billion A&E (and BBC) adaptations under my my belt than my cleverness.
The Clocks: Oh, Agatha Christie. One minute, it's all "the marine biologist who moonlights as a secret agent is having Awkwardness with the communist spy because the communist spy is actually the long-lost-supposedly-dead blind mother of the compulsive liar he's in love with" and the next its "foreign au pairs are so dumb and can't cook and are so irresponsible DURNED FURRINERS ARE RUINING THE COUNTRY!" and I'm all "BUT WHY?" Aslo, I didn't realize this was a Poirot book. He wasn't in it much, but while I apparently like him as a character in the A&E series, he annoyed me a lot here. I was all "stop going on about your brilliance and just say it already!" Also, he solved the mystery using information that literally no one else but him had access to, so it kinda felt too convenient, and even a bit like cheating.
They Came to Baghdad: Were this book not primarily set in Baghdad with the setting purely exotic flavoring and every important character but one a white English(wo)man , and that one character being the evil POC girl who hates our heroine, this would have been rather fun. The heroine is a compulsive liar who is...not exactly particularly smart, but who is amazingly competent at always landing on her feet no matter what situation she finds herself in. Which involves communist plots and spy rings. She also decides that she is In Love For Life after a single lunch conversation with a guy and finagles her way from England to Baghdad despite being broke, and keeps comparing herself to Juliet for some reason. Normally that would really bug me, but it didn't here, I suppose because I suspect she does that sort of thing all the time and the guy was just her latest excuse to run off somewhere on an adventure. But fun, aside from the racism and colonialism. (By this point, I think I was starting to be a bit deadened to some of Christie's classism, even though it's still pretty obvious.)
Spider's Web: And...another where the main female character is a habitual liar. Though this one didn't seem to fall into it as a lifestyle as much as she's a regular prankster who finds it easy to start spinning stories at the drop of a hat. Still, a rather...interesting trend. Reading this, I suspected it was based on a play (and novelized by Charles Osborne in 2000, which might explain the lack of xenophobia and less classism), and I was right. The whole thing takes place over just a few hours and in only a couple of rooms, and the prose still reads like stage directions at times. I liked this largely because a goof chunk of the plot revolved around the heroine trying to protect her stepdaughter, who was possibly sexually abused by her stepfather, and may have killed him when he came to her father's (and the heroine's) house. Because the the stage-direction-like prose, what characters were up to was a little more obvious than it really should have been, but it was still fun.
Peril At End House Another Poirot, in ehich I spent most of the book going "Poirot! Shut up about how brilliant you are!" I'm pretty sure I've seen a David Suchet adaptation of it, but don't remember it. This one involves Poirot trying to solve a murder before it's actually committed. I enjoyed it mostly until the end, when I started to wonder what was with Christie having her killers kill themselves rather than going to jail and everyone just letting them. Also, another female lead known for being a liar.
Destination Unknown: More a light thriller than a mystery, really. Agatha Christie seems to have spent a certain block of time all but obsessed with Secret Communist Plots, even when it doesn't actually turn out to be a Secret Communist Plot. Though, I suspect that was fairly common at the time. In this one, a suicidal divorcee whose daughter recently died is offered the opportunity to have a more fun and creative suicide than overdosing on sleeping pills by impersonating the dying wife of a suspected defector to find an infiltrate a camp of suspected defectors. The plot is a bit much, but fun aside from the treatment of "natives" in various locales, and the brownface.
Ordeal By Innocence: Good: Interesting concept where, years after a man is convicted of his mother's murder and dies in prison, a man who gave him a lift while he was supposedly committing the crime, and who has been out of the country ever since, returns to England and realizes that he was the alibi. Family, instead of being greatful, is horrified because now they knows they've been cozying up to a killer all this time and everyone suspects everyone else. Bad: OMG Agatha Christie, why so antagonistic to the very idea of adopted families? Also, being "foreign" really isn't something strong evidence of guilt. Sadly, the bad rather devoured the rest. I actually enjoyed the very gutted version of this that ended up one of the recent Marple adaptations, aside from Richard Armitage's character being a jerk and having an affair with his wife's sister (note: In the book, he's nice and not having an affair with his wife's sister. Also, the convicted son is less noble in the book, and it's a man who dies later on, not a woman.) and I am very pleased they removed all the anti-adoption sentiments.
The Pale Horse: This one is a bit odd for me, I think because we have two detectives following completely different paths on the same case, but with no interaction for most of the book. But I like "find the reality behind the supernatural" plots, and things obsessed with MacBeth and the three witches (not just there, but in various forms and mythologies) is usually fun for me. I wish there had been more of Ariadne Oliver, though.
The Mystery of the Blue Train: This is another Poirot, and I liked Poirot a lor more than I did in the other books with him that I've read. This one had lots of secret identities and double crosses and conartists and I predictably wished the main character was the 30-something companion who inheritted money and was very quiet and smart and observant. Too bad Christie kept going "that class" and "that race" every chance she got.
Crooked House: Gosh, Agatha Christie certainly had a fascination with Constance Kent, didn't she? I think this is the third book I've seen it come up in conversation, though this is the first one where that interest contributed to the plot. Like Ordeal By Innocence this has a whole family as suspects for a murder with an outsider for the detective, with a very convenient killer being obvious that would satisfy everyone, except they didn't do it so now they have to suspect people they don't want to be guilty, with the victim's generosity seeming to actually work against the growth of family members. I think it worked better here? I'm not sure. in the end, I was a bit uncomfortable with it, though I suppose I was meant to be.
Sparkling Cyanide: This is one in which a man whose wife supposedly committed suicide begins to suspect she was murdered, and attempts to recreate the murder scene. The beginning was a bit too scattered for me as it hopped between 6 POVs in rapid succession, much of which took place inside their head, but was fun once it got going. Many years and imitators later, both the reveal in the romantic subplot and the villain were fairly obvious early on, but that didn't really detract from the entertainment value.
Endless Night: This is basically about a young couple from different classes moving into their dream home, with possibly sinister relatives. I was enjoying it until the last leg, when The Twist kind of turned me off it. I actually guessed The Twist early on (I suspect it was unique at the time, but is more common now) but dismissed it because, uhm, I didn't like it. Still, a decent bit different from the other Christies I've been reading.
And Then There Were None: This is, I believe, one of Christie's most famous books, and one that was probably very unique at the time. Sadly, reading it 70 years later lacks that element, and so while it can be appreciated, the fact that there isn't a single likable character (and, for me, none fascinating enough to make up for it) interferes with enjoyment.
The Man In the Brown Suit: My introduction to Christie was the TV movie based on this with Stephanie Zimbalist. Based on my recollections, I suspect I would find it a hopeless jumble, but when I was young, it was the best thing ever. She has adventures around the world! Saves herself from Dire Peril! Has a boyfriend who is a mysterious and tortured dude who eventually whisks her off to a private island! Then I read the book, which I also liked a lot, but Christie's prose didn't work for me when I was a wee teen. But! She has adventures! And thinks scientifically when she isn't comparing her life to "The Perils of Pamela"! (Is that show real?) She saves herself even more! And her love interest is still a tortured and mysterious dude. But my adult self notices how incredibly prone to manhandling her he is, and there are conversations about how he's hot because he's scary and violent. Sigh. (Sadly, if it weren't for Questionable Conversations and the manhandling, they would be awesome.) So, lots of nostalgic value for this, but I notice so many things I didn't when younger.
The Sittaford Mystery: There was lots of snowsnowsnow? Actually, it was pretty good (though I didn't care for parts of the ending) but I had a hard time really focusing on it, aside from the parts with Emily.