Tag: Agatha Christie

Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I enjoyed Agatha Christie’s Taken at the Flood, on several levels. There is the murder and mystery level, but also a great sense of the times, set in post-war Britain, reflecting the mood of the population, and, on top of all, that the characters stand out for the most part as well-rounded, convincing people. There are plenty of references to the changing social scene, to the attitude towards women and foreigners and to the difficulties  of war heroes adapting to civilian life.

It was published in 1948, when the aftermath of the war is felt by some people as a restless dissatisfaction with life,  feeling ‘rudderless’ just drifting along and by others, who had ‘come into their own’ during the war, benefiting from the need to plan and think and improvise for themselves.

Lynn Marchmont is one of the people feeling ill at ease and nervous; she was aware of ill will, ill feeling:

It’s everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and amongst workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will. But here it’s more than that. Here it’s particular. It’s meant! (page 65)

There is certainly ill will in her family after her uncle, Gordon Cloade had died, killed in an air raid, and left the rest of the family ‘out in the cold’. They had all relied on him to help them out financially and expected they would inherit his wealth on his death. But Gordon had married Rosaleen, a young woman, whose brother, David Hunter has no intention of letting any of them have any money. Rosaleen has a chequered past and when a tall, bronzed stranger arrives in the village calling himself Enoch Arden, the question of his identity becomes of great importance. I didn’t know the reference to Enoch Arden, but knew it must be of significance when it stirs some poetical memory in David’s mind, from a poem by Tennyson. Then Enoch Arden is found in his room at the local inn, The Stag:

‘Dead as a doornail,’ said Gladys, and added with a certain relish: ‘ ‘Is ‘ead’s bashed in!’ (page 161)

Poirot is called in to help solve the crime. Was Enoch Arden was Rosaleen’s first husband, Robert Underhay or had Robert died in Africa, as she said? Would the family fortune remain with the Cloades? Is Rosaleen’s life in danger, are the Cloades wishing her dead?

It’s a baffling case and Poirot tells Superintendent Spence that it’s an interesting case, because it’s all wrong – it’s not the ‘right shape.’ Eventually, of course, he works it out and it is complicated as Spence complains, protesting when Poirot quotes Shakespeare. Poirot, however, explains that it is very Shakespearian:

… there are here all the emotions – the human emotions – in which Shakespeare would have revelled – the jealousies, the hates – the swift passionate actions. And here, too, is successful opportunism. “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at its flood leads on to fortune …” Someone acted on that, Superintendent. To seize opportunity and turn it to one’s own ends – and that has been triumphantly accomplished – under your nose, so to speak!’ (page 319)

Agatha Christie’s Birthday – A Celebratory Post

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

So much has been written about Agatha Christie’s life, her books, her houses, and so on and so forth, that I wasn’t sure what to write about for this post to celebrate the 121st anniversary of her birth.  Last year I wrote an A – Z of facts about her taken from her autobiography and the year before I visited her grave and wrote a bit about that and Winterbrook House, her house at Wallingford.

Looking for inspiration I came across the Agatha Christie: Official Centenary Celebration 1890- 1990, which is a mine of information with articles about Agatha Christie to celebrate her life and work. Along with lists of her books, plays, films and TV adaptations (up to 1990) there are articles about her poetry, life before the First World War, her family life, the actors and actresses playing the roles of Poirot and Miss Marple, including many fascinating facts and photographs.

For example there is this “Confession” reproduced in Michael Parkinson’s Confession Album, 1973 in which famous people filled in a questionnaire about their likes and dislikes. The reproduction in the book is indistinct and I can’t make out some of the words but here are some of Agatha’s favourite things and her greatest misery:

  • My ideal value: Courage
  • My idea of beauty in nature: A Bank of Primroses in Spring
  • My favourite qualities in men: Integrity and Good Manners
  • My favourite qualities in women: Loving and Merry
  • My greatest happiness: Listening to Music
  • My greatest misery: Noise and Long Vehicles on Roads
  • My  favourite authors: Elizabeth Bowen Graham Greene
  • My favourite actors and plays: Alec Guinness  Murder in the Cathedral
  • My favourite quotation: Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us – Sir Thomas Browne
  • My favourite state of mind: Peaceful

There is also an article by Mathew Pritchard – Agatha Christie – a Legend for a Grandmother, which reveals that

She was an intensely private kind of person, who listened more than she talked, who saw more that she was seen, and whose perception, humour and enjoyment of living was in many ways the opposite of what you might expect from the nature of her stories. Her family was what she prized most – I think she regarded our summers together as a reward in part for the completion of another Christie for Christmas which had usually taken place by May or June each year and partly as relaxation from the strenuous archaeological tours she undertook with her husband Max Mallowan most springs during the 1950s. We all looked forward to them, I as a schoolboy more than most.

Amongst other memories he  wrote about her plays in the West End, and her house in Wallingford where he took school friends, who were all impressed by her modesty, friendliness and the interest she took in what they were doing. He revealed that her greatest passion apart from reading and writing was music (see her greatest happiness, above) and remembered her singing  and their visits to the opera, visiting Bayreuth together to see a production of Wagner’s Parsifal.

One strand of Agatha Christie’s work that I’m not familiar with is the books she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Her daughter Rosalind Hicks explained how she had chosen the name – Mary was Agatha’s second name and Westmacott the name of some distant relatives. She managed to keep her identity as Mary Westmacott unknown for fifteen years. She wrote six books under this name:

  1. Giant’s Bread, published in 1930, a novel about Vernon Deyre and his obsession with music, in line with her love of the musical world. She had been trained as a singer and a concert pianist.
  2. Unfinished Portrait (1934), based on her own experiences and early life.
  3. Absent in the Spring (1944), which was for Agatha the most satisfying book she wrote, about a woman alone in the desert finally coming to recognise what she was really like.
  4. The Rose and the Yew Tree (1947), which Rosalind described as a favourite of both Agatha and herself.
  5. A Daughter’s a Daughter (1952) about the battle between a widowed woman and her grown-up daughter.
  6. The Burden (1956), the story of the weight of one person’s love on another.

Rosalind didn’t think it was fair to describe them as ‘romantic novels’, nor yet ‘love stories’, but books about ‘love in some of its most powerful and destructive forms.’ Definitely books I’m going to seek out.

See more celebratory birthday posts at the Agatha Christie Blog Challenge Celebration.

Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie: a Book Review

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I found it wasn’t too difficult to work out who the murderer was in Agatha  Christie’s Dumb Witness, because there is a rather obvious clue at one point, but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this book. In fact I felt it added to my satisfaction and there was a further development which I hadn’t thought of at the end, which surprised me.

From the back cover:

Everyone blamed Emily’s accident on a rubber ball left on the stairs by her frisky terrier. But the more she thought about her fall, the more convinced she became that one of her relatives was trying to kill her. On April 17th she wrote her suspicions in a letter to Hercule Poirot. Mysteriously he didn’t receive the letter until June 28th … by which time Emily was already dead!

Dumb Witness is set in the small country town of Market Basing (a fictional name) where Miss Emily Arundell lived in Littlegreen House. Part of Poirot’s problem is that he doesn’t actually have a murder to investigate because Miss Arundell’s death was certified by her doctor as a death from natural causes from a long standing medical condition. But he thought he was under an obligation from Miss Arundell to investigate. He uses subterfuge to find out more information, pretending to be writing a biography of General Arundell, Emily’s father. And from some very slender facts he reconstructs the sequence of events leading up to her death.

As usual there are a number of suspects, mostly the members of her family, her nephew and niece Charles and Theresa Arundell and her married niece Bella and her husband Doctor Tanios. Then there is her companion, the rather ineffectual Miss Wilhelmina Lawson, and the servants. Poirot considers each one in turn. He also considers the character of the murderer, as he explains to Captain Hastings, the narrator, who is completely baffled as he assists Poirot in looking at the evidence:

‘Since at the moment, it is only suspicion and there is no definite proof, I think I must leave you to draw your own deductions, Hastings. And do not neglect the psychology – that is important. The character of the murderer – that is an essential clue to the crime.’

‘I can’t consider the character of the murderer if I don’t know who the murderer is!’

‘No, no, you have not paid attention to what I have just said. If you reflect sufficiently on the character – the necessary character of the murder – then you will realize who the murderer is!’ (page 184)

The ‘dumb witness’of the title is Bob, Emily’s wire-haired terrier in what is described as ‘the incident of the dog’s ball.’ Agatha Christie dedicated Dumb Witness to her wire-haired terrier, Peter, describing him as ‘most faithful of friends and dearest companion, a dog in a thousand‘. Bob plays an important part in the plot and indeed Agatha Christie gives him some dialogue!

I didn’t think I knew anything about Dumb Witness before I read it – I didn’t even know the title. But after I read it I checked the entry in wikipedia and found that Dumb Witness  had been adapted for television in 1996 as one of the episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot with David Suchet playing the role of Hercule Poirot. I then remembered watching it and being surprised because it was set in the Lake District, which I thought was most unusual for an Agatha Christie book.  Now I’ve read the book I can see that the TV adaptation differed considerably from the original story. As I hadn’t read it when I watched the adaptation that didn’t bother me in the slightest. It would have done the other way round!

NB: take care reading because if you haven’t read earlier books featuring Poirot, in chapter 18 he gives away the names of the murderers in four of his earlier cases.

First published in Great Britain in 1937
published in the US as Poirot Loses a Client, also known as Mystery at Littlegreen House or Murder at Little Green House.
This edition published by Harper Collins 1994
ISBN: 9780006168089
251 pages
Source: My own copy

Book Beginnings

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

Miss Arundell died on May 1st. Though her illness was short her death did not occasion much surprise in the little country town of Market Basing where she had lived since she was a girl of sixteen. For Emily Arundell was well over seventy, the last of a family of five, and she had been known to be in delicate health for many years and had indeed nearly died of a similar attack to the one that killed her some eighteen months before.

But though Miss Arundell’s death surprised no one, something else did. The provisions of her will gave rise to varying emotions, astonishment, pleasurable excitement, deep condemnation, fury, despair, anger and general gossip.

These are the opening lines of Agatha Christie’s Dumb Witness. And because it is an Agatha Christie book, it is obvious that Miss Arundell’s death should be cause for suspicion and that it was most unlikely to have been a natural death.

From the fact that the date of her death is specified in the first sentence makes me think that must be significant. And the surprising contents of her will also indicate that Miss Arundell had perhaps changed her it – why was that?

I’m still reading Dumb Witness and as the title indicates and the cover picture on my copy shows, a dog has an important part in the mystery – one which Hercule Poirot has to solve, with very little to go on.

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Katy, at  A Few More Pages.

Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Carnival

Published on by Margaret

The July edition of the Agatha Christie Reading Carnival is available here.

This month there are 10 contributors providing 16 blog posts with reviews of Agatha Christie’s books and posts about her.

You can join the Carnival too, sign up, then read at your own pace, write a review on your blog then go to the Carnival collecting space, and put in your URL, your details and a comment about the post.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Published on by Margaret12 Comments

Murder on the Orient Express must be one of Agatha Christie’s most well known books. It was first published in 1934 and it was first filmed in 1974, starring Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, and most recently in 2010 with David Suchet as Poirot. I’ve seen both films and so knew the plot, but I’d never read the book until now.

Poirot is on the Orient Express, on a three-days journey across Europe. But after midnight the train comes to a halt, stuck in a snowdrift. In the morning the millionaire Simon Ratchett is found dead in his compartment his body stabbed a dozen times and his door locked from the inside. It is obvious from the lack of tracks in the snow that no-one has left the train and by a process of elimination Poirot establishes that one of the passengers in the Athens to Paris coach is the murderer.

Poirot interviews the passengers and the Wagon Lit conductors, none of whom appear to have a motive for killing Ratchett or to have any connection with him or each other. Poirot decides that this

… is a crime very carefully planned and staged. It is a far-sighted, long-headed crime. It is not – how shall I express it? – a Latin crime. It is a crime that shows traces of a cool, resourceful, deliberate brain – I think an Anglo-Saxon brain. (page 193)

Having interviewed all the suspects Poirot draws up a list of questions about things that need explaining. This leads him to speculation and re-interviewing some of the suspects and eventually he arrives at the truth. It’s hard to know whether I would have arrived at the same conclusion if I hadn’t seen the films, but watching the first one it did become obvious before the denouement.

I liked this book enormously. I like the way Agatha Christie divided it into three sections – The Facts, the Evidence and Hercule Poirot Sits Back and Thinks. I liked the characterisation and all the, now so non-pc, comments about nationalities, highlighting class and racial prejudice. I like the problem-solving and ingenuity of the plot.

  • Paperback: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Harper; Masterpiece edition (Reissue) edition (3 Sep 2007)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0007119313
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007119318
  • Source: Library book because I can’t find my own copy!