Agatha Christie – Page 17

Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie: a Book Review

Published on August 9, 2011December 27, 2018 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 July 29, 2011 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 July 25, 2011 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 July 14, 2011 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!

Agatha Christie Reading Challenge Update

Published on June 22, 2011 by Margaret5 Comments

The Agatha Christie Reading Challenge is run by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise. It’s an open-ended challenge to read all of Agatha Christie’s books. I’m not attempting to read them in order (as Kerrie is doing) but reading them as I find them. So far I have read her Autobiography, 25 of her full length books and 2 of the collections of her short stories:

Progress in publication date order (the links are to my posts on the books):

1920 The Mysterious Affair At Styles
1922 The Secret Adversary
1924 The Man in the Brown Suit
1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
1928 The Mystery of the Blue Train
1929 The Seven Dials Mystery
1932 Peril At End House
1934 Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (Aka The Boomerang Clue)
1936 The A.B.C. Murders
1937 Death on the Nile
1938 Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
1939 Murder is Easy
1941 The Body in the Library
1946 The Hollow
1949 Crooked House
1953 A Pocket Full of Rye
1956 Dead Man’s Folly
1957 4.50 from Paddington
1961 The Pale Horse
1962 The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
1964 A Caribbean Mystery
1968 By the Pricking of My Thumbs
1970 Passenger to Frankfurt
1972 Elephants Can Remember
1975 Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case (written in the 1940s)

Short Stories:

1932 The Thirteen Problems
1933 The Hound of Death

Autobiography/Biography

Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

I own a few more of her books, which I’ll be reading next:

Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
Dumb Witness (1937)
The Moving Finger (1942)
Taken at the Flood (1948)
They Do It With Mirrors (1952)
A Murder is Announced (1950)
They Came to Baghdad (1951)
The Golden Ball and Other Stories (1971)
Nemesis (1971)

I also have:

The Complete Parker Pyne: Private Eye, which brings together the 14 stories featuring Mr Parker Pyne.
Miss Marple and Mystery: the Complete Short Stories.

Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on May 13, 2011 by Margaret4 Comments

Murder is Easy, Agatha Christie’s 25th book was first published in 1939.

Publisher’s summary:

Luke Fitzwilliam could not believe Miss Pinkerton’s wild allegation that a multiple murderer was at work in the quiet English village of Wychwood — or her speculation that the local doctor was next in line. But within hours, Miss Pinkerton had been killed in a hit-and-run car accident. Mere coincidence? Luke was inclined to think so — until he read in The Times of the unexpected demise of Wychwood’s Dr Humbleby …

My view

This has stood the test of time very well. It’s another one of Agatha Christie’s easily read crime mysteries, with plenty of plot twists and unexpected revelations. This time the detective is Luke Fitzwilliam, a retired policeman recently returned to England from the East. He was wondering what to do with himself when he met Miss Pinkerton quite by chance. She tells him of her suspicions about a number of murders in her village and when he tells her that it’s rather hard to do a lot of murders and get away with it, she replies:

No, no, my dear boy, that’s where you’re quite wrong. It’s very easy to kill – so long as no one suspects you. And you see, the person in question is just the last person anyone would suspect! (page 22)

Wychwood-under-Ashe is a picturesque village with a Manor House, a village green and a duck pond. In other words a quintessentially English village just like Miss Marple’s St Mary Mead. But instead of Miss Marple, the person who helps Luke with his investigations is Bridget Conway, a beautiful young woman who immediately entrances Luke. His cover story is that he is writing a book on folklore and needs to talk to the locals gathering tales and legends.

I had no idea about the killer’s identity and neither really did Luke, until just near the end of the book. Superintendent Battle appears but does nothing towards solving the mystery and denies that he could have done any better than Luke explaining that