Tag: Agatha Christie

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

The Man in the Brown Suit 001Agatha Christie wrote The Man in the Brown Suit whilst on a world tour with Archie Christie, her first husband, in 1922 and it was first published as a serial in The Evening News in 1923 in 50 instalments under the title of Anna the Adventurous. I think that’s an apt title as Anne Beddingfield, one of the two narrators of this book, longs for adventure, enjoying the cinema films of The Perils of Pauline. Agatha Christie, though thought it was ‘as silly a title as I had ever heard‘. But as The Evening News were prepared to pay her £500 for the serial rights she said nothing and bought a Morris Cowley with the proceeds.

She had the idea for the story from Major Belcher, a friend of Archie’s who had invited him to go with him on a grand tour of the British Empire to organise an Empire Exhibition. The Christies dined with Belcher at his house, the Mill House at Dorney and he had urged Agatha to write a detective story about it. He suggested the title The Mystery of the Mill House and wanted her to put him in it.

Agatha sketched the plot whilst she was in South Africa when there was a revolutionary crisis and decided that the book was to be more of a thriller than a detective story, with the heroine as ‘a gay, adventurous, young woman, an orphan, who started out to seek adventure.‘ But she found it hard to make the character she had chosen based on Belcher to come alive, until she hit upon the idea of writing it in the first person and making the Belcher character (Sir Eustace Pedler), Anne’s co-narrator.

I found this information in Agatha Christie’s An Autobiography, but I haven’t added the details she also added that give away who the murderer is (for of course there is a murder) – maybe she thought anyone reading her autobiography would have read all her books.

Anne’s adventure begins when she sees a man fall to his death on the live rails at Hyde Park tube station. He had a terrified look on his face and turning round Anne sees a man in a brown suit, who quickly becomes The Man in the Brown Suit both to her and the newspapers. He announced he was a medical man and that the man was dead, and as he left the station he dropped a piece of paper with some figures and words scrawled on it in pencil, which Anne picked up. A second death follows, this time a young woman is found strangled at Mill House, the home of Sir Eustace Pedler, MP. She was thought to be a foreigner. Anne decides to investigate and the trail takes her on board the Kilmorden Castle sailing to Cape Town.

The action takes place mainly on board ship and in South Africa which Agatha Christie describes so well from her own experiences.  Like Agatha, Anne suffers terribly from sea-sickness; both stayed in their cabins for three days until the ship reached Madeira and like Agatha, Anne just wanted to go ashore and be a parlourmaid. At that point in her life, Agatha had told Archie: ‘I would quite like to be a parlourmaid’. (An Autobiography page 300)

This book features the first appearance of Colonel Race, who appears in three more of Agatha Christie’s books. Anne describes him as ‘one of the strong, silent men of Rhodesia‘ and was very taken with him – ‘easily the best-looking man on board.‘ (page 54)

The novel is a mix of murder mystery and international crime organised by an arch-villain known as ‘the Colonel’, involving violence (but not graphic) and suspense. As usual there are a number of suspects and Anne has to work out who she can trust and who to believe. I found it a bit too drawn out for my liking, too many time lapses and coincidences to convince me of the plot’s credibility, but it held my interest to the end even though I knew the culprit’s identity.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter N

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

This week we’ve reached the letter N in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet. My choice is a medley of ‘N‘s.

  • I had thought I would review Peter James’s Not Dead Enough, and I started it a while back but put it down to read other books. Not because I didn’t like it, but it’s a very long book – 610 pages of very small font, which is difficult for me to read, especially late at night when my eyes get tired quickly. From the back cover:

On the night Brian Bishop murdered his wife he was sixty miles away, asleep in bed at the time. At least that’s the way it looks to Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who is called to investigate the kinky slaying of beautiful young Brighton socialite, Katie Bishop.

  • Another choice for the letter N that I considered is A Necessary End, an Inspector Banks mystery by Peter Robinson but I haven’t finished that book either. From the back cover:

In the usually peaceful town of Eastvale, a simmering tension has now reached breaking point. An anti-nuclear demonstration has ended in violence, leaving one policeman stabbed to death. Fired by professional outrage, Superintendent ‘Dirty Dick’ Burgess descends with vengeful fury on the inhabitants of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, an isolated house high on the daleside.

  • My third choice is Not the End of the World by Christopher Brookmyre. I started reading this after enjoying Quite Ugly One Morning. The bookmark shows I’m up to page 30. I think I didn’t finish this book because I was expecting it to be set in Scotland like Quite Ugly One Morning and was put off by it being in Los Angeles – silly I know!

 

  • Then there is Agatha Christie’s Nemesis, which is the last Miss Marple mystery. I only bought it recently and I’m itching to read it soon. Mr Rafiel, an old acquaintance (see A Caribbean Mystery), has died and left Miss Marple instructions for her to investigate a crime after his death.

 

  • And finally the book I’m currently reading is Janet Neel’s Ticket to Ride, which so far is making very interesting reading. But I don’t want to write much about it before I’ve finished it. Ticket to Ride features Jules Carlisle a newly qualified solicitor. She takes on the case of Mirko Dragunoviç, an illegal immigrant who claims that one of the eight dead bodies, found on the beach west of King’s Lynn, is that of his brother.

Janet Neel is the nom de plume of Baroness Cohen of Pimlico who sits as a Labour peer in the House of Lords. She started out as a solicitor, then went to the Board of Trade and then to Charterhouse Bank. She has written several crime fiction novels. The first, Death’s Bright Angel won the John Creasey Prize and both Death of a Partner and Death Among the Dons were shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger.

Teaser Tuesday

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB of Should be Reading.

I’ve just finished reading Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, which is one of her earliest books. It has a very complicated plot about a diamond robbery, an accidental death at a London tube station and a murder in a remote country mansion. I’ll write about in more detail about in a later post, but for now here is a teaser:

For in each suspicious instance Pagett had been shown as the directing genius. It was true that his personality seemed to lack the assurance and decision that one would suspect from a master criminal – but after all, according to Colonel Race, it was brain-work only that this mysterious leader supplied , and creative genius is often allied to a weak and timorous physical constitution. (page 148)

And the last few sentences in the book show Agatha Christie’s interest in anthropology:

‘Congratulations and love to the latest arrival on Lunatics’ Island. Is his head dolichocephalic or brachycephalic?’

I wasn’t going to stand that from Suzanne. I sent her a reply of one word, economical and to the point:

‘Platycephalic!’ (page 238)

Crime Fiction Alphabet – Letter M

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie is my choice to illustrate the letter M in Kerrie’s Crime Fiction Alphabet.

This is Agatha Christie’s 6th book, published in 1926, one of her best known books and possibly one of the most controversial because of its solution to the mystery. I hadn’t read it before, but I knew a bit about it from reading Agatha Christie’s Autobiography, in which she wrote:

Of course, a lot of people say that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is cheating; but if they read it carefully they will see that they are wrong. Such little lapses of time as there have to be are nicely concealed in an ambiguous sentence … (page 352)

I won’t write any more about the controversy – no spoilers!

Set in the village of King’s Abbot, the story begins with the death of Mrs Ferrars, a wealthy widow and the local doctor, Dr Sheppard suspects it is suicide. The following evening Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy widower who it was rumoured would marry Mrs Ferrars, is found murdered in his study.

Poirot has retired to King’s Abbot, to grow vegetable marrows, not very successfully. He’s missing Captain Hastings who is living in the Argentine, so when he is asked to investigate the murder he enlists Dr Sheppard, who lives next door with his sister Caroline, to help him and it is Dr Sheppard who narrates the story. Caroline is a most interesting character who takes a great interest in other people and likes to know everything that goes on in the village. She is, possibly, a forerunner of Miss Marple as Agatha Christie wrote in her Autobiography:

I think it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home. (page 448)

This has to be one of my favourite Agatha Christie books. It’s full of believable characters, suspects aplenty including Major Blunt, an old friend staying with Ackroyd, Flora, Ackroyd’s niece and her mother, his sister-in-law and poor relation, Geoffrey Raymond, his secretary, Ursula Bourne, a parlourmaid who may not be all she appears and Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s adopted son who has large gambling debts.

The setting is that of the quintessential English village where Poirot appears as an mysterious foreigner. Dr Sheppard’s first impression of him is that he must be a retired hairdresser because of his immense moustaches. He also doubts his ability to solve the mystery and described his as

… ridiculously full of his own importance. It crossed my mind to wonder whether he was really any good as a detective. Had his reputation been built up on a series of lucky chances? (page 80)

Of course, it hadn’t and Poirot meticulously works through the timing of events, and disposes of all the suspects to find the culprit. It was only towards the end of the book that I began to realise who it had to be.

  • Hardcover: 237 pages
  • Publisher: HarperCollins; Facsimile edition (2011)
  • Language English
  • Source: My own copy, part of an issue of The Agatha Christie Book Collection partwork published by Agatha Christie Limited

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

The Secret Adversary was first published in 1922. It was Agatha Christie’s second book and the first featuring Tommy and Tuppence. In this book they have just met up after World War One, both in their twenties: ‘an essentially modern-looking couple’. They are both stony broke and decide to set up a joint venture under the name of the Young Adventurers Ltd, initially intending to hire themselves out to commit crimes.

A Mr Whittington overhears their conversation and offers Tuppence their first assignment, but when she tells him her name is ‘Jane Finn’ he acts very strangely and thinks she is blackmailing him. From then on Tommy and Tuppence set out to find Jane Finn, a name Tommy had overheard from a conversation in the street.

Reading it reminded somewhat of Enid Blyton’s adventure books, mixed up with P G Wodehouse’s books. It’s a spy/detective story that is fast and furious with Tommy and Tuppence landing themselves in all sorts of dangerous situations. It’s also full of red herrings and they’re never very sure who they can trust. Tommy and Tuppence advertise for information relating to Jane Finn and have two responses. One is from Mr Carter, from British Intelligence who tells them that Jane Finn, a survivor from the torpedoed Lusitania, was handed a certain document – a secret agreement, with a ‘new and deadly significance’. The second response is from Mr Julius P Hersheimmer, a young American, who says he is Jane’s cousin and wants to find her.

Just who is the mysterious Mr Brown, the secretive mastermind behind a plot to unite all of England’s enemies, overthrow the government and cause anarchy?  There is no clue to his real identity, he remains elusive and always in the background. But it becomes clear that he is one of two people and as I read I swung from believing it to be one character to the other.

One point of interest is the brief mention of Inspector Japp, of Scotland Yard. His role in this is merely incidental.

I enjoyed this book and I liked Tommy and Tuppence, who by the end realise they are in love. Agatha Christie only wrote five books featuring this couple. Unlike Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Tommy and Tuppence age as the books were written:

  • Partners in Crime: a book of short stories
  • N or M?
  • By the Pricking of My Thumbs
  • Postern of Fate.

Format: Kindle Edition
File Size: 378 KB
Print Length: 229 pages
Source: Project Gutenberg EBook

Teaser Tuesday

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

My teaser today is from Agatha Christie’s The Secret Adversary, which I’ve just started to read. This is the first Tommy and Tuppence mystery first published in 1922. It begins:

“Tommy, old thing!”

“Tuppence, old bean!”

The two young people greeted each other affectionately, and momentarily blocked the Dover Street Tube exit in doing so. The adjective “old” was misleading. Their united ages would certainly not have totalled forty-five. (Kindle Loc 56-61)

Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event hosted by MizB of Should be Reading.