Tag: Agatha Christie

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.

Crime Fiction Alphabet – A is for …

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

… Agatha Christie

For the first of this year’s Crime Fiction Alphabet hosted by Kerrie I’ve chosen a double A – Agatha Christie – An Autobiography.

I finished reading it at the end of December. I can’t remember exactly when I began reading it. I think it was the end of May because in a Sunday Salon post then I wrote that I was thinking about starting it. I read short sections of it most days since I started it and felt quite sad when I came to the end. It was like having a daily chat with Agatha.

 

It took her fifteen years to write it. She stopped in 1965 when she was 75 because she thought that it was the ‘right moment to stop’. It seems right that a book that took her so long to write should take me a long time to read. As well as being a record of her life as she remembered it and wanted to relate it, it’s also full of  her thoughts on life and writing. I’ve written about her Autobiography in a few posts as I was reading it:

It struck me as I was reading her Autobiography that  it’s not very easy to work out the dates of many of the events she described. It follows on chronologically but is so interspersed with her thoughts and reflections that I forgot the date, or she hadn’t mentioned it. She wrote about her childhood, teenage years, friends and family, and her marriage to Archibald Christie; but although she wrote about their divorce she didn’t write about her disappearance in 1926. She wrote about her travels around the world, the two world wars, her interest and involvement with archaeology and her marriage to Max Mallowan.

Towards the end of the book she wrote that she had decided not to tidy up her Autobiography too much:

Nothing is more wearying than going over things you have written and trying to arrange them in proper sequence or turn them the other way around. I am perhaps talking to myself – a thing one is apt to do when one is a writer. (page 455)

What she remembered most were things that were most vivid and it was places that remained most clearly in her memory. She never had a good memory for people, apart from her own dear friends:

A sudden thrill of pleasure comes into my mind – a tree, a hill, a white house tucked away somewhere by a canal, the shape of a hill. Sometimes I have to think for a moment to remember where and when. Then the picture comes clearly, and I know. (page 416)

She wrote quite a lot about her writing methods, writing criticism, hearing your own voice, economy in wording, writing detective stories, adapting plays and writing them herself, the right length for a detective story (50,000 words), writing two novels at once, writing books set in historical periods and the joy of creation. The one book that satisfied her completely is not one of her detective books but one she wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott – Absent in Spring – and she wrote it in three days flat (pages 516 -7).

She ended the book with these words:

A child says ‘Thank God for my good dinner’.

What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.’ (page 551)

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Curtain was first published in 1975, but it was written in the 1940s during the Second World War. Agatha Christie had written it with the intention that it be published after her death, but in 1975 her publishers persuaded her to release it so that it could appear in time for the Christmas season – a ‘Christie for Christmas’.

In this book Poirot and Hastings have come full circle, returning to Styles, the scene of their first case. Poirot is now an old man (just how old is not revealed  – I think if you go by the chronology of the novels he must have been about 120, but there is no need to be too precise), and close to death.  Hastings is the narrator of this mystery. He is saddened by the devastation age has had on Poirot:

My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feeling by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot’s hair came out of a bottle. but now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse the children!

Only his eyes were the same as ever, shrewd and twinkling, and now – yes, undoubtedly – softened with emotion. (pages 12-13)

Curtain is in many ways a sad book. Sad because this is Poirot’s last case and he dies, with  X, the murderer, apparently having got away with his crimes. Sad, too because Hastings is in a nostalgic and morbid frame of mind, mourning the death of his wife and wishing himself back into happier times. It doesn’t help him that one of his children, Judith, a secretive child now aged 21, is also staying at Styles, the assistant to Dr Franklin who is engaged in research work connected with tropical disease. She resents her father’s interference in her life and is scornful of what she considers his sentimental and old fashioned ideas. Sad too, because of the setting. Styles, once a well-kept country house has been sold  and is now being run as a guest house, the drive badly kept and overgrown with weeds and the house iself badly needing a coat of paint.

But is also an interesting puzzle. Poirot knows the identity of X, a murderer who is present at Styles but will not tell Hastings, because Hastings would not be able to conceal his knowledge – his face would give him away. Poirot is convinced that X will kill again, but he doesn’t know who the victim will be. He asks Hastings to be his eyes and ears whilst he is confined to his wheelchair. He also gives Hastings newspaper cuttings of five murder cases, all of which were committed by different people. X apparently had no motive for killing any of the victims, but he/she was connected with all of them.

Hastings is intrigued and suspects all the people staying at Styles in turn. The first mishap occurs when Colonel Luttrell, the owner of Styles, accidently shoots his wife, but she is only wounded and recovers. Then Barbara, Dr Franklin’s wife, who suffers from her nerves and is looked after by Nurse Craven is found dead, poisoned by one of the toxic substances her husband is researching. Finally Stephen Norton, another guest is found dead in his locked bedroom with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. It looks like suicide, but there is something about the scene that reminds Hastings of an earlier death.

When Poirot, himself dies, the mystery is unsolved, but there is a twist in the ending, which I didn’t see coming, making this one of my favourite Agatha Christie books. It is also a theatrical and dramatic ending to the book and to Poirot, himself.

Agatha Christie on Individuality

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

This morning I was reading more of Agatha Christie’s Autobiography. It feels as though I’m listening to her as she recalls her life and in this morning’s chapter she was talking about individuality and writing. She said that even though you admire certain writers and may wish to write like them, you know you can’t:

If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them. I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things, that as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do. As the Bible says, ‘Who by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’ (page 422)

So it’s no good me wanting  to write like she did!

She went on to list the things she couldn’t do:

  • she was never good at games
  • she was not a conversationalist
  • she couldn’t draw or paint
  • she couldn’t model or do any kind of sculpture
  • she couldn’t hurry without getting rattled
  • she couldn’t say what she meant easily – she could write it better

and then the things she could do:

  • she could write
  • she could be a reasonable musician, but not a professional one
  • she could improvise when in difficulties

and things she didn’t like:

  • crowds
  • being jammed up against people
  • loud voices
  • noise
  • protracted talking
  • parties, especially cocktail parties
  • cigarette smoke and smoking generally
  • any kind of drink except in cooking
  • marmalade
  • oysters
  • lukewarm food
  • grey skies
  • the feet of birds, or the feel of birds altogether
  • and most of all – the taste and smell of hot milk

finally, things she did like:

  • sunshine
  • apples
  • almost any kind of music
  • railway trains
  • numerical puzzles and anything to do with numbers
  • going to the sea
  • bathing and swimming
  • silence
  • sleeping
  • dreaming
  • eating
  • the smell of coffee
  • lilies of the valley
  • most dogs
  • going to the theatre

Apart from a few exceptions we like and dislike most of the same things – I do like a glass of wine for example, I’m useless at numerical puzzles, can’t do sudoku (I bet she’d have liked that), I’m not fond of swimming, and I like cats as well as dogs.