stonepicnicking_okapi | Entries tagged with all of agatha

This month in my quest to read all of Agatha Christie in publication order, I tackled Peril at End House and Thirteen Problems.

Peril at End House has Poirot, Hastings, and Japp.

Poirot and Hastings vacation in Cornwall, meeting young Magdala "Nick" Buckley and her friends. He is persuaded that someone is out to kill her. They meet all of her friends at her home called End House. Though he aims to protect Nick, a murder happens that provokes Poirot to mount a serious investigation.

The solution is ingenious, and even though I remembered it well, it was still fun to read again.

Even more fun was Thirteen Problems a short story collection, which has some of Miss Marple's best cases like "Herb of Death" and "A Christmas Tragedy." It also has a lot of her interacting Dolly Bantry, which I enjoy very much. Most of the stories are available on Youtube being read by Joan Hickson and really I can listen to her over and over and never grow tired of her.

Next up, I am to Lord Edgeware Dies.

The Floating Admiral [1931] was written by the Detection Club, of which Agatha Christie was a member. Each member wrote a chapter and passed it onto the next. My expectations were low, but it turned out to be a decent story. Anthony Berkley did the last chapter and was Very Clever about it. Dorothy L. Sayers did a chapter, too.

The plot:

On a drifted boat, the body of Admiral Penistone is found. Last night, he had dinner with his niece in the house of the vicar. Afterwards he used his own boat to navigate over the river to his home. However, the boat on which the admiral is found is not his property, but is owned by the vicar. The admiral was stabbed by a knife or a dagger, but there is no blood on the floor. Furthermore, the mooring line has been cut.

Everyone is Not What They Seem and Guarding Secrets and quite a few of them Have a Past. And there's a chapter that relies heavily on train schedules and another that includes a lot about river tides.

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The Sittaford Mystery [1931] is a girl + guy solve a mystery. I had read it before and remembered the most interesting part of it: the motive of the killer. It's greed but the circumstances of the greed are sort of funny and pathetic and twee. And, boy, does Agatha have Bizarre Thoughts about couple compatibility, marriage, romantic relationships, etc. A heavy does of People Being Not What They Seem. And I can see her taking bits and pieces of other works and weaving them in. Parts of this are like The Man in the Brown Suit. There's an element here that will show up in Mousetrap. There's another type of character (the older man who makes foolish investments) shows up in all kinds of places.

Mrs Willett and her daughter host a a séance on a snowy winter's evening in Dartmoor. The spirit tells them that Captain Trevelyan is dead. The roads being impassible to vehicles, Major Burnaby announces his intention to go to the village on foot to check on his friend, where he appears to find the prediction has come true. Emily Trefusis, engaged to Trevelyan's nephew, uncovers the mystery along with the police.

Next up: Peril at End House. I can hear the way Poirot says 'Mademoiselle Buckley' in my head as we speak. And more séances, I think.

Being the first Miss Marple novel, Murder at the Vicarage deserves its own post. I listened to Joan Hickson reading it here on the You Tube and I watched the Joan Hickson TV version. I enjoyed Joan Hickson and the Yes, Minister vicar in the last, but the rest of the cast I could take or leave.

I've read it many times, but you always find something new if you really love a book. There was one part which I liked very much this go-round.

"I have been reading a lot of American detective stories from the library lately," said Miss Marple, "hoping to find them helpful."

"Was there anything in them about picric acid?"

"I'm afraid not."

The idea of Miss Marple on the reservation list at the Saint Mary Mead's lending library for the latest Raymond Chandler and reading it for clues tickles me.

The next up is the Detection Club's The Floating Admiral and Christie's own The Sittaford Mystery.

So I managed two books this month:

The Mysterious Mister Quin [1930] is the first Harley Quin book, a collection of short stories introducing Harley Quin and Mister Satterthwaite. Mister Satterthwaite is an observant man in his 60's and Harley Quin is a mysterious figure who appears and disappears and encourages or invites Mister Satterthwaite to investigate or contemplate and ultimately resolve puzzles, mysteries, injustices that come across his path. For all the stories, the incident now is always related to something that's happened before.

I listened to an audiobook of the whole thing with Hugh Fraser narrating. Then I listened on Youtube to Martin Jarvis doing the first 6 in the collection. The problem with Martin Jarvis is that he did the audiobook of Good Omens and it's difficult for me not to hear his Aziraphale voice and his Crowley voice.

Mister Satterthwaite is a snob and a grump and a curmudgeon, but I liked the element of him finding his purpose and a reason to live in solving these puzzles and Harley Quin is so nebulous that I've decided to write a story 'The First Rule of Harley Quin is that We Do Not Talk about Harley Quin' in the manner of Fight Club, and Mister Satterthwaite coming to realize that Harley Quin and he are the same person.

I've used "The Soul of the Croupier" in a ficlet for JWP at Watson's Woes.

The second book I just read was on archive.org: Giant's Bread, Agatha Christie writing under the name Mary Westmacott. It was sort of dreary. Imagine the kids from The Secret Garden grow up, WWI happens, and they're all sort of unhappy. One of them gets wounded in the war and has amnesia and shows up after presumed dead for four years. Consumption. Ships hitting icebergs. Opera. Horrible mothers. And fathers. Bleh.

But none of that matters because guess what's next? MURDER AT THE VICARAGE! Woo-hoo! Guess whose clock is 15 minutes fast? And who has brought the wrong rock for Miss Marple's rock garden?

This month I read only one work in my quest to read all of Agatha Christie's ouvre in UK-published order. That work was Partners in Crime, a collection of Tommy & Tuppence stories where they run a detective agency. I also rented the TV series from the 1980's but I only watched one [I watched another with the Shedunnit book club, which was an entirely different, and pleasurable, experience] when I decided I just couldn't take the perky, campy nature of it. It's not it, it's me. I think I am just to sober and in a, as Bertie Wooster would say, though not disgruntled, far from gruntled, mood to appreciate them.

In the stories, Tommy and Tuppence take clients and try to use the techniques and styles of fictional detectives to solve the crime/problem. The problem is that most of the detectives I'd never heard of. I'd heard of four: Holmes, Poirot, Thorndyke, and Roger Sherringham. That was it. But I've never read any Thorndyke so I might do that. Written by R. Austin Freeman, Dr. Thorndyke is known for the use of science (forensic science and medicine) elements.

It was a bit of a slog to get through. I think it's just too light and campy for me at the moment, and it's difficult to un-hear Francesca Annis' voice ringing in your ears.

Next up: more short stories The Mysterious Mr. Quin.

This month, I managed 3 Agatha Christie books.

The Big Four is a Poirot and Hastings and about a secret international conspiracy of murder and mayhem. The problem reading this in 2021 is that you know it isn't a question of being secret. Treason got committed in broad daylight on Twitter by the last US president. And collusion, too. It's a question of not enough people with power being willing to put a stop to evil. And there just aren't.

The Mystery of the Blue Train [audiobook, John Moffat, who does American accents without sounding too marble-mouthed.] I have a special place in my heart for this one because I wrote a Jeeves and Wooster fusion with it, Jeeves & the Blue Train. I like it still. An arrogant American heiress takes a cursed ruby on a train trip with her lover, her husband, her husband's lover, and Hercule Poirot. What could go wrong? I am sad, of course, that Katherine Grey ended up with Derek Kettering in the end. I think if I inherited the fortune that Katherine Grey did, I'd never speak to another man again.

The Seven Dials Mystery. [audiobook, Emilia Fox, who is a solid female narrator] Very silly. It is blending a country house murder with another secret international conspiracy plot (this time with masks) where no one is what they seem. With the cast from The Secret of Chimneys, which, in my opinion, is not advertisement.

Next up is Partners in Crime a Tommy and Tuppence short story collection. I think I will take my time with it as Christie is doing parodies of different detectives with each chapter and I'll try to read some of the unfamiliar originals.

The Secret of Chimneys [1925]. A summary from Wikipedia: At the request of George Lomax, Lord Caterham reluctantly agrees to host a weekend party at his home, Chimneys. A murder occurs in the house, beginning a week of fast-paced events with police among the guests.

The good thing about reading Christie’s books in order is that you can see what she’s doing. In my opinion, Chimneys is a less compelling version of The Man in the Brown Suit. Every character from the grumpy aristocrat to the rake to the clever heroine to the detective to the elements of foreign espionage is less compelling, but you can see that the pieces are similar and the setting is less compelling [country house] and even the MacGuffin [memoirs not diamonds]. Warnings for antisemitic and racist caricature.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd [1926]. No one can talk about this book without spoilers so it all goes in a cut. SPOILER ALERT!
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Next up is The Big Four, which I am not really looking forward to. Espionage only works if you still believe that some governments are the ‘good guys’ and I think I’ve been successfully disabused of that notion for a while. And then The Mystery of the Blue Train, which I know very well since I did a Bertie & Jeeves fic of it. I have an audiobook version narrated by John Moffat.

This month in my quest to read all of Agatha Christie's ouvre in published order, I read the short story collection, Poirot Investigates and the novel The Man in the Brown Suit, both published in 1924.

The first is a collection of eleven stories, [eleven in the UK version, three more were added to the later US version] all very known to me, with Hastings and Poirot. Some are clearly tributes to ACD. Such as "The Case of Mr. Davenheim" being a send-up of "The Man with the Twisted Lip"; "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb" being much like "The Blanched Soldier" and "The Case of the Cheap Flat" being basically every ACD story where the client accepts a situation that is far too good to be true. And all the stock in trades, jewelry thefts, Egyptian curses, and espionage. Warning for lots of xenophobia and anti-Asian racist stereotypes in "The Adventure of the Western Star." I listened to some of them on audiobook with Charles Armstrong as narrator who does a fine job. I'm a fan of David Suchet as an actor but not an audiobook narrator.

I loved "The Man in the Brown Suit." I don't honestly remember reading it before, so maybe I didn't. I was turned off by an audiobook version which I only listened to about 30 seconds (Allison Larkin was narrating and whose voice resulted in instant revolt of my eardrums). But if you skim over the Very Heterosexual romance and noxious sentiments about Love and Marriage and,to a lesser extent, Women, it was a romping good story about Anne Beddingfeld whose academic father dies leaving her penniless and she (much like Tuppence Cowley/Beresford) is looking for adventure and she finds it by witnessing a death on the tube in London and being caught up in intrigue which takes her to South Africa and Zimbabwe. The mystery centres around missing gems and involves a long sea voyage and danger aboard ship and no one is who they seem! There were TWISTS! And much, much humour. And I loved it. There's much to learn from it about misdirection.

Some quotes:

[talking about her hat]...with the inspiration of a genius, I had kicked it once, punched it twice, dented in the crown and affixed to it a thing like a cubist's dream of a jazz carrot". I am definitely going to draw a cubist's dream of a jazz carrot.

Professor Peterson one clasped me affectionately and said I had a "neat little waist"....The phrase alone dated him hopelessly. No self-respecting female has had a "neat little waist" since I was in my cradle. Anne is no fool--except when it comes to Love!

He has the face of a fourteenth-century poisoner--the sort of man the Borgias got to do their odd jobs for them." Such a Bertie Wooster line! And I will steal a poor ficcer's version

"I can drink practically an unlimited amount of ice cream sodas." You and me, Anne!

And having lived and worked in East Africa, I did appreciate the mention of wooden animal souvenirs. They are difficult to resist.

So technically, the next work is a book of poems called Road of Dreams, but apparently only one edition was printed and so unless I have a A. Z. Fell, bookseller, who wants to grace me an ethereal peek at a rare book, I'm going to move on to the forgettable and UN-forgettable: The Secret of Chimneys and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Bring your mah-jog tiles! And start dreaming of vegetable marrows!

So the second stop on my life-long quest to become an Agatha Christie completist is The Secret Adversary and The Murder on the Links.

So, The Secret Adversary (1922) is the first Tommy and Tuppence work, and it's young and fresh. Tommy and Tuppence are childhood friends who meet and are broke after WWI and want some adventure and they get entangled in a spy plot involving Secret Papers that were transferred on the sinking Lusitania. I enjoyed it.

I like the dedication. TO ALL THOSE WHO LEAD MONOTONOUS LIVES IN THE HOPE THAT THEY MAY EXPERIENCE AT SECOND HAND THE DELIGHTS AND DANGERS OF ADVENTURE.

My life is so dull I despair so I feel like she's writing for me. I also liked Tuppence's breezy, fun summary of her time in WWI. I know bun shops can't be half as interesting as I think they are, but I would like to visit one before I die. They are in the bun shop when she does this.

( Tuppence monologue )

The Murder on the Links (1923) is Poirot and Hastings and my chief complaint is that it isn't a golfing mystery. The first body is left on the edge of a golf course under construction so that it will be found, but that's about it. Hastings falls in love with Cinderella and is still an ass from the Nigel Bruce School of Watsoning. I mean anyone who says the following deserves a tremendous eye roll:

“Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!”

But then of course Poirot admits: “A malformation of the grey cells may coincide quite easily with the face of a Madonna.”

Also, Agatha breaks some of the cardinal rules of Golden Age Crime fiction in that there is a set of twins. The story also smacks of ACD's "The Mystery of the Abbey Grange." Never trust a wife who's tied up and left alive while the husband's shot. Suspicious. I read this very quickly, much quicker than The Secret Adversary.

I think one or two a month is about my pace. So next up are Poirot Investigates (eleven short stories as I'm going by the original UK publication set) and The Man in the Brown Suit.

Inspired by an episode of the Shedunnit podcast, I've decided to embark on a life-long quest to become an Agatha Christie completist [to read her entire bibliography in publication order and for the sake of my rabid but recrudescent anglophilia, I'm going to go with UK publication date and in the case of the short story collections, the original UK table of contents].

I suspect almost all of these will be re-reads. I read Agatha Christie as a child.

So here we go. We begin where we always begin...at Styles.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1921.

Poirot's first novel. It is, in my opinion, The Tits! [read this means the best, I like tits] Here are a few observations.

-Hastings is an ass straight out of the Nigel Bruce School of Watsoning [apologies to

luthienberen and any other Nigel Bruce fan].

-I ship Poirot and the faithful Dorcas. I may have to write Poirot giving her a little end-of-case seeing-to.

-Equating Japp with Lestrade in describing him as ferret-faced. Or maybe (like grey eyes) there are a lot of ferret-faced people in England and that's a common way of describing people.

-It'd be swell if I could get to Torquay before I die. Maybe when I finish this list as a reward.

Quotes:

"Ah, my friend, one may live in a big house and yet have no comfort."

"Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend," observed Poirot philosophically.

So next month, I'm getting Tommy and Tuppence Beresford's debut in The Secret Adversary and possibly Hasting Being an Ass the Sequel aka The Murder on the Links.