stonepicnicking_okapi

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order. It was begun in January 2021.

Endless Night (1967) was a slog. None of the characters are likeable and because I have been consistently reading so much Christie, I recognized the plot points and guessed what was happening very early on. It's very much like Death on the Nile in some respects but without the Nile to make it interesting and intriguing and the other amusing characters to make it fun and Poirot and Race. Much of it was just tedious from a reader point of view but not, perhaps, from a ficcer point of view working out how the misdirection and manipulation is being done. The narrator's name is Michael Rogers and the poor rich girl is Ellie and the secretary/companion is Greta. And I'm not sorry I'm done with it. Here's a summary:

A newlywed couple faces a series of mysterious events and threats after building their dream house on a cursed land.

Next up: I've discovered to my great consternation that I skipped over a couple of books in the winter. So I will go back and do The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side and The Clocks, both of which I remember very well and have enjoyed.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order. It was begun in January 2021.

Star over Bethlehem (1965) is a small collection of religious Christmas stories and poems. No one reads Christie for her sermons or her poetry, so this was difficult to get though even though it was short. The only highlight was a short tale called "The Naughty Donkey" which I think might make a cute play (with puppets) for my friend

smallhobbit and the Children's Christmas service at her church.

The Third Girl (1966) is also not Christie at her best although I think there are nice bits to it. It is Ariadne Oliver and Poirot. And a girl comes to Poirot wanting help and when she sees him she decides he's too old to help her and he gets involved in a family drama which extends to an apartment/flat shared by a trio of intertwined young ladies. Lots of old-woman complaining about how the kids don't wash these days and you can't tell the girls from the boys and a double identity (think BBC Sherlock's Eurus Holmes) which wasn't convincing to me.

Next up: Endless Night, which I can't remember at all, and it's not at my library so I shall have to read in on archive.org. So maybe putting it off 'til June or later.

Agatha Christe was seventy-five years old when she published At Bertram's Hotel in 1965 so she was (more or less) the age that Miss Marple is when she revisits a London hotel she visited when she was a girl. [by contrast, she was in her 30's when she wrote Murder at the Vicarage]. Indeed, the complaints mentioned in the beginning do sound old-lady-ish (...so many modern armchairs, stop halfway between the high and the knee, thereby inflicting agony on those suffering from arthritis and sciatica...). One theme that runs throughout is looking at the past. Miss Marple doesn't go to museums or shows when she's in London, she goes to places she used to know, places where people she used to know lived, shops she visited with her aunt, eg the Army Navy stores, etc.

When Miss Marple comes up from the country for a holiday in London, she finds what she's looking for at Bertram's: traditional décor and impeccable service. But she senses an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished veneer.

So Things aren't What They Seem.

And Miss Marple concludes: one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back--that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a One Way Street, isn't it?"

This is what I personally think. I hate looking back. I never plan to visit the area where I grew up. I have absolutely no desire to even think about the past.

They make a big deal about muffins and seed cake. That we Americans think muffins are a kind of tea cake with raisins. I'm not sure what that's all about.

But it's a good story. Of course, Agatha has to be very high-handed about Mummy Issues. And it's nice and quaint to think about a crime syndicate being run out of an old-fashioned hotel and not, say, the White House :)

Next up: The Third Girl!

One of my favorite books of all books. A Caribbean Mystery has Miss Marple on holiday in the island of St. Honore, solving a series of murders. It has some of my favorite minor characters: Major Palgrave and Mister Rafael.

You can listen to a version read by Joan Hickson on Youtube here.

I did a drabble for the

small_fandom Drabblethon where one person's hell is another person's heaven.

Title: Post-canon
Fandom: Agatha Christe - Miss Marple [A Caribbean Mystery] and And then there were none
Content Notes: Phillip Lombard meets another colonial, post-canon

( Read more... )

Some quotes:

1. Like to see the picture of a murderer?

2. But then you see, the next day, he died.

3. Who did you think I was calling--a cat?

4. You're about a hundred and I'm a broken-up old crock.

5. D'you want to get me hanged? Shut up, I tell you. Shut that big ugly mouth of yours.

And I did a collage. This is actually my second attempt. The first one wasn't good enough.

Next up: March is going to be fun. More Miss Marple at Bertram's Hotel. She gets to go to all these places and is never satsified (until she's solving a murder).

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order. It was begun in January 2021.

I enjoyed The Pale Horse [1961]. Summary:

A dying woman, Mrs Davis, gives her last confession to Father Gorman, a Roman Catholic priest, but along with her confession she gives him a list of names and a terrible secret. Before he can take action, however, he is struck dead in the fog. As the police begin to investigate, a young hero begins to piece together evidence that sets him upon a converging path.

Mark Easterbook is the amateur detective in the case. He is actually a Mogul scholar (a scholar of the Mogul period) but gets drawn into a diabolical conspiracy. It really is a clever scheme, I think, and smacks of And then there were none but the villain is not as cool as the one in that book. Nevertheless, excellent murder weapon and use of red herrings and blinds in the form of the occult.

I listened to an audiobook version narrated by Hugh Fraser which was solid. I hurried a bit through it because I wanted my first completed book of 2025 to be an Agatha Christie, but I am saving the next two for February and March because we've hit two of my all-time favorites: A Caribbean Mystery and At Bertram's Hotel--and I have a jigsaw puzzle to go with them! Rapture! Joy!

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) is set in an English girls' school, and the plot involves gems smuggled out of a Middle Eastern country at the cusp of revolution. It is ostensibly a Poirot mystery but Poirot plays a minor part toward the end. I enjoyed it. It could've been a short story, I think, but interesting character studies of different kinds of professors/instructors. Spies and foreign office and all that jazz. Also, various kinds of mother love/mother pain. The woman with the illegitmate still born. The drunk mom. The flighty mom. The overprotective mom. Etc.

Next up: The Pale Horse is an interesting one, especially from a poisoner's perspective. And we move into the 1960's--not much more to go! Maybe I will finish in 2025.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

Ordeal by Innocence (1958) is, overall, not one of Christie's best. BUT I do like the plot device of Arthur Calgary. He is a man who picks up a hitchhiker on a certain night, then gets into an accident, has a concussion, forgets about the hitchhiker, then goes on a South Pole expedition, and comes back 2 years later to discover the hitchhiker has died in prison after being found guilty of murder and that Calgary could have given the young man an alibi if he had been around (or aware).

It's very, very contrived, but still interesting and compelling (to me).

The rest of the story is rubbish.

There are five adoptive siblings, and the murdered woman is their adoptive mother. There's a husband and devoted secretary and Christie pulls out that old hobby horse of people being miserable because they suspect the person they love of being a murderer instead of the ASKING THEM. [Communication! Damn it!]

Christie has a lot of rot to say about motherhood. 'Real' motherhood. Adoption. Blood winning out. Etcetera. Yuk. And there's a lot of racism because the one mixed race sibling is ALWAYS compared to an animal. And there's women 'of a certain age' being hysterical morons. And invalid husbands being 100% assholes. And wives who baby their husbands (did those ever exist?)

Next up: Cat Among the Pigeons Poirot! I am going to save this for December. It's set in a girls' school. [I went to a women's college for undergraduate, so been there, done that [without a murder or Poirot, sadly], got the T-shirt, I actually did own a shirt one time from my college which read 'Not a Girls' School without Men but a Women's College without Boys.']

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

I've read that Dorothy L. Sayers wasn't so much in love with Lord Peter as with Bunter, and I think the same must apply here to Agatha Christie and Lucy Eylesbarrow, the domestic extraordinaire who Miss Marple engages to find the body at Rutherford Hall.

4:50 from Paddington is one of my favorite books of all time, and easily in the top five of my favorite Agatha Christie's.

So Miss Marple's no-nonsense Scottish friend sees a murder in another train, but the body never turns up. So Miss Marple engages Lucy to take a position at the Hall and dig around until she finds the body in the Long Barn.

I even pulled out some quotes:

"...Cedric--that's the one who lives abroad. Paints!" The inspector invested the word with its full quota of sinister significance.

"I remember so very well in my young days, the black mixture and the brown mixture...and the white mixture, and Doctor So-and-so's pink mixutre. People didn't mix those up nearly as much. [of course that made me think of this one:

cough syrup

]

Finally we get quite a few Untold Stories in this one: Mrs. Brierly who went to the looney bin but didn't want to tell the kids so had people post them postcards from different places and Mrs. Stanwich who poisoned all her kids because she was jealous of their youth.

I watched the two TV adaptations, and I listened to a audiobook on CD with Joan Hickson narrating so I got my fill. It's a really great story.

Next Up: Ordeal by Innocence, which I feel will tip back and forth between racist and cringy.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

We are still in the 1950's with The Burden by Mary Westmacott (1956). Please don't read this book. It's about sisters and the tragedies that befall them and the Poor Life Choices they make. It plays with Christie's warped psychologies about relationships which tend to fall into the borderline personality disorder-type quagmires and codependent muck. Just don't.

But I had to get through it to get to the next one...

...4:50 from Paddington! One of my all time faves. Who doesn't need an Lucy Eyelesbarrow?!

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

I am solidly in the 1950's. Two Poirots.

Hickory Dickory Dock [1955].

I enjoyed this more than I anticipated. First of all, we get Miss Lemon, Poirot's secretary, whom I like very much as a side character and her sister. Her sister is matron at a boarding house for students, where the crimes are taking place. The students are a mix of different nationalities and races, so I was anticipating a lot of racism, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been [faint praise, I know, but still]. I enjoyed the mystery, and it made sense to me.

This novel is set at a student hostel. Poirot is initially asked to investigate petty thefts and vandalism in the hostel.

Dead Man's Folly [1956].

I don't know that I felt completely satisfied at the resolution. Ariadne Oliver is in this one. She is running a murder game at a fete, which is a classic premise. There is a murder of a child, which is disturbing. And the clues are a mixed bag of heavy-handed and very obtuse. I got the sense that she has used most of these clues in other books to better use, i. e. having a lady wearing a flamboyant hat & outfit for Reasons. The word is: unconvincing, which coming after the one before made it more strikingly unconvincing.

Poirot is invited to Nasse House in Devon by crime-mystery writer Ariadne Oliver, who is staging a Murder Hunt as part of a summer fête the next day. At Nasse House, Mrs Oliver explains that small aspects of her plans for the Murder Hunt have been changed by requests from people in the house rather deviously, until a real murder would not surprise her.

Next Up: A Mary Westmacott I've never read called The Burden. It sounds very dreary so I may put it off until June. Let's not spoil the birthday month with yuckity-yuck.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

Destination Unknown is a forgettable novel from 1954. Here is the synopsis:

Hilary Craven, a deserted wife and bereaved mother, is planning suicide in a Moroccan hotel, when she is asked by British secret agent Jessop to undertake a dangerous mission as an alternative to taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The task, which she accepts, is to impersonate a dying woman to help find the woman's husband, Thomas Betterton, a nuclear scientist who has disappeared and may have defected to the Soviet Union. Soon she finds herself in a group of travellers being transported to the unknown destination of the title.

I think it's a nice fantasy. A person planning to commit suicide finds themselves enveloped in a strange plot that ends up giving them a reason to live. But there's so many identity changes that you could be forgiven for forgetting who is who.

Next Up: A Poirot and a return to the nursery rhyme theme with Hickory, Dickory, Dock.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

I am still in 1953 with a Miss Marple (yay!). A Pocketful of Rye is interesting. I listened to the audiobook version narrated by Rosalind Ayers and she did an okay job with everyone except Miss Marple. There was something lacking there.

So this is another one with a nursery rhyme theme. And the bodies drop in quick succession (3). Miss Marple isn't in it as much as other books.

When London businessman Rex Fortescue dies after drinking his morning tea, Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Neele spearheads the investigation. An autopsy reveals the cause of death was poisoning by taxine, a toxic alkaloid obtained from the yew tree, and that Fortescue ingested it with his breakfast, while a search of his clothing reveals a quantity of rye in his jacket pocket.

BUT

I realized (or remembered) that the real story is Miss Marple and and Gladys (her former maid who is one of the murder victims) and the end of the last chapter is really rather poignant and telling:

The last words of the pathetic letter echoed in her mind.

You can see what a nice boy he is.

The tear rose in Miss Marple's eyes. Succeeding pity, there came anger--anger against a heartless killer.

And then displacing both of these emotions, there came a surge of triumph--the triumph some specialist might feel who has successfully reconstructed an extinct animal from a fragment of jawbone and a couple of teeth.

That's why I like Miss Marple.

Next up: Destination Unknown which I don't remember at all.

Snowflake Challenge promotional banner with image of ice covered tree branches and falling snowflakes on a blue background. Text: Snowflake Challenge January 1-31.

Challenge #8

Talk about a current fannish project (fic, art, vid, crochet, funko pop village) (that you are creating or enjoying).

Unfortunately, I don't really have a fannish project at the moment.

Last year, in 2023, I did Fannish 50 (more info here: https://swannee.dreamwidth.org/139283.html) and posted about 50 things I enjoy, and I found that to be a nice round-up of really everything I like. They are here: https://stonepicnicking-okapi.dreamwidth.org/tag/fannish+50

But I suppose you can count my All of Agatha campaign as a fannish project and so I'll post an update on that.

I am trying to read all of Agatha Christie's oeuvre before I die in order of UK publication date (including the Mary Westmacott works). I began in January 2021, beginning where we always begin, at Styles and now I am up to 1953 and After the Funeral.

A wealthy man dies at home. His relatives gather after his funeral for the reading of his will, during which his sister states that he was murdered. The next day, she herself is found murdered. Poirot is called in to solve the mystery.

Lots of red herrings. Lots of unlikeable characters. My favourite character is Mister Goby, who is an inquiry agent acting for Poirot and collecting information on the suspects. The interesting thing is Mister Goby never looks at the person he's talking to and this quirk is presented in an amusing way. A very diabolical crime, and an unhinged murderer. I watched the film Cape Fear with Robert deNiro the other day and I was unsettled by all the violence, but in terms of cold blooded murderers, ol' Aggie can hold her own when you think about it. I mean the murder weapon is a hatchet!

This campagin was inspired by the Shedunnit podcast, which did an episode on another podcast which is focused on reading all of Christie in order, and because I am a very big Christie fan, I decided to take it on.

So I supppose it is fannish. I will certainly be sad when I'm done.

https://stonepicnicking-okapi.dreamwidth.org/tag/all+of+agatha

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

A Daughter's a Daughter [1952] is the fifth of the works published under the Mary Westmacott name. It was a story about a mother and her nineteen-year-old daughter whose love turns to bitterness and jealously. It was not a fun read.

Part of me thinks that Agatha was well-versed in what I think are elements of what would be classified as borderline personality disorder (and maybe other personality disorders) by today's standards. I was diagnosed with bpd when I was a teen and I recognize some of the attitudes and manipulative tactics (used deliberately and subconsciously) that I have tried to un-do for the past 30+ years. The mother and daughter fight about boyfriends and then manipulate each other (and themselves) into being miserable and then fall apart and slowly put themselves back together. And really if someone would even TRY to pass the bechdel test, I would be grateful.

Next up: After the Funeral, which is fun one.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

They Do it With Mirrors (1952) is a decent story made more decent by its opening premise of Miss Marple helping her girlhood friends. I like that idea. Miss Marple goes to Stoneygates, a country house converted to an institute for young delinquents. It follows the idea 'the people you think are crazy, aren't and the people who aren't crazy, probably are.' Except for Miss Marple, of course.

The next book is a Mary Westmacott called A Daughter's a Daughter which I have never, ever heard of. It sounds very tedious so I am thinking about putting it off to November. I will have enough to do for October.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

Mrs. McGinty's Dead is a novel that beggars belief even for Agatha. The plot of solving the murder of a char woman and the main clue being a newspaper clipping of past murderers who got away with it and one of the past murderers is living in the village and doesn't want their secret discovered. It's Hercule Poirot with Ariadne Oliver and we get some insight into Agatha Christie's dilemmas and anxieties about having her works adapted for the stage. The murder weapon (a sugar cutter, a kind of small axe) is interesting, and there are way, way too many different characters. A nice twist at the end and a final clue that wouldn't work nowadays (in my opinion).

On y va, back to Miss Marple and They Do It With Mirrors which also has a big cast of singular characters but it also has Miss Marple so it'll be more fun.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

They Came to Baghdad [1951] puts us squarely in the 1950's, publication wise. It was an underwhelming read I had to slog through at points. It might be called the misadventures of Miss Victoria Jones. Here's the summary:

Baghdad is the chosen location for a secret summit of superpowers, concerned but not convinced, about the development of an, as yet, unidentified and undescribed secret weapon.

Only one man has the proof that can confirm the nature of this fantastic secret weapon – a British agent named Carmichael. Unfortunately the criminal organisation responsible for the weapon’s development will stop at nothing to prevent him entering Baghdad and presenting his proof to the assembled delegates. Can Carmichael enter the city against such odds?

Into this explosive situations appears Victoria Jones, a girl with a yearning for adventure who gets more than she bargains for when a wounded Carmichael dies in her arms in her hotel room.

Now, if only she could make sense of his last words

I didn't really like Victoria so I didn't care much what happened to her. At one point, she thinks:

A phony platinum blonde, with no face powder and no lipstick! Could any girl be more unfortunately placed?

This is after she's escaped after having had her hair dyed forcibly, been chloroformed, kidnapped, held prisoner, and nearly starved. I mean, what?! These kinds of thoughts don't endear her to me.

One phrase I noticed which also appeared in A Caribbean Mystery is one woman saying she'd like to 'tear [item of clothing] off another woman' ostensibly because Woman A likes the shawl/suit/etc. that Woman B is wearing so much that it warrants assault. This is not a sentiment I have ever known. It's a strangely violent phrase.

Next we have What Mrs. McGinty Saw! Sing along if you know the words...Mrs. McGinty How Did She Die? Holding Her Hand Out...Just Like I....

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

So with A Murder is Announced we move from the 1940's into the 1950's. A Murder is Announced is one of my favourite books because we get Miss Marple and Hinch and Murgatroyd, as far as I can remember, the only cannonical Boston marriage in all of Christie's bibliography. I watched the 1985 version with Joan Hickson. You can listen to Joan Hickson read here on YT.

So the opening premise is:

A notice appears in the local newspaper for Chipping Cleghorn: "A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, 29 October, at Little Paddocks, at 6.30 pm. Friends accept this, the only intimation."

I am going to squee, so I'll put it in a cut.

( Read more... )

Next up: They Came to Baghdad which I don't remember.

This series of entries is commentary on my lifelong quest to read all of Agatha Christie's works in UK publication order.

Aggie says Crooked House is one of her top five favourites. It isn't a favourite of mine but I did have a lot of 'oh, I see what you're doing there' moments where you can't help but admire her talent for misdirection and multiple interpretations of the same incident/statement/object.

Here's the plot:

Wealthy entrepreneur Aristide Leonides has died aged 85. Due to the war, the whole Leonides family has been living with him in a sumptuous but ill-proportioned house called "Three Gables", the crooked house of the title. The autopsy reveals that Leonides was poisoned with his own eserine-based eye medicine via an insulin injection. Sophia tells Charles that she can't marry him until the matter is cleared up.

I tried to watch the TV production with Glenn Close but I only lasted about 5 minutes and turned it off. For some reason, it rang my 'Lots of White People Being White' bell.

As I said, in terms of mystery engineering it is a gem, but I didn't care about any of the characters so it didn't matter.

But...speaking of characters I care about...I posted Crooked House by itself because next up is A Murder is Announced!!! And we have a canonical Boston marriage and Miss Marple being an A+ ally. Hinch and Murgutroyd! And the suspicious goings on at Little Paddocks. There are some very droll lines in it that I want to pull out and I checked out the Joan Hickson version to watch.

I realised I'd missed a few short stories in my reading timeline and wanted (for the sake of completeness) check them off. They were compiled and published one-off in various magazines. They were: The Crime in Cabin 66; Poirot and the Regatta Mystery (this would later be changed to a Parker Pyne story); The Problem at Pollenesa Bay; and The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest.

The last one is the only one I want to talk about. So in this story, the body is found in a chest the morning after a party which had taken place in the same room. There is a love triangle. It's a Poirot story and it reminded me a lot of the Hitchcock film Rope. It reminded me so much so that I looked Rope up but it is supposed to be based on the real life Loeb and Leopold case and the Christie story predates the film. But I find it rather fascinating and inspiring (the Christie story).

If I get back into my Bertie Wooster voice I would love to take this story and make it a comedy about Bertie going to an awkward dinner party and either finding the corpse or realising there is a corpse and finding it. Like take Rope and make it a comedy. I mean, Bertie Wooster was made for lifting the lid of an antique chest after putting on a gramophone record and finding a corpse and not knowing what to do about it. (Jeeves will know, of course)

So my next official read was a Mary Westmacott: The Rose and the Yew Tree. It's a romantice tragedy. And, as much as I love Aggie, I think most of her romance is pretty tragic. So a woman makes a Poor Choice and Suffers and Dies. I absolutely don't know enough about the subject, but I think the main character might today be classified on the autism spectrum. I don't know. Maybe not. But there could be some organic reasons for her choices. And the narrator is an injured soldier (not injured during the war but rather in a pedestrian crash after it) and sent to the country to rehabilitate with his sister. We see this dynamic in The Moving Finger, too, so Aggie must've known someone (or someones) like that.

Anyway I don't recommend. There are much better ways to spend your time.

But next up: Crooked House. That should be good. Last novel of the 1940's.

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Entries tagged with all of agatha

All of Agatha: Endless Night (1967)

All of Agatha: Star over Bethlehem & The Third Girl

All of Agatha: At Bertram's Hotel

All of Agatha: A Caribbean Mystery

All of Agatha: The Pale Horse

All of Agatha: Cat Among the Pigeons

All of Agatha: Ordeal by Innocence (1958)

All of Agatha: 4:50 from Paddington

All of Agatha: The Burden by Mary Westmacott

All of Agatha: Hickory Dickory Dock and Dead Man's Folly

All of Agatha: Destination Unknown

All of Agatha: A Pocketful of Rye

Snowflake #8: Fannish Project

All of Agatha: A Daugther's a Daughter by Mary Westmacott

All of Agatha: They Do It with Mirrors

All of Agatha: Mrs. McGinty's Dead

All of Agatha: They Came to Baghdad

All of Agatha: A Murder is Announced

All of Agatha: Crooked House

All of Agatha: Some Short Stories and a Mary Westmacott