Published: 29 Dec 2023 Updated: 18 May 2024
And now it's time for the acknowledged Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. For the past year, as I worked my way through the A, B and C mystery authors, I debated how to approach Christie's oeuvre: I have at least 70 of her books. One approach would have been to take all the Hercule Poirots in order, then all the Miss Marples and so on, but I thought I would quickly tire of that schedule, so I've just decided to take them as they come in chronological order, starting with her first published novel from 1920, The Mysterious Affair At Styles. As I finish each book, I'll update this list. At least that's the current plan.
As for her own ten favorite novels, Christie told an interviewer in 1971 that her favorites, at least at that time were: And Then There Were None; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; A Murder is Announced; Murder on the Orient Express; The Thirteen Problems; Towards Zero; Endless Night; Crooked House; Ordeal By Innocence; and The Moving Finger. Agatha Christie books.
Significantly, The Mysterious Affair At Styles did not make her list of favorites. As an early effort, it's OK, but that and Christie's display of her pharmaceutical skills acquired as a hospital dispenser during WW I are about the best things that can be said for it. Hercule Poirot makes his debut in the book as a retired Belgian detective war refugee. Also making his debut is the narrator of the book, Captain Hastings, who in my opinion is one of the more irritating Watsons ever to come on the scene. Hastings' apparent inability to conceal anything at all is Poirot's excuse for not divulging his deductions until the ultimate drawing room scene with all the potential suspects assembled when he unmasks the murderer. Christie does play fair; all of the clues necessary to unravel the mystery are there, with the possible exception of the character of one of the suspects. I'll give it a B just for the historical value, but probably won't read it again. More about Poirot here.
The Secret Adversary (1922) introduces Tommy and Tuppence, a young couple yearning for adventure in post-World War I England, who become involved in the search for a mysterious young woman, a survivor of the sinking of the Lusitania, who is believed to have possession of secret documents that may threaten the government of Britain. They encounter an energetic young American millionaire, Julius P. Hersheimmer, and a nasty set of international spies, who are all also searching for the young woman. Grade: A.
I don't seem to have Murder on the Links, published in 1923. I know I read it years ago, but don't have a paper copy--probably borrowed it from the library. So I purchased a very bad electronic version, evidently a transcription of an audio book; it's bad because many words were missing, replaced by "garbled", "unintelligible" or simply "missing". The plot of the book was convoluted and not very interesting, but Poirot does manage to get his annoying sidekick, Captain Hastings, married off and sent to manage a ranch in Argentina, so that's one good thing about the book. Grade: C.
The Man In the Brown Suit (1924) introduces the mysterious Colonel Race, who may or may not be a Secret Service agent. Anne Beddingfeld, the recently orphaned daughter of an eminent British anthropologist, longs for adventure and soon finds herself embroiled in murder and international crime. Seizing the day, she bluffs her way onto the staff of a newspaper to investigate a murder to which she was a witness, and is soon on her way aboard ship to South Africa in pursuit of adventure and the mysterious man in the brown suit. Grade: A.
Hercule Poirot returns in Poirot Investigates, a collection of short stories published in 1924. All good stories, but not terribly memorable. Grade: B.
The Secret of Chimneys introduces another recurring detective, Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard. The shy and unassuming Marquis of Caterham is induced by an official in the British government to hold a conclave of representatives of financial interests at his ancestral estate, Chimneys, where a fabulous jewel disappeared years before. Naturally, murder ensues. This one has been a favorite of mine for years. Grade: A.
The Mystery of the Blue Train finds Hercule Poirot, without Captain Hastings, on the Rivera investigating the murder of an American millionaire's daughter who was murdered aboard the Blue Train. Her jewelry, including a fabulous ruby alleged to have once belonged to Catherine the Great of Russia, has disappeared. Was it simply a robbery gone wrong, or was there a more personal motive involved? Part of the story is set in the village of St. Mary Meade, later the home of Miss Jane Marple, but she is not a character and is not mentioned in the book. Grade: C.
So now we come to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, probably Agatha Christie's finest work, although one that created some controversy when it was first published in 1926; some readers thought she had cheated, but absolutely every clue Poirot uses to solve the case is there before the reader. I won't say any more than that to avoid giving it away, but once Christie had used this plot twist, no one else could ever do it. Grade: A+.
I groaned when I saw that The Big Four was the next book on the list. For one thing, Poirot confronts an international gang of criminals, and second, Christie brings back Captain Hastings as the narrator. I was surprised to find that I liked the book much better this time than I had in the past, and I was impressed again with Christie's ability to use features of the story in unexpected ways, particularly Captain Hastings' tendency to blurt out anything that comes to his mind, which Poirot adroitly uses to bring about the ultimate destruction of the gang. Her humor also clearly shines through with a wry satire on one of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Grade: B.
The Seven Dials Mystery, published in 1929, revisits some of the locations and characters from The Secret of Chimneys, including Bundle Brent and Superintendent Battle, taking on yet another gang of international criminals... maybe. An apparently healthy young man is found dead in his bed during a house party at Chimneys. When a close friend of his is also murdered, Bundle and her friends start detecting. This is another book where Agatha Christie uses common Golden Age themes and devices to bamboozle the reader, even after laying some pretty blatant clues in the path down which she is leading us. Grade: A.
The Tuesday Club Murders (alternate title: Thirteen Problems) is a series of short stories which introduced Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster living in a small village, in 1928. A gathering of six people, including Miss Marple; her writer nephew Raymond West; his fiancee, the artist Joyce Lampiere; clergyman Dr. Pender; solicitor Mr. Petherick, and retired Commissioner of Scotland Yard Sir Henry Clithering discusses unsolved mysteries. The stories are told in turn by each of the members; each relates a mysterious event and the other members try to come up with the answer. To the surprise of them all, Miss Marple turns out to be the only one who can come up with the correct solution to the mystery. After the initial six problems, Agatha Christie includes seven more stories told by a different group. This group again includes Sir Henry but also introduces Colonel and Mrs. Bantry. Again, Miss Marple has all the answers. Grade: A.
9 Feb 2024
Miss Marple appears for the first time in a full length novel in Murder At The Vicarage, published in 1930. The local police, embodied by Inspector Slack, whose energy belies his name, and Colonel Melchett, the Chief Constable, are baffled when first one person, then another, and finally a third person all confess to have murdered the highly unpopular Colonel Protheroe in the Vicarage study. This abundance of suspects does not bother Miss Marple, who states early on that she has no less than seven potential suspects, each of whom has a motive for the removal of the obnoxious Colonel Protheroe from the scene. Miss Marple fortuitously lives next door to the scene of the murder and helps the police identify and trap her final suspects. Grade: A.
13 Feb 2024.
Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective (alternate title: Parker Pyne Investigates) is a collection of short stories introducing Parker Pyne, who is not, strictly speaking, a detective. Instead, he is a retired civil servant who has set up a business where he strives to make people happy. He runs an advertisement in the agony column of the newspaper that says simply, "Are you happy? If not, consult Mr. Parker Pyne." He will then diagnose the source of the client's unhappiness and find a way to remedy it, occasionally using a scenario constructed by that celebrated author of best-selling thrillers, Mrs. Ariadne Oliver. Grade: B.
17 Feb 2024
Murder At Hazelmoor (alternate title: The Sittaford Mystery) is set in a remote area of Devonshire, on the edge of Dartmoor, with a major blizzard coming on. A mother and daughter have rented Sittaford House from the owner, Captain Trevelyan, who has removed himself and his most cherished possessions to a house in Hazelwood, six miles away. The local people are puzzled as to why Mrs. Willets has chosen to come to this remote location in the middle of winter; she has invited them to the house one evening and someone jokingly suggests a seance. During the table turning, they receive a message saying that Captain Trevelyan has been murdered. One of the party, Major Burnaby, a close friend of the Captain's, decides to push through the snow; when he arrives at Hazelmoor, he finds that it is true. I'm giving this one a C--the best part was the plucky young woman who sets out to prove that her fiancé, the Captain's nephew, is not the murderer. Grade: C.
20 Feb 2024
Peril At End House was another book I didn't have on my shelves, so I bought an electronic copy. I doubt I'll ever read it again; for one thing, Captain Hastings is back as Watson to Poirot. I also felt the solution to the mystery was not sufficiently indicated in the earlier parts of the book, but that may just be sour grapes on my part for being bamboozled yet again. It's always a good idea to remember Poirot's dictum, "Me, I suspect everyone." Grade: C.
26 Feb 2024
Lord Edgeware Dies (alternate title: Thirteen At Dinner) brings Hastings back again to recount one of Poirot's cases. Actress Jane Wilkinson, estranged wife of Lord Edgeware, enlists Poirot to ask her husband to give her a divorce because she wants to marry the Duke of Merton. Lord Edgeware, to Poirot's astonishment, tells him that he has already written to her six months ago agreeing to the divorce, but she has not responded to the letter and has done nothing about it. Shortly thereafter Lord Edgeware is found dead, stabbed in the back of the neck. The plot of this seems a bit simple, but that may be that I had read it fairly recently and was not surprised by the plot twist. Doubt I'll ever read it again. Grade: C.
1 March 2024
The title of Why Didn't They Ask Evans was evidently suggested to Agatha Christie by a similar question she had included in the course of the previous book, Lord Edgeware Dies. The plot of that book has no relation to this one, but the identity of the mysterious Evans in this book drives the whole plot. A man who has fallen over a cliff in Wales utters the sentence, "Why didn't they ask Evans?" as he is dying. Bobby Jones, a young former naval officer hears the question which sets him and Lady Frances "Frankie" Derwent on a quest to identify the man and to locate the elusive Evans. The plot gets a bit convoluted, and the conclusion reinforces the dictum "suspect everyone" in that no one may be what he or she seems. Grade: C.
8 March 2024
Another of Agatha Christie's own favorite books is Murder on the Orient Express (alternate title: Murder in the Calais Coach), and it's always been one of my favorites, too. Hercule Poirot is returning to London aboard the famous Orient Express along with a collection of international travelers. Before the train departs a rich American tries to hire Poirot to protect him from an unspecified enemy whom he suspects will try to assassinate him during the journey. Poirot refuses on the simple grounds that he doesn't like the man's face. The man is killed during the night, stabbed to death twelve times. Since the train has been immobilized in a blizzard during the night, it is apparent that one of the passengers on the train must be the murderer, but each of them has an alibi. It's one of Poirot's most difficult, but ultimately satisfying cases, demonstrating again the devious genius of Agatha Christie. It also includes one of my favorite lines from mystery fiction, uttered by an anguished official of the railway company, "They can't ALL be lying!" Grade: A+
13 March 2024
Hercule Poirot attends a dinner party at the home of retired actor Sir Charles Cartwright at which an inoffensive elderly clergyman is served a cocktail and promptly drops dead in Murder In Three Acts. Although murder is suspected, there appears to be no motive for anyone to have murdered him. However, when a prominent doctor, also a guest at the party, subsequently dies in the same way a few weeks later, Poirot steps in to solve the case. I found the plot of this one to be a bit obvious, although in fairness I might have gotten a hint when some of the pages in my ancient paperback copy of the book fell out and I had to replace them. Grade: C.
18 March 2024
Death In The Air (alternate title: Death In The Clouds) finds Poirot aboard an air liner; somewhere between Paris and London, a passenger is murdered, and the inquest jury attempts to bring in a verdict of murder against Poirot himself. The plot of this one gets a bit convoluted and increasingly improbable. Grade: C.
Murder in Mesopotamia is narrated by an English hospital nurse, Amy Leathern, who is in Iraq with an archeologist's wife who has been receiving anonymous letters and believes that the writer of the letters, possibly her first husband or his younger brother, intends to kill her. The members of the expedition dismiss this belief as nervous "fancies" until she is actually murdered. Poirot once again follows his rule of suspecting everyone. Grade: C.
24 March 2024
I thought The ABC Murders was ingenious when I first read it years ago. This time around I thought it was a little less brilliant, although that may be due to the fact that I remembered "who dunnit" from previous readings, and that the principle Christie uses is the old adage, "where's the best place to hide a tree?" Grade: B.
27 March 2024
The plot of Cards on the Table may have suggested itself to Agatha Christie from a passage early in The ABC Murders, when Poirot and Hastings are discussing what each would consider the "cream" of crime. Hastings wants it to be the murder of a millionaire or Prime Minister, with a curiously twisted dagger or stone idol, a couple of beautiful girls, "and then, of course there must be some other suspects--an older woman, dark, dangerous type--and some friend or rival of the dead man's--and a quiet secretary--dark horse --and a hearty man with a bluff manner--and a couple of discharged servants or game-keepers or something--and a damn fool of a detective rather like Japp, and well--that's about all." "That is your idea of the cream, eh?"
"I gather you don't agree."
Poirot looked at me sadly. "You have made there a very pretty resume´ of all the detective stories that have ever been written."
"Well," I said, "What would you order?"
Poirot leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "A very simple crime. A crime with no complications. A crime of quiet domestic life... very unimpassioned, very intime´."
"How can a crime be intime´?"
"Supposing," murmured Poirot, "that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead. One of the four, when he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?"
And there we have the plot of the next novel, Cards on the Table. Mr. Shaitana, who enjoys subtly displaying his knowledge of other people's secrets, has invited eight people to dinner, four of whom are detectives: Poirot, Superintendent Battle, the detective novelist Mrs. Ariadne Oliver (who is introduced as the author of The Body in the Library), and Colonel Race. The other four people, Dr. Roberts, Miss Meredith, Mrs. Lorrimer and Major Despard, may have each successfully committed murders in the past. One of these last four certainly murders Mr. Shaitana during the course of the evening. Which of them was it? Grade: A.
1 April 2024
Next up is Poirot Loses A Client (alternate title: Dumb Witness). Poirot receives a letter requesting that he investigate a matter discretely, but he notices that the letter is dated two months earlier; he then discovers that his client, Miss Emily Arundell, had died shortly after writing the letter. The matter she wished him to investigate was a fall she had taken down the stairs, which had been attributed to a ball her dog left on the stairs. Subsequent to the fall, Miss Arundell had revised her will, disinheriting all her relatives and leaving her substantial fortune to her companion. Poirot fears that this is a case not only of attempted murder, but possibly of successful murder as well and navigates his way through the crowd of scheming, disgruntled relatives. Grade: B.
8 April 2024
In Death on the Nile, Poirot has a chance encounter in a popular London restaurant with a young couple, Simon and Jackie, planning their honeymoon in Egypt. Several months later, on a steamer traveling up the Nile River, he again encounters the young couple, but by this time Simon has married a rich woman, Linnet Ridgeway, and the young woman, Jackie, who was supposed to marry Simon, is stalking them and threatening to kill Linnet. Colonel Race, of the Secret Service, is also aboard seeking a ruthless secret agent who is a known killer. When someone does kill Linnet, it becomes apparent that there are several other people on board who also had motives to kill her, and it's up to Poirot and Colonel Race to sort it all out. Grade: B.
12 April 2024
Dead Man's Mirror contains three Hercule Poirot stories including the title piece, Murder in the Mews and Triangle At Rhodes, each too short for novels, each a bit too long for a short story. I found them each a bit obvious, too. Grade: C.
13 April 2024
I didn't have Appointment With Death, so bought an electronic version. I found this book puzzling--the writing is very clunky, not up to Christie's usual smooth style and almost as if it was written by someone writing their first book who had not yet grasped the principle of "show, don't tell." I didn't find it at all interesting, and if I had a paper copy, it would be on its way to the donation bin. Grade: D.
19 April
Hercule Poirot's Christmas (alternate title:
A Holiday For Murder) is a classic
locked room puzzle. Poirot is spending the holiday with Chief Constable Colonel Johnson, when they are summoned to the home of elderly Simeon Lee, whose body has been found in a locked room with blood everywhere, smashed furniture and crockery, and from which an unearthly scream was heard at the time the furniture and items were smashed. I must say that Christie plays more than fair with the solution to this one; she's left so many signposts along the path it would put a Burma Shave advertising campaign to shame. Grade: B.
22 April 2024
Luke Fitzwilliam, a retired policeman, encounters an elderly lady on a train headed to London, who tells him it is Easy To Kill (alternate title: Murder is Easy). She says she's on her way to Scotland Yard to tell them of a series of murders committed in her village, and she is worried that the local doctor is the next intended victim. Fitzwilliam dismisses her story as fanciful until he learns that she was run down by a car later that day, and several days later discovers that the doctor has also died. That leads him to return to the village to investigate the matter. Grade: C.
24 April 2024
I've read And Then There Were None many times before, but it still kept me up half the night finishing it. Ten people marooned on an island, each accused of having committed murder, each killed off one by one. What a triumph for Christie--a tightly woven plot, believable characters, believable motivation and skillfully written. When this book was published in 1938, it was a blockbuster that catapulted Christie to the top of the mystery fiction tree. Grade: A+.
26 April 2024
The Regatta Mystery is a collection of short stories featuring Hercule Poirot, Mr. Parker Pyne and Miss Marple, all of whom are in excellent form for these stories. Grade: A.
29 April 2024
Elinor Carlisle's situation seems hopeless in Sad Cypress; Mary Gerrard, a young woman Elinor's Aunt Laura was very fond of, has been poisoned with morphine, and Elinor, who had motive, means and opportunity, is accused of having murdered her out of jealousy. Hercule Poirot is implored to step in and find exculpatory evidence. This one sort of fell apart for me toward the end, as I'm just not sure the murderer would actually have achieved the desired result. Grade: C.
I didn't recall having read Sad Cypress before, but after having read it this time, I was struck by the similarity between this one and Dorothy L. Sayers' Strong Poison, published in 1930. Both books involve young women on trial for murder; each had opportunity, means and motive; each case seems completely hopeless until the detective steps in to investigate; each case involves food or drink that seemingly could only have been poisoned by the young woman, and in both cases the poisoned food or drink was actually consumed by the real murderer as well as by the victims. Harriet Vane's case in Strong Poison was investigated by Lord Peter Wimsey; the investigation in Elinor Carlisle's case is driven by the local doctor, named .... Peter Lord. Coincidence? Did Christie read Sayers' book, published about ten years before hers? If she did, did she think she could do the plot better? Or did it sink into her subconscious to reemerge through her pen? We'll never know... it's another Agatha Christie mystery.
Just to be clear, there's no doubt in my mind as to who was the better writer and whose plot hangs together better, it's definitely Sayers.
3 May 2024
Hercule Poirot goes for his twice yearly visit to the dentist thinking everyone in the dentist's waiting room looks like a potential murderer in An Overdose of Death (alternate titles: The Patriotic Murders and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe). Several hours later, when the dentist is found murdered, Poirot realizes that one of them probably was a murderer. Grade: C.
6 May 2024
Evil Under the Sun is the next in the Seven Deadly Sins category, this one involving Lust. Beautiful, sexy Arlena Stuart, a former actress, has no trouble attracting men. Poirot, on vacation on Smuggler's Island, observes that as she walks down the beach, every male head turns to follow her, except one: her husband's. When she turns up dead on a lonely beach a few days later, the husband has an alibi, as does the current boyfriend who was sitting on another beach under Poirot's eye at the time, yet somebody strangled her. I found it a bit difficult to follow the geography and the timetable in this one. Grade: C.
9 May 2024
And then we come to an old favorite, The Body In The Library, not written by Ariadne Oliver. After so many Poirot cases, it's a delight to have Miss Marple back in action again. The body in this case is a beautiful blond, strangled and deposited on the hearthrug in Colonel Bantry's library. He swears he's never seen her before, but she turns out to be a dancer at a seaside hotel who has become the protégée of an old friend of Colonel and Mrs. Bantry. Miss Marple teams up again with Sir Henry Clithering, the retired head of Scotland Yard, to untangle the mystery. Grade: A+.
14 May 2024
In The Moving Finger Jerry Burton and his sister Joanna come to Lymstock for peace and quiet while Jerry recuperates from a back injury, but they find that this village is not so peaceful as it appears when they receive a nasty anonymous letter shortly after they arrive. It seems that the letters are a frequent occurrence, and one of them soon triggers an apparent suicide and a murder. The vicar's wife decides to call in a specialist in human wickedness, and summons Miss Marple to sort matters out. I've always like this one--the plot hangs together well, it moves along smartly and the characters are believable. Grade: A.
18 May 2024
Mr. Treves, an elderly lawyer, is reminiscing about murder cases at the beginning of Towards Zero:
" I like a good detective story," he said. "But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that--years before sometimes--with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day. ... All converging towards a given spot. ... And then, when the time comes, over the top! Zero hour. Yes, all of them converging towards zero."
And in this case, Mr. Treves, Nevile Strange, Nevile's current wife, his former wife and various other people converge at Gulls Point, the home of elderly invalid Lady Tressilian in an atmosphere of increasing tension, until it's zero hour. This one has long been a favorite of mine; it's tightly plotted, all the clues are there, it's just an ingenious piece of work. Agatha Christie really hit her stride with this series of books. Grade: A.