And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

I'm saddened to report that this novel, published in 1939, and which has had at least four titles, "Ten Little Indians" not being even the most offensive of them, has sold over 100 million copies. The ten victims were comprised of eight visitors to this remote island, along Ethel and Thomas Rogers, who are the housekeeper and butler respectively. Slowly these people start being killed off, and apparently no one is safe.

The residents and visitors alike are all evidently morons, and all guilty of some misbehavior or one kind or another in their past. Apparently someone has found out about their sins and retribution is on its way. Anthony Marston dies first from cyanide poisoning, Mrs Rogers is found dead in her bed the next morning, and general MacArthur (no, not that one, this other one) dies from being bludgeoned. Mr Rogers is found dead shortly afterward not having a beautiful day in his neighborhood. Later, Emily Brent is found dead in the kitchen, again from cyanide poising. All that these people had to do was to lock themselves in a room and stay there eating nothing, until the boat came from the mainland, but apparently that never occurred to them.

And how convenient that the bad weather prevented the daily boat from coming over to the island and rescuing them that next morning! This book was too much and once the stupidity became not only evident, but also positively rampant, I DNF'd it. I can't commend it at all - and I'm now done with Agatha Christie.

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

Boring! That was my conclusion on my very first attempt to meet Miss Marple, another in Agatha Christie's stable of amateur detectives.

This audiobook began with a long, tedious, semeingly endless history of everyone who was remotely connected to anything. At first I thought I was listening a Stephen King novel, but no, there's Miss Marple being summoned. Naturally when you find the body of a complete stranger on your library, the first thing is to dismiss the word of the maid who has been terrorized by finding it. Obviously she's la-la. The next thing to do when it's actually confirmed is to say, 'the hell with the police, I'm calling in an amateur sleuth'. Well, I don't do 'sleuths', amateur or otherwise. If a book has the word 'sleuth' anywhere in the blurb, I don't even consider reading any further.

This one didn't have 'sleuth' anywhere to be seen, and that wasn't the reason I DNF'd it. The reason was that it took forever to get going and I lost patience with it. Miss Marple may or may not be doddering, I never got far enough to find out. My problem was that the entire book was doddering long before she ever came on the scene, so no. Just no.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

This was an offshoot of my reading of the biographies of Agatha Christie recently. There were about four of her books I had never read which were mentioned and caught my interest for one reason or another. I may as well have not bothered!

This is a Hercule Poirot story full of suicide, surprise engagements, dramatic activity, secret engagements, unknown offspring, and finally the murder of Ackroyd. Evidently there’s trouble at t’ mill, lads! Of course Poirot solves it because when has he ever failed? There was far too much going on in this story, but I did not make it very far because the opening portion of it was so dreadfully boring dahlings! I gave up in it. It had intrigued me earlier when I was reading the biographies, but not so much that I’m willing to be bored to death! Not when there are other books out there which I know will grab my interest from the start. I can’t commend it based on the dire portion I heard.

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

This audiobook made little sense from the title onward, but I did start to get into it initially. Unfortunately, it failed to hold my interest with too much rambling, and seemingly endless interviews covering the same ground. It was very flat and static, and it became boring for me. Maurice Disher, who was a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement back in 1943, claimed, according to Wikipedia: "No crime enthusiast will object that the story of how the painter died has to be told many times, for this, even if it creates an interest which is more problem than plot, demonstrates the author's uncanny skill. The answer to the riddle is brilliant." I beg to differ. The suspect was - in retrospect, I have to admit since I'm usually hopeless at guessing who it is - pretty obvious, and it was clearly not the wife despite the endless damning evidence stacking up against her. I favored a different suspect which I thought would have made for a better story, but that might have been obvious too had she gone that route.

One problem was that I started in on this around the same time as I also started in on another Christie by the name of And Then There Were None which is not the original title, but it is a more acceptable title than the original ever was. The problem with hearing these two volumes so closely together was that in many ways they felt very much alike, the biggest difference being that this story focused only on five people whereas the other focused on ten!

The story begins with the daughter of a woman who was, some thirteen years before, convicted of murdering her husband and who herself died within a year of being imprisoned. Now her daughter is seeking to marry a guy and for some reason the jerk seems to be insisting that that conviction all those years ago is an impediment to marriage. My feeling this that this woman should ditch the guy, but instead she comes to Hercule Poirot, convinced of her mother's innocence, and asking that he investigate, so off he goes.

After a very brief analysis, he concludes conveniently that there are only five suspects (other than this woman's mother), and he goes off to interview them, hence the five little pigs. Every single one of them is gracious and loquacious. The problem was that of how would Hercule Poirot know this rhyme? It's been around since the mid-18th century, but why on Earth would Hercule Poirot know it? He didn't grow up in the UK, being Belgian and was therefore never exposed to British nursery rhymes. He moved to Britain only during World War One, when he was (as initially conceived) an elderly man, having retired 1905. Of course after his immense success, Christie rather had to retcon him some youth as it were, but still he was very mature.

None of this automatically precludes him from ever having heard the nursery rhyme, but the fact is that he never married, Never had any interest in women, and certainly never had children nor was interested in them, Quite the opposite in fact, so whence would he ever have heard the nursery rhyme? I think this is a problem of writing which Christie never thought through. Clearly, having long been a mother herself by then, she was aware of it, but she never considered the unlikelihood that Poirot would have been. She could have resolved this by having someone mention the rhyme to him in passing or have him accidentally hear it, thereby putting it in his head and having him adopt it as a framework for his enquiries, but this literary great never thought of that, I suspect because she evidently considered her character to be as English as she was despite the thin veneer of his foreign origin.

Yet this nursery rhyme forms the foundation of his battle plan and he refers to it quite often as he moves from one suspect to another. That may be a minor issue, but what wasn't was the endless repetitive retelling of the murder, which unlike Mr Disher, I found to be tedious. I found my mind wandering from the story often because it was the same story over and over, and I tired of it. I cannot commend this as a worthy read.

Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie

Rating: WORTHY!

After this I have about four more Agatha Christie novels I'm interested in reading because they had mentions that interested or intrigued me in the biographies I read, and then I'm done with her. I think I've done enough! LOL! This one was another attempt to listen to one of her stories, an effort which hasn't been going well lately, but I can hope that if they're read by David Suchet as this one was, they might engage more. He does a masterful job of reading this particular novel - really quite engaging. That may be why I enjoyed this story, although the story is one of her better ones, I think.

The mystery is of the death of Marlene Tucker, a young girl who is ironically playing the victim in a murder mystery enactment put on as a sort of treasure hunt for attendees at a fête held at Nasse House in Devon. I recently saw a novel advertised which essentially steals this plot for its own. The treasure hunt is being staged by Ariadne Oliver, a well-known writer of murder mysteries, who has contacted Poirot because she has become suspicious of an assortment of changes to her plot which have been requested by various people. Something feels wrong to her and she hopes Poirot can figure out what's up, but before he can do so, Marlene is dead, and Lady Stubbs, wife of Sir George Stubbs, the newish owner of Nasse House, is missing.

The murder investigation drags on over several weeks with neither the police nor Poirot making progress, until Poirot has an insight and finally solves it. I find it ridiculous that Poirot is never charged with obstructing justice since he frequently withholds so much information from the police, even when he has strong suspicions, if not a strong conviction of the murderer's identity! But that aside, this story was well-written and entertaining, and beautifully-read, so I commend it as a worthy listen.

An Autobiography by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

Having listened to a few of Christie's books in audiobook format with varying success recently, I got curious about how she worked, how she felt about her books, where her inspiration came from, how she wrote them, that kind of thing, and I have to say my search for those answers went largely unsatisfied! I found four biographies - after a fashion. One was for children, which I thought wasn't bad for its intended audience, but not suitable for my needs. Another was a graphic novel which told a straight-forward story and which I enjoyed, but again not satisfying my real need. A third was a biography that I thought wasn't worth the reading - not at over five hundred pages!

This book came closest, but even it left me wishing I'd been better rewarded. I do not envy anyone heading into this almost six-hundred page tome, which Christie wrote over many years rather more like a diary than a book in some ways. For my purposes I skimmed it, pausing to actually read only those sections where her books are specifically talked about. That was interesting, particularly how screwed-over she was by her first publisher and how she quickly learned her lessons going forward. Caveat, all ye who wish to publish! This is one reason why I have no time for big publishing™.

I went into this hoping for something different than I imagine many people would, who would presumably read it for a story about her life from the horse's mouth so to speak, with perhaps a minor in book writing, so perhaps I was less satisfied than others might be because of that. I did get some idea of her writing and how she felt, but I felt like I ought to have had more out of it since this was her own words, and she was a writer! Maybe I expected too much.

On a cautionary note, those expecting or hoping for some insight into her missing days way back in 1926, will be disappointed since she doesn't even mention it; not a word. You'd learn more from looking up old newspapers on the subject! But there were parts I enjoyed, and not all of those were about her books, and overall, I commend this as a worthy read because it is from the source and it is unembellished (beyond what a writer might unconsciously do anyway!). It felt honest and from the heart and that I appreciated, but for my purposes, in seeking deeper insight into her writing and motivation, I was less than happy.

Agatha Christie by Laura Thompson

Rating: WARTY!

Having read a few of her books - or more recently listened to them, and seen virtually her entire Poirot oeuvre on TV, I decided to take a look at Christie herself out of sheer curiosity, and I picked up two books: this one and Christie's own autobiography. My interest in these was not to read about her entire life, but to skim the books for references to Christie's own writing, to see if I could gain any insights into how she put the books together or where she got her inspiration. My goal was only partially met, I'm sorry to have to report. I don't envy anyone who actually plows through over a thousand pages for so little reward, so I wouldn't commend either book unless you are really, really, and I mean seriously really into Christie! Even then you may find yourself disappointed.

Subtitled "An English Mystery" for no apparent reason other than to sound dramatic, this book is well over five hundred pages and the author seems determined to link every single thing in Christie's life to every single thing in her murder mysteries, mostly with limited success. Obviously a writer puts herself into her books, but that doesn't mean everything has link and/or meaning. For me though, the worst part about this was Thompson's pure fiction in describing the week or two Christie 'disappeared' in a huff over her first husband's infidelity, and apparently with a petulant desire to make him pay for it by making it look like maybe he murdered the murder mystery writer. It was awful. Christie herself mentions not a thing about this in her own autobiography and never talked of it, so all of this here is pure speculation and guesswork even with the best of intentions. I'm not convinced this author has the best of intentions, or the most honest in her portrait.

The book really offers nothing new and reveals the answer to no mysteries including why Christie has been such a perennial and prolific seller of her books. I can't commend this as a worthy read.

Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

This one was not well read by Anna Massey, and the story wasn't engaging me at all so I DNF'd it. I had already seen this on TV but I couldn't recall the finale, so I thought it might make for an entertaining read, but in the end it was just annoying. Holmes once said to his companion, "Watson, you know my methods!" which was his polite way of saying 'figure it out for yourself' and so it's time, I think, to read a biography about Christie, and see if I can learn anything from that about what made her tick.

On the upside, this story is mercifully-free of that moron Captain Hastings who makes John Watson look like a scintillating paragon of incisiveness. On the other, it was a bit much to swallow. It features Amy Leatheran (a name to conjure with!) who is a nurse taking up her charge in the Iraq desert at an archaeological dig, caring for the ailing wife of the man in charge of the dig. This woman - the patient, not the nurse - seems to have experienced terrifying hallucinations, and in the end dies, and Hercule Poirot finds himself trying to unearth clues as to the perp. I can't commend this audiobook version based on the portion to which I listened.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

This was my first - and last - experience of Agatha Christie's Tuppence and Tommy Beresford stories. Tuppence, seriously? Does she have a sister half her age named Penny? Actually her name is prudence. I have no idea how she got labeled Tuppence. The plot was quite an engaging one: a painting goes missing and it turns out the painting reveals something really rather critical about a criminal enterprise. T&T begin an investigation and showing a complete lack of prudence, Tuppence goes off alone and disappears. Rather than call the police, Tommy takes up her disappearance as his primary investigation, and he ends up knocking on the door of this woman whose name I forget, but who inadvertently became my hero!

Instead of him grilling her in the hope of finding a lead to his wife's disappearance, she ends up interrogating him and he lets her take complete control! This went on, and on and on, and on, and...on. I'm serious. It went around in circles forever and I got so irritated with it that I quit listening to this summarily. You know it's bad when you'd rather listen to rubber on asphalt than to the actual audiobook you ahve in your car, especially during a somewhat tense long-distance drive where a mild distraction would have been very welcome.

I swear I don't give tuppence about this investigating team and I never will. In fact rather than shilling out for another such story I would pound on their heads so severely that they'd be left only half a crown....

Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

Here's an example of Christie reusing old material. One the characters is named Bella like the one in her Dumb Witness story, and also we have an instance here of Poirot being summoned to help out someone whose life is on the line and he arrives too late - again, like in the Dumb Witness story. It's also in some ways a case of mistaken identity as in Dumb Witness. The story takes place in Merlinville-sur-Mer in France where Poirot arrives with all Hastings at the Villa Genevieve to discover that mister Renauld was stabbed in the back with a letter opener the previous night, and left in a newly-dug grave by the local golf course.

The worst part of this story for me was the appalling reading by Charles Armstrong, who has no idea how to pronounce French words and repeatedly mangles ones such as Sûreté and Genevieve. When he tries to imitate a female voice his own voice sounds like he's being strangled. It was horrible to listen to and I couldn't stand to hear any more after the first 15 percent or so. I DNF'd this and consider it a warty "read".

I got hold of the DVD for Murder on the Links as well as Dumb Witness. Of the two, the latter departed from the book the most - and by quite a considerable margin, but I enjoyed that filmed story. It was cute and amusing, but Miss Peabody was totally absent, which annoyed me to no end. Murder on the Links, by contrast, was a lousy story which made no sense and in which Hastings was a complete dumb-ass (even more than he usually is) who got rewarded rather than getting his just deserts for actively perverting with the course of justice.

Having DNF's this, I can't comment on whether the book was as bad, but the TV show in regard to this particular episode simply isn't worth watching. Worse than this though was that despite the story taking place almost entirely in France, every single person spoke with a perfect English accent with no trace of actual French marring it whatsoever! Even French words like Genevieve and Sûreté were mangled. It was almost as though it was filmed entirely in England with a complete English cast! Whoah! Trust me, it sucked. I think it's by far the worst Poirot episode I ever saw and I've seen most of them so this one is double-warty!

Dumb Witness by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

This started out rather well, and was quite well read by Hugh Fraser, who played Poirot's companion Captain Hastings in the David Suchet TV series which covered very nearly all of Poirot's stories. The problem for me was that it descended into predictability and tedium in the last third or so, and the brilliant detective Poirot failed to see clues that even I could see, which tells me this story was badly-written.

I'm not a fna of detective stories which begin by telling us information the detective doesn't have. I much prefer the ones where we come in blind to the crime, just as the detective arrives. This one was not one of the latter, but the former, so we got an overly-lengthy introduction to the crime which to me was uninteresting and removed any suspense and excitement.

That said it wasn't too bad once the story began to move and Poirot arrived, but Hastings was a complete asshat with his endless whining along the lines of 'There's nothing to see here! Let's go home'. I'm truly surprised Poirot didn't slap him or kick him in the balls. I know this business of having a dumb-ass companion was set in stone by Arthur Doyle, but it's really too much.

The story is of the death of Emily Arundell, and aging and somewhat sickly woman of some modest wealth, at whom her relatives are pecking for crumbs before ever she's dead. After a fall down the stairs which she survives, Emily passes away at a later date, and after this, Poirot gets a letter form her which was somehow delayed in posting. It seems rather incoherent, but it does suggest she fears greatly for something. Poirot arrives to discover she died, and rather than turn around and go home, he poses as an interested buyer for a property that belonged to Emily so he can snoop around and ask questions. This part went on too long, too, for my taste.

Eventually Poirot's deception is exposed by Miss Peabody who for me was one of the two most interesting characters, and hands down the most amusing in the book. I really liked her. My other favorite was Theresa Arundell, whose initials, you will note, are TA, which have mirror symmetry. It's this that Poirot fails to grasp for the longest time after he learns that a person was identified by initials on a broach which was glimpsed in a mirror.

The problem though is that Christie fails to give us vital information that would have clearly identified the killer for anyone sharp enough to have picked up on this mirror image, so we're cruelly-robbed of the chance to nail down the actual killer, although some of the red herrings are disposed of with relative ease.

The final insult is Poirot's gathering of all the suspects together for the dénouement, and this is ridiculous for me. I know it's a big thing in these mysteries, but really it's laughable and spoils the story. It's so unrealistic and farcical especially since everyone, including the murderer, blithely agrees to gather for this exposure. How absurd! If the murderer had any sense, he or she would off Poirot before he had chance to expose the culprit, and thereby they would get off scot-free since Poirot is such an arrogant and persnickety old cove that he never reveals to anyone who the murder is until that last minute, thereby giving them ample opportunity to scarper!

I got hold of the DVD for this story from the library and watched it. I also watched Murder on the Links. Of the two, the former departed from the book the most - and by quite a considerable margin, but I enjoyed that filmed story. It was cute and amusing, but Miss Peabody was totally absent, which annoyed me to no end. Murder on the Links, by contrast, was a lousy story which made no sense and in which Hastings was a complete dumb-ass (even more than he usually is) who got rewarded rather than getting his just deserts for actively perverting with the course of justice. I can't comment on whether the book was as bad since I DNF'd it, but the TV show in regard to this particular episode simply isn't worth watching. Worse than all I've mentioned though was that despite the story taking place almost entirely in France, every single person spoke with a perfect English accent with no trace of actual French marring it whatsoever! Even French words like Genevieve and Sûreté were mangled. It was almost as though it was filmed entirely in England with a complete English cast! Whoah! Trust me, it sucked. I think it's by far the worst Poirot episode I ever saw and I've seen most of them.

So while there were some interesting and even fun bits to this audiobook, overall it was tedious, and I cannot commend it as a worthy listen.

4:50 from Paddington by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

This is a short audiobook that I thought I would give a try. I am not much of a fan of Christie's writing, but I did enjoy the Hercule Poirot series on TV to the point where I even wrote a parody of Murder on the Orient Express. I have to really like something or really hate something to do a parody of it, and I'm not thinking of doing a Miss Marple parody, but I know nothing of those particular stories, so I decided to give this try since I found it on audiobook. My bad!

It's read by Joan Hickson, a Brit actor with whom I'm familiar (no, not that familiar!). She played the role of Miss Marple in a TV series of the same name (Marple, not Hickson!). There were twelve shows, and one of them was based on this particular novel. I may try to see that if I can get my hands on it, just out of curiosity, but this particular novel I found far too plodding and filled with too much extraneous detail to be entertaining. I think Hickson was the wrong choice too, because her voice, sorry to say, sounds a bit too mouth-filled-with-marbles for enjoyment. It reminded me of the voices the Monty Python crew used when they were impersonating women. I can see why the publisher hired her, but going the 'obvious' path isn't typically the best option and for me it didn't work well here.

Christie is the world's all-time best-selling author, even as of today, having sold some three billion books (that's not the same as saying almost half the planet's population have read her!), which ranks her behind only the Bible and Shakespeare, but I have to ask, if Christie had never lived, and some unknown writer today wrote her books and offered them for sale, would a publisher actually buy them or would that poor writer end up having to self-publish if they wanted to get anything out there?

Would these books sell even if they were picked up by a mainstream publisher? Would a publisher even pick up a typescript to read if its title was "4:40 from Paddington"?! I may be wrong of course, find it hard to believe that they would. Certainly not as well as they historically did. But guess what? Her books are now starting to come into the public domain, so who knows what new writers will do with them?

Anyway, this one, first published in 1957, has the interesting plot of a woman traveling on a train which happens to run in parallel for a short time, with another train traveling in the same direction. Through the windows, before the trains part company, the woman witnesses a man strangling a woman on the other train, and when she reports this to the train authorities (why them and not the police I have no idea) they dismiss her story, thinking she has dreamed it after reading a magazine story about someone who was strangled.

The woman is a friend of Miss Marple of course. I have a theory about this. People like this Marple and this Poirot (and far too many others) always seem to be around when murders are committed! It seems only logical to conclude that they somehow cause the murders. How else can you account for them being in such proximity to so many of them?

Anyway, when the woman reports this murder to Marple, she's believed, and the two of them then go to the police, where Maple knows the desk sergeant. They're taken more seriously, but when inquiries come up blank, Miss Marple recruits a small army of advisors to figure out where the body most likely was tossed from the train. She's working on the theory that this was a planned murder, the murderer throwing the body out at a convenient, but secluded location, and then afterwards coming back by car and picking it up to dispose of it.

The basic problem here is: why would he plan it on a train? If he could lure the victim onto a train ride with him, he could evidently lure her anywhere. The limp excuse given is that someone might see him with his victim and remember it if he tried the murder somewhere else, but this completely ignores the fact that everyone and their uncle would see him and this poor woman going onto the train together! So, not so well thought out.

What got to me though was the excessive detail which had nothing to do with the murder or the investigation: eating all the food at the table, clearing away the dishes, washing the dishes. Sorry, but no! There was too much of this, and the story felt perfunctory even with these details, like Christie wrote this as detailed notes, but never bothered to flesh them out before it was published. While the plot was a good starting point, the story itself felt poorly-written and was consequently unentertaining, and I gave up on it. Besides, everyone knows the Butler did it, right? Or the doctor.

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

Rating: WORTHY!

This is pretty special - a novel about Hercule Poirot (not to be confused with poi rot!) in which Hercule Poirot almost doesn't appear and in which the motive is uncovered by a young schoolgirl rather than Poirot himself! Don't confuse this one with the score of novels by other authors with this same now way over-used title.

This is the fifth of Christie's novels I've reviewed, nearly all of them Poirot stories, and all (including this one) save one I have rated as worthy reads. The one I did not like was Death on the Nile. The others that I considered to be worthy were: Murder on the Orient Express, The Unexpected Guest (which was taken from a play Christie wrote rather than an actual novel, and was not about Poirot), and Lord Edgeware Dies more commonly known as Thirteen at Dinner.

This story actually flirted with receiving a 'warty' rating (hey, in the middle of warty, there's still art!), but what saved it was the female politics, and in particular the amazingly entertaining schoolgirls Jennifer Sutcliffe and Julia Upjohn. These two were even more entertaining in the televised version starring David Suchet, which departed from the novel rather a lot, especially in bringing in Poirot at the beginning. In the novel, he is entirely absent for the first two thirds of this story, which takes place at Meadowbank School for Girls, fictional, but the most prestigious preparatory school for girls in the entire country.

Christie is known to have grown to detest her character, Poirot, yet she continued to serve up stories featuring him because she felt some sort of duty to her readers. I can't help but wonder if this is perhaps why he is so conspicuous by his absence from this one. Perhaps when she wrote it, she was really having a bad time finding anything to like about him, and decided to see how far she could take the story before she had to draft him in. In this instance, it was by a rather unusual means that he came onto the scene.

The start of a new term brings the usual minor issues, and one larger one. The principal, known as the headmistress, is Miss Bulstrode, and she's ready to retire if she can find a replacement who is worthy of overseeing Meadowbank. She has two fellow teachers in mind: Miss Vansittart, who is a veteran at the school and her prime choice, but newcomer Miss Rich is a serious contender.

Things seem to be fine until the gym mistress, a bit of a busybody, is discovered murdered in the new pavilion. In the TV series, she's impaled by a javelin, but is merely shot in the novel. How uninventive! As more murders occur, and the reputation of the school starts rapidly downhill, other questions arise. Why as Princess Shaista kidnapped? What is so important about the new pavilion which continues to draw some evil perp there? And why isn't the tea being served already?!

I enjoyed this novel and recommend it.

Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

Rating: WARTY!

This is one of three novels by Agatha Christie that I intend to review this year, the other two being Murder on the Orient Express, and Cat Among the Pigeons. I enjoyed all three of these in the ITV television series starring David Suchet as the consummate Hercule Poirot, but my experience with the novels was not the same. This one I really did not care for. It was boring. Note that I already favorably reviewed Christie's The Unexpected Guest in July of 2013, and Thirteen at Dinner in November of 2014.

The murder doesn't take place until about half way through the story, so the entirety of the first half is prologue. I'm not a fan of prologue! Some of it plays into the story, but most of it seemed to be nothing more than Christie running off at the mouth painting character studies and contributing nothing to the plot at all. It was awful. The same could have been achieved with two or three short chapters.

This saddened me, because this particular audio book was read by David Suchet, and he did an excellent job. I had never heard his real voice until this novel! But the tedium, particularly of the interactions between the girls in the opening chapter, was deadening. I detested each and every one of those women and had no issues with any of them being bumped off!

The story was highly formulaic in quintessential Christie manner. She cannot write a travelogue story without having her stock characters. These consist of several Brits, including a young woman and an old crotchety woman, a couple of Brit guys, and then there are "the foreigners" which always consist of an American, an Italian, and at least one other foreigner, preferably French or German. In addition to this there is the trope Christie ending which improbably gathers all of the characters together at the end so he can lord it over them with his brilliance. This, for me, was the most irritating part of the TV series, and it was so unrealistic as to be ridiculous. Seriously, would all of these people put up with this every episode, including the murderer? Not on your nelly!

Poirot is actually in danger of being charged with impeding a police investigation, too, since he has knowledge which leads to the arrest of the perp, but which he inevitably conceals until the last minute, and the police inexplicably indulge him every time! In this case, there were no police, just Poirot and some high-up in the Brit consulate or something, I forget which from the TV show, and I didn't listen far enough to meet him in the audio book. The essential plot is that a woman introduces her fiancé to a Lady who isn't so much a Lady as a spoiled brat. She steals the man and marries him, and the jilted woman takes to stalking the happy couple including following them on their honeymoon to Egypt. No one thinks to ask how this impoverished woman could afford a vacation to Egypt and a cruise on the Nile. If they had, they might have rooted out the killer earlier.

The new bride is found shot, and witnesses are being bumped off left, right and center before Poirot figures it out. There are the usual Christie red herrings, of course. All in all it's a bit improbable, but not a bad story in the TV version. The written version not so much. I can't recommend it.

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Rating: WORTHY!

This is one of three novels by Agatha Christie that I intend to review this year, the other two being Death on the Nile and Cat Among the Pigeons. I enjoyed all three of these in the ITV television series starring David Suchet as the consummate Hercule Poirot, but my experience with the novels was not the same. This one I really liked, though. Note that I already favorably reviewed Christie's The Unexpected Guest in July of 2013, and Thirteen at Dinner in November of 2014.

This one contains many of the tropes Christie routinely employed in her detective stories, including the usual array of foreigners: one Italian, one American, one French or German, and assorted Brits. It includes the young good looking guy, the young good looking girl, and the old crotchety woman. There is also the stock Christie signature ending whereby Poirot gathers all his suspects together at the end and slowly eliminates each until the murderer is identified. This to me is the weakest link, because none of these people would put up with this, and the police certainly would not. Fortunately for Poirot, the audience is already captive aboard the train, and there are no police here, only an official from the railroad. The role of official is usually played by a police officer, but there are other people who act as stand-ins, such as government officials. Here it's the railroad guy who lends Poirot authority as an agent of the railroad.

This story is so old that you very likely know the outline if not the filler, so I'm not going to launch into a detailed review here. The basis is that a truly bad man is traveling on the Orient express with a large assortment of other people. The express is full, which is unusual for the time of year. Poirot has encountered some of the passengers before he gets on the Orient Express, and meets many more aboard. The train hits a snowdrift and is stuck for several days. The night the snowdrift is encountered, the bad guy is bumped off, and Poirot naturally takes it upon himself to solve the crime. He has a harder time of it here than he usually does because of the nature of the death.

The victim was traveling under a false identity. He was stabbed twelve times, but the stab wounds offered no consistency: some were violent and deep, while others were shallow and weak. Some appear to have been delivered left-handed, whereas others were right-handed. There were some 'clues' which appeared to be false, whereas others appeared to be real, and the result of mistakes made by the perps(s).

The passengers are interviewed one by one, and Poirot slowly picks away at their stories until the rather unusual truth is revealed. I liked this story and the characters, and I recommend it.

Thirteen At Dinner by Agatha Christie

Title: Thirteen At Dinner
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: AudioGO
Rating: WORTHY!

Published as Lord Edgware Dies in Britain in 1933, it appeared in the US under the title Thirteen at Dinner. Boring as the Brit title is, it's a far more accurate representation of events than is the US title. Thirteen at dinner might have been so, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual murder and story, which is that of Hercule Poirot in pursuit of solving Lord Edgware's mysterious and confusing murder.

I was first introduced to Agatha Christie around the age of fourteen, when I was off school for the better part of a week, sick and in bed, and desperately looking for new books to read. The only ones available at the time were in the limited library of an older bother, so I got an early introduction to Ian Fleming's James Bond, and to Agatha Christie. It was an Hercule Poirot story that I read then, but I can't for the life of me recall which story it was. I don't think it was this one, but it could have been.

Note that Poirot is very much a rip-off of Sherlock Holmes, and he has a foil, Captain Hastings, who stands in for John Watson, and a less than excellent police inspector, Japp, who stands in for Inspector

I found this novel charming, a bit confusing, and entertaining, but I suspect that the bulk of the charm and entertainment came from Hugh Fraser's excellent performance in the audio book which I listened to. Normally I rail against the absurd pretension and affectation of publisher's claims that a reader is "performing" an audio book when all they're typically doing is simply reading it. Sometimes it actually is a performance, but such things are rare indeed. In this case, Fraser really turned in a confoundedly spiffing performance, what?!

This story doesn't begin with a murder, but with a request from the self-centered and self-absorbed actor Jane Wilkinson, also known as Lady Edgware, who asks Poirot to speak on her behalf to her husband and try and persuade him to grant her a divorce. Poirot does so and discovers, to his surprise, that Lord Edgware acceded to her request six months previously in a letter - a letter which Wilkinson later claims she never received.

Then comes the murder. Lord Edgware is found dead in his library with a knife wound to a critical position at the base of his skull. Naturally Wilkinson is the suspect, especially since she was seen entering Edgware's house by two people on the night of the murder - at around the murder time. The problem is that Jane was at a dinner party that night and has multiple witnesses to testify to this. It would seem clear that someone impersonated her.

It so happens that Poirot very recently saw another actor, Carlotta Adams, impersonating Jane Wilkinson on stage, and later attended a dinner party at Wilkinson's home to which Adams was also invited. Later, Adams is found dead of an overdose of a sleeping potion. There's also one more mystery: before the murder, Bryan Martin, an American actor, consults Poirot on the matter of his being followed by a mysterious man with a gold tooth. He also advises Poirot that Wilkinson is dangerous and might well carry out her publicly-voiced assertion that her husband has to die.

There are so many red herrings in this novel that I completely lost track of who was supposed to be the prime suspect at any one time. In the end, I could not figure out who dunnit and was a bit surprised to learn the answer! I also watched the Peter Ustinov movie based on this novel. It had been updated to contemporary times (for when the movie was made), and it really didn't work. I did not like Ustinov as Poirot, which is why this isn't a movie/novel review - I only review movies that I like!). Curiously, David Suchet was in that same movie playing the part of Inspector Japp to Ustinov's Poirot. Later Suchet went on to play Poirot in a lengthy TV series, and he was perfect for the role. Much better than Ustinov.

I recommend this audiobook.

The Unexpected Guest by Agatha Christie

Title: The Unexpected Guest
Author: Agatha Christie
Publisher: St Martin's Minotaur
Rating: worthy

The Unexpected Guest was first published as a play in 1958, and written into a novel by Charles Osborne in 1999. The story is set in Wales one foggy night. The protagonist is Michael Starkwedder (sounds rather like Starkadder, doesn’t it?!). He's an oil engineer who has returned to his roots after a spell in the Middle East, perhaps looking to buy a house there. His car gets stuck in a ditch conveniently outside this residence. Looking for assistance, he enters the house uninvited since no one answers when he knocks on the french windows (why there and not the front door is unexplained, except that in a play, it usefully confines the action to one setting, but as a novel it's klutzy). This is actually why I don’t go to see stage plays. In my experience of them, they have a sour tendency to be pretentious, and the action is typically completely unrealistic.

In the room Michael discovers an old man (whom he later learns is Richard Warwick) in a wheelchair. He apparently doesn’t notice that the man has been shot through the head(!) until the man's wife, Laura, shows up gun in hand and spontaneously confesses that she killed him. Instead of calling the police, Michael sits down and becomes all chatty with Laura about why she did it. Apparently it was because her husband was a cruel and spiteful man. He offers her a cigarette without asking if she smokes, and he observes that she's very attractive. So they sit there smoking and talking.

My first impression was that Starkwedder was a moron, but it turns out that he's a jerk - or so it appears. He seems to want to cash in on Warwick's personal tragedy and profit by it for no other reason than that she's pretty. It occurs to me that perhaps Laura Warwick isn't quite as helpless as she seems since she goes along with his suggestions as they talk. I can see her, in the end, turning the tables on Starkwedder and using him to her own advantage! For no good reason, Michael suggests covering up the murder to make it seem like something else. As he learns about Richard from Laura, he concocts a plan. Apparently Richard was a cruel and nasty person, and about two years previously, he had killed a child when driving drunk, and had got away with it!

Given that the 'breathalyzer' test made its first appearance as early as 1927 in England, and it’s not so difficult to tell if someone is drunk or has had merely one sherry (as Richard lied) even without the test, I can only put his avoidance of all charges as incompetence on the part of the police. The child's father was extremely angry, but Richard's nurse, who was with him in the car, backed up Richard's story and he was cleared. The family had to move from Norfolk (where this happened) to Wales to get away from the publicity. Now Michael's plan is to blame this murder on belated retribution from the child's father.

I have to say I appreciate the twist here, in that unlike your usual detective story, we know who the perp is right from the start! So the suspense here is whether the two of them can get away with murder or whether the police in Wales are more competent than the ones in Norfolk, and will discover what really happened. The police are represented by Sergeant Cadwallader, who is annoying in the extreme, and Inspector Thompson.

Michael's plan is to create a 'blackmail style' note, made up from letters cut from a newspaper and glued to a page reading simply: 'May 15th. Paid in full', the date being the day Richard killed the child. His first mistake (I believe, but we'll see!) is to give Laura the newspaper from which he cut the letters for the note, asking her to burn it in the furnace. We don't know if she did so. He wipes his fingerprints from the room, and instructs Laura to pretend she had a headache and got out of bed looking for aspirin. In this way she can be with a witness when a shot is fired (by Michael) from the gun. Several of the residents then go to the murder scene, and Michael comes through the door carrying the gun, claiming he was knocked down by someone who came running out of the room with the gun in hand, dropping it as they collided. From that point onwards, he uses his real story - that of being stuck in the ditch and coming to the house for help.

This novel started out being rather poorly for me, but once I discovered how it was going to go down, it improved somewhat. After reading Ian Rankin and being disappointed, and then reading John Dickson Carr and being disappointed, I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in Agatha Christie, too, to begin with! It appeared to be a sad month for detective stories.

This one slowly grew on me as yet one layer after another was revealed. I did start to think that this would have made a better story had it been combined with Carr's The House at Satan's Elbow and the resultant mash-up has been titled "The Unexpected Ghast"! Despite these improvements, though, I still found myself looking forward to getting past this novel and moving on to a different genre, which is a bit sad. Three rather disappointing detective stories in a row! I'm having better luck with the TV shows! Prime Suspect (US version) continues to please, and I can recommend the first episode of Midsomer Murders so all is not lost! I plan on getting my hands on the novel that inspired that show, it was so good. As for Prime Suspect the shorter format tells a better story than the English original, but the other side of that coin is that it’s rather sad that the US is completely unwilling to experiment or to stray far from formulaic, given all the jingoistic talk of the US being an innovative and cutting edge nation! Not in entertainment we're not!

But I digress! Christie seems extraordinarily obsessed with people sitting on the ends of things - most often the sofa! I found that a bit weird. Throughout the novel I found myself changing the person I suspected as being the perp. Obviously at the beginning, it seemed pretty obvious that it was Laura, but that "fact" changed and so the story itself changed. Instead of being one where we knew who the perp was and were left thinking that the mystery was whether she would get away with it, it returned to being the standard detective story wherein we no longer sure of the perp, and have to figure it out. Methinks 'twas a bit overdone, though!

Just when I was starting to suspect that Jan (the adult with the mind of a boy who Laura takes care of, and who is Richard's young step-brother) might have shot Richard, and Laura was covering-up for him, a new character showed up: a local politician and evidently an ex-military man named Julian who is Laura's secret boyfriend. At that point it was impossible to to tell if Laura shot Richard to be free to indulge herself with Julian, or if Julian did likewise! Needless to say, Michael is a bit miffed at discovering that Laura has a boyfriend! Or maybe the Laura/Julian thing is a red herring and it was Jan who shot Richard after all? I'm not going to reveal it. All I will do is taunt you with the fact that it becomes much more complicated than that!

While Jan shows the inspector and the sergeant to Richard's gun room, which is only next door, Julian leaves, and Michael, now alone with Laura, challenges her to demonstrate how she shot Richard. She does a really unconvincing job leaving Michael to conclude that Laura never did shoot her husband. There are two problems here. The first is that they're speaking loudly, so unless the room is superbly well sound-proofed, the police ought to be able to hear everything they're saying. Michael is now convinced that that it was Julian who carried out the murder. He remarks to Laura, "You've never fired a revolver in your life...You don’t even know enough to release the safety catch." The problem is that revolvers don’t have a safety! It’s quite amazing that crime writer of Christie's stature did not know this.

Even though this started out looking like an open and shut case, Christie kept ripping out the rug from under me as Jan, Bennett, Angell, Julian, Warwick's mother et al were paraded before me. Every time I thought I knew who had done this, Christie turned it around and pointed me at someone else. In the end, I never did guess who had done it, so it came as rather a surprise! I went back and forth in thinking that this was warty, and then it was not, and on and on. In the end, I decided that it was good enough to be deemed worthy!