Tag: Agatha Christie

Review 2639: #1925Club! #RIPXX! #HYH25! The Secret of Chimneys

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My second book for the 1925 Club is The Secret of Chimneys. I usually don’t enjoy Christie’s political mysteries as much, but this one is a romp. It’s got everything—a missing jewel, impersonations and secret identities, secret passages, an arch-criminal, Italian gangsters, kidnapping, and Balkan assassinations.

In Zimbabwe, Anthony Cade is leading a bunch of old ladies on a guided tour when he runs into Jimmy McGrath, an old friend. Jimmy is about to depart on a gold-mining expedition, so he asks Anthony to do two favors for him. Jimmy once saved the life of Count Stylptitch, prime minister of Herzoslavakia, and the Count had his memoirs shipped to Jimmy after his death with a promise of £1000 if he gets them to the publisher before a specific date. Jimmy offers Anthony a cut if he will take them to England for him. Jimmy also came by a collection of letters that someone has kept with the idea of blackmailing the writer. He wants to return them so that the writer, Virginia Revel, addressing the letter from Chimneys, will feel safe. Anthony takes on both tasks and returns to England, traveling under Jimmy’s name.

It turns out that lots of parties want the memoirs. England is about to help the heir to the throne of Herzoslavakia, Prince Michael, ascend to the throne after a period of anarchy. As a friend to the monarchy, England will get an important oil concession. But perhaps the memoirs say something embarrassing about Prince Michael. Anthony is approached by Baron Lolopretjzyl asking to buy them. Anthony refuses. Then he hands them on to a man who says he’s a representative of the publisher.

Next thing he knows, the Italian waiter at his hotel has stolen the packet of letters, along with the newspaper clipping he found about Virginia Revel. He goes to see her and gets to her house just after she discovers the body of the Italian waiter in her study. She explains that he had come the day before and even though she knew the letters weren’t hers, she gave him some money just to see what it would feel like and told him to come back the next day. She is due at Chimneys, so Anthony disposes of the body for her and follows her.

The reluctant Lord Caterham and his daughter Bundle, who also appear in The Seven Dials Mystery, are entertaining important political guests at Chimneys—Prince Michael and Count Lolopretjzyl; the millionaire Herman Isaacstein, who is involved in the oil deal; Mr. Fish, an American collector of books; and Virginia. Anthony arrives late at night and approaches the house only to hear a gun shot. The next morning, Prince Michael is found dead. Inspector Battle has been summoned, and Anthony recognizes the prince as the man he handed the manuscript to. Anthony’s boot prints have been found outside, so he has some explaining to do.

And in all this, I forgot about the jewel, the Koh-i-noor, which King Nicholas last had at Chimneys and hid somewhere before he returned to Herzoslavakia and was killed.

The novel has two engaging protagonists in Anthony and Virginia and is lots of fun. There are several characters in disguise, and although I guessed the identity of one of them as soon as I heard of that person, the others fooled me. I also didn’t guess at all who killed Prince Michael.

This is a ridiculously unlikely but entertaining early book by Christie. Note, though, that there are several anti-Semitic comments as unfortunately isn’t unusual for the time.

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Review 2592: Death Comes As the End

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I have been trying to pick off Agatha Christie’s books I haven’t read without looking to see what they are about. So, I was surprised by this one. At first, I thought maybe the ancient Egyptian setting was the introduction to a more modern mystery, but then I realized it wasn’t.

Renisenb has returned with her young daughter to her father’s house on the lower Nile, her husband having died. At first, it seems as if everything is the same. Her father, Imhotep, a property owner and priest, is still watchful of his own authority and eager to have control of everything. Her oldest brother, Yahmose, is still dutiful and careful of Imhotep’s interests—his wife Satipy thinks too much so and nags him to be more assertive. Satipy argues with her sister-in-law Kait over precedence one moment, and they giggle together the next. Kait’s husband Sobek, the younger brother, is still full of big ideas and wasteful of his father’s money. Renisenb’s orphaned nephew Ipy is still young but disrespectful and spoiled by Imhotep. Esa, the grandmother, is frail but sharp.

Renisenb still cannot bring herself to like Henet, the servile but sneaking servant, and she still feels comfortable with Hori, her father’s main scribe. However, when she tells Hori that everything is still the same, he warns her that it is not.

Imhotep goes off on a business trip, and when he comes back he has brought two people—a young concubine named Nofret and a secondary scribe named Kamini, who claims some relationship to the family. It becomes clear that Nofret is malicious and means to make trouble. Almost immediately, she has problems with the two sisters-in-law. Renisenb tries to be friendly to her but feels she dislikes her.

Nofret begins to succeed in dividing Imhotep from his two sons. Imhotep, angry about an incident, threatens to send the sons and their families away. The next thing they know, Nofret is dead, having fallen from the cliff path that goes to the tomb Imhotep is responsible for keeping.

The two sisters-in-law suddenly change behavior. Satipy, formerly shrewish, becomes timid and withdrawn. Kait becomes more forceful. Renisenb and Hori wonder if Nofret’s death was an accident.

The next event seems clearly not an accident. The two brothers are poisoned after drinking some wine. Sobek, having drunk more, dies.

Renisenb, Esa, and Hori get together to try to figure out who the murderer is, but there are more evil events to come.

Christie doesn’t offer many hints to figure out the murderer, and I didn’t guess the solution. However, I also didn’t find this novel as interesting as some of the others. Perhaps Christie was trying a change of pace or just wanting to write something that reflected what she learned on her archaeological digs. Still, it worked almost wholly on an understanding of the characters rather than any real clues.

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Review 2569: #1952Club! Mrs. McGinty’s Dead

~ whatmeread ~ 10 Comments

It’s time for the 1952 Club, for which participants review books written in 1952 on the same week. What would a year club set between the 1930s and the 1960s be without an Agatha Christie? So, this book became one of my choices for the 1952 Club, especially good because I hadn’t read it before.

However, first, as usual, I have a list of the books I’ve reviewed previously that were written in 1952:

And now for my review.

Hercule Poirot is retired, and the days are passing slowly. So, he is happy to look into a case for an old acquaintance, Inspector Spence. An old cleaning lady was apparently murdered for her savings by her lodger. All the evidence points that way, and the lodger was found guilty. But Inspector Spence isn’t satisfied that he did it, and there is little time to investigate before he is hung.

So, Poirot journeys to a small village—only four houses and a post office. He meets a few people and seems to be getting nowhere when a chance remark gives him an idea. Mrs. McGinty had purchased ink at the post office, which meant she intended to write a letter, and she was so unaccustomed to writing letters that she had no ink. Who was she writing to?

Going back to look through some of her things, he finds a newspaper with an article ripped out. When he finds the paper at the archive, he sees the article is a “Where are they now?” piece about females connected with four infamous crimes, with old photos from 20 years before. He reckons that Mrs. McGinty, in her work as a cleaner, saw one of those photos at the home of a regular client. Someone in the village has a relationship with one of those women, but what kind of relationship? The field broadens as he considers. Is it the woman herself? A relative or spouse? With the range in age of the original females, the woman could now be anywhere from her 30s to her 50s.

And that was the problem. There are too many people in this book, many of them suspects, and Christie didn’t do her usual job of making them instantly specific. I couldn’t keep track of them by their names. The only distinctive villager at first is Maureen Summerhayes, Poirot’s incompetent hostess, who can’t cook and is completely disorganized, but I soon thought of her as Maureen, so that by the time there was a reference to Mr. Summerhayes, I had forgotten he was Maureen’s husband.

Fairly early on, Poirot meets his old friend the author, Ariadne Oliver. She is staying with the playwright Robin Upward while they try to adapt one of her books for the theater. Mrs. Upward is another of Mrs. McGinty’s clients, and thus a suspect.

I never thought of the murderer as a suspect, but I also felt I wasn’t given much of a reason to. I just didn’t think this was one of Christie’s best.

I was also struck by how little any of Mrs. McGinty’s clients cared that she was dead. There’s some real classism going on here (including the idea that she had to buy ink because she never wrote any letters; even if it happened to be true; anyone might have to buy ink).

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Review 2529: Sparkling Cyanide

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This novel begins in an unusual way for Christie, with sections on six people, each of whom had a motive to kill Rosemary Barton. There’s her younger sister, Iris Marie, who would inherit a fortune. There’s her husband George’s secretary, Ruth Lansing, who would like to take her place. There’s Anthony Browne, whose secret Rosemary has discovered, that he is really Tony Morelli. There’s Stephen Faraday, whose career as a policeman will be finished if his wife learns of his affair with Rosemary. There’s Sandra Faraday, who already knows about the affair. Finally, there’s her husband, George Barton, who also knows about the affair. Almost a year ago, these six were together at a party when Rosemary suddenly died from cyanide poisoning.

Rosemary’s death was ruled a suicide. Now, nearly a year later, someone has mailed George letters saying that Rosemary was murdered, so George decides to set a trap by reconvening the same people at the same table. But first, he asks in his friend, Colonel Race. Race things it’s a foolish idea, and it is—for George dies that night, also poisoned.

Colonel Race teams up with Inspector Kemp to try to figure out what happened. Was Rosemary poisoned? Who wrote the letters? How could anyone have poisoned George without touching his drink?

I don’t think the approach used in this novel was very successful. The writing seemed oddly static. It is only when we leave the character bios that the novel snaps back to life, with Christie’s usual clever dialogue and interesting action. Then, it’s quite good and makes you forget the first part.

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Review 2490: #1970Club AND RIPXIX! Passenger to Frankfurt

~ whatmeread ~ 9 Comments

Usually, when an Agatha Christie books pops up as a possibility for the biyearly club reads, I am happy to choose it, especially if I haven’t read it before. This year, in looking for books for the 1970 Club (and also for #RIPXIX), I saw Passenger to Frankfurt, one of Christie’s stand-alone espionage novels. Unfortunately, it was not one of her best.

Sir Stafford Nye is a young mid-level diplomat often distrusted by his peers because of eccentric dress and a certain sarcastic sense of humor. He is returning from a trip to Malaya when his plane, bound for Geneva, is rerouted to Frankfurt and thence to London.

In the Frankfurt airport lounge, he is approached by a young woman asking him for help. She tells him that if the plane had landed in Geneva, she would be safe, but since it is going to London, she’ll be killed. She bears a certain resemblance to him. She asks if he will leave the burnoose he’s been wearing with his passport in it and allow himself to be drugged. She will cut her hair and use his passport, and he will wake up long after the plane has landed in London and claim he was robbed. And he agrees.

Back in London, he places an ad hoping to meet her and she ends up sitting next to him during a concert. He is carefully brought into a mission—one that she is already working—by some government officials who are alarmed about a plot that is rousing the youth worldwide to violence and anarchy. Nye travels with the girl, who has many names but might be Countess Renata Zerkowski, to view a Hitler-like rally headed by a young man referred to as the Young Siegfried. He is just a figurehead, but the officials want to find out who is in charge.

The plot of this novel is so ridiculous that I barely had any patience with it. But worse, there is hardly any action, just a bunch of meetings. Once Nye is recruited, we see him traveling with Renata and then he disappears about 2/3 of the way through, only to reappear at the end. The only real action takes place in one page at the end of the novel. This one is pretty much a stinker. The only interesting character is Nye’s elderly aunt, Lady Matilda Cleckheaton.

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Review 2461: Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I usually take much longer to read a work of nonfiction vs. fiction—up to a week as opposed to two or three days—but such was the power and readability of historian Lucy Worsley’s prose that I was astonished to finish this book one day after I started it. Of course, many people may want to know about the days Christie was missing, and she deals with that, but there is much more.

Christie lived an interesting life, and Worsley tells us about it, from the pampered, loved child of wealthy parents, to the loss of her father and the family fortune when she was 11, the World War I nursing and dispensary work, the ill-planned marriage to Archie Christie, and so on. Worsley’s main message is that Christie understood people to hide their actual selves and she presented her own masks, as well as evolved during her life into different personas. That was why she presented as shy when she had a lot of self-confidence, why she said little about her disappearance, why she told everyone she was a housewife rather than an author, and so on.

I’m fairly sure I have already read a biography of Christie, but this one was much more interesting. It is written in a lively style but looks thoughtfully at some of the problems posed by other writer’s remarks, and is thoroughly documented.

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Review 2451: Endless Night

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Mike Rogers is a wanderer who moves from job to job, never seeming to amount to much. But he has a taste for finer things. One thing he wants is to have an architect he’s met build a house at Gipsys’s Acres, but even though the property is going cheap because of the curse on it, he can’t afford it.

He goes up to look at the property one day and meets Ellie Guteman. She is a young, wealthy heiress who has slipped her leash from trustees who keep her so protected that she never has any fun. With the help of her companion, Greta, she contiues to see Mike, and they daydream about buying Gipsy’s Acres and building their dream house. Eventually, they decide to get married on the day she turns 21. (Here’s some book serendipity, a concept coined by Bookish Beck, two books within a week that have houses being built that may turn out to be haunted. The other is The House Next Door.)

All goes well until they move into Gipsy’s Acres. Ellie keeps meeting Mrs. Lee, an old gypsy woman who warns her of danger. Someone throws a stone through the window. Even though Ellie’s relatives are American, they show up for visits, and they are not very nice. And Ellie has offered Greta a place to live. Lots of people seem not to like Greta, including Mike.

The novel is narrated by Mike, who seems disarmingly straightforward. However, there is a lot going on under the surface, and Mike is an unreliable narrator.

Although I guessed what was going on fairly early, that didn’t ruin my appreciation of how Christie slowly builds suspense. Then, at the very end, the novel took a turn I didn’t expect. Note that gypsies don’t fare well in the comments of characters.

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Review 2304: Midwinter Murder

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Even though I don’t always get on with mystery short stories, I’ve observed Midwinter Murder going around and thought it sounded like good winter reading. And so it proved to be.

For one thing, with Christie’s stories I didn’t feel that lack of characterization that I often feel with other mystery short stories, since Christie is so deft at depicting characters with just a few strokes. Not all of these stories involved murders, and some are quite benign. Poirot appears in several, Miss Marple in one, Tommy and Tuppence in one, and in two, a Mr. Satterthwaite and his mysterious friend, Mr. Quin.

“The Clergyman’s Daughter,” about a woman who inherits a house only to find odd things happening in it, was unfortunately already included in Partners in Crime, which I read last year. Similarly, the Miss Marple story, “A Christmas Tragedy,” was included in The Tuesday Club Murders.

Just for a change, I believe I preferred some of the more benign stories. For example, in “The Problem at Pollensa Bay,” Mr. Parker Pine receives a plea from an overprotective mother to find a way to get her poor son Basil away from a girl she deems unsuitable. But Mr. Pine doesn’t see anything wrong with the girl.

I also liked “The World’s End,” in which the mysterious Mr. Quin appears in a desolate location in Corsica to right a wrong.

And in “The Manhood of Edward Robinson,” Edward is a clerk who yearns for romance but his too-practical fianceé Maud thinks he’s a spendthrift and chides him when he tries to make a romantic gesture. Edward wins £500 in a contest and decides to spend it all on a sportscar then take it away for a day before Maud ruins his fun. And he has an unexpected adventure.

There are lots of stories with clever puzzles, for example, “Christmas Adventure,” in which Poirot figures out why there is a jewel in the plum pudding. But I thought I’d point out some of the more unusual stories.

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Review 2237: The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

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It’s been interesting rereading a few Jane Marple books after I so recently viewed the television versions, because although I have known the identity of each murderer, I’ve been better able to judge how fair Christie is playing. That is, are there clues to the solution? In The Mirror Crack’d there are.

The villagers of St. Mary Mead are agog to hear that the famous actress, Marina Gregg, has purchased Gossington Hall (the site of The Body in the Library) and will be hosting the local fête. Miss Marple’s friend Mrs. Bantry, who used to own the house, will be a special guest.

At home, Miss Marple is a bit unhappy. She is no longer allowed to garden, and her doctor thinks she shouldn’t live alone. The solution is the kind but obnoxious Mrs. Knight, who talks in the plural and hovers and doesn’t listen to Miss Marple. One day Miss Marple sends her out shopping so she can escape and goes to investigate the new housing development. She has a fall and is helped by Heather Badcock, a foolish woman who doesn’t consider how her actions affect others.

At the fête, just after Heather has introduced herself to Marina Gregg and is again telling her how she met her, her drink is spilled. Marina gives Heather her own, and after Heather drinks it, she quickly dies. It is poisoned, but was the victim intended to be Heather or Marina? Neither woman seems to have serious enemies.

I think that this novel has one of the most powerful endings of Christie’s novels. You’ll also be happy to know that Miss Marple finds a way to rid herself of Mrs. Knight.

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Review 2219: A Pocketful of Rye

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

When wealthy businessman Rex Fortescue collapses and dies over tea in his office, the police are surprised to find his pocket full of rye. When they figure out how he was poisoned, they realize it must have been over breakfast not tea. That leaves his family in the frame.

His much younger new wife is having an affair, so she is the obvious suspect—that is, until she collapses over tea. Then Gladys, the house maid, is found with the laundry, strangled and with a clothespin on her nose.

Miss Marple arrives on the scene after she reads of Gladys’s death, having trained Gladys to be a maid. She is the one who makes the connection between the deaths and the old nursery rhyme. But then, what about the blackbirds? Could this have anything to do with the Blackbird Mine, over which Fortescue reputedly cheated a partner?

This is one of Christie’s more ingenious mysteries. It hangs together without seeming absurd even though the murders seem deranged. I also thought the ending was quite effective.

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