Christie

I thought it might be nearer the end of the 25 days when I started depending on the addictive joy of Agatha – but I could resist no longer, and picked up Death in the Clouds (1935) by Agatha Christie. It’s a relatively early Poirot novel, and thus I could feel relatively assured of it being a good’un.

The murder takes place, as the title suggests, on a plane – called the Prometheus – and Madame Giselle is discovered dead. The only sign is a puncture mark on her neck – and so all the passengers are under suspicion. Well, all except one – because Hercule Poirot happens to be on the flight.

We follow the usual twists and turns of a Poirot novel, and my foolish belief that I’d worked out the ending turned out (but of course) not to be true. Sadly no Hastings or Ariadne Oliver, both of whom I love and always want to pop up in a Poirot, but it’s a neat murder mystery with all the clues laid out well – if only the reader is able to spot them… And there’s the good fun of a detective novelist, Clancy, on board – with Agatha Christie obviously enjoying teasing the profession. Here’s Inspector Japp on the topic:

“These detective-story writers… always making the police out to be fools… and getting their procedure all wrong. Why, if I were to say the things to my super that their inspectors say to superintendents I should be thrown out of the Force tomorrow on my ear. Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of damn-fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.”

Having just read Martin Edwards’ very entertaining The Golden Age of Murder (which I’m due to write about over at Vulpes Libris soon), I was in the mood for some Agatha – and decided to grab one which fulfilled one of the criteria on my Book Bingo. One of them is ‘Book set in Asia’, and so I grabbed They Came to Baghdad (1951), which my friend Simon gave me a few years ago.

I feel a bit guilty about it, since I don’t think it’s the most authentic portrayal of Asia imaginable (and I had been planning to read Illustrado by Miguel Syjuco), but at least Christie knew the area fairly well.

They Came to Baghdad has one of Christie’s most likeable heroines, the impetuous, charming, and accident-prone Victoria Jones. She starts the novel by getting fired from her position as a typist (for impersonating the boss’ wife) and wanders, bloody but unbowed, into the streets of London – whereupon she meets a gentleman as impetuous and charming as herself, the handsome Robert. They obviously rather fancy each other, but he is off to Baghdad the next day.

Luckily, Victoria manages to find someone willing to pay her board to Baghdad in exchange for helping her manage the journey, so she can go and surprise Robert. (Remember the impetuous thing?) Only… she doesn’t know his surname, and doesn’t have any money. A delight of a hotel proprietor gives her a room (he is forever offering her beautifully cooked meals, and describing everyone he knows as ‘very nice’) and she decides just to wait it out and see what happens. Only, what happens is that somebody ends up dead in her hotel room…

This isn’t a traditional Agatha Christie whodunnit, though, more’s the pity. The death doesn’t come until almost halfway through the book, for one thing, and long before that there has been much talk of intrigue and codes and meetings of international importance, etc. The novel is really a thriller, rather than a detective novel – and, had I known that, I might not have picked it up.

For much the same reasons I talked about in relation to spy novels recently, I am not enamoured with thrillers. I avoid anything with gore or sadism, which rules out many modern thrillers, but even Christie’s cosy approach to the thriller didn’t, er, thrill me. It is compellingly readable, as everything Christie wrote was, but I can’t bring myself to care about international plots and orchestrated assassinations and the like. I want Christie novels to revolve around anger that somebody knocked over a bird cage (for example) and to take place in a small village or country house.

There’s still a twist or two in the tale (though the main one is so obvious that I can’t really believe it was intended to be a twist), but there’s not really much to satisfy those on the lookout for the sort of clues and denouements that are the fabric of Christie’s archetypal output.

So, did I enjoy reading it? Sure, it was still pretty fun. But it’s probably one of the least enjoyable Agathas that I’ve read so far, and confirms my preference for Marples and Poirots. Speaking of which, I’ve just picked Nemesis off the shelf for my ‘one-word title’ square on Book Bingo…

Sometimes you just need to read an Agatha Christie, don’t you?  Well, I do.  When I was getting bad headaches still (they seem to have worn off now, for the moment at least) I needed something that didn’t require much thought, but which still would be good – and so I picked up Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie.  You may remember, from my report of a talk at Folio HQ, that Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson considered Five Little Pigs her best novel, and so I had to give it a go.