evelyn_b | Entries tagged with hercule poirot

What I've Finished Reading

Cards on the Table is excellent, of course. Even if it weren't, it has Ariadne Oliver in it, which is an excellence all its own. Mrs. Oliver is wrong about everything, but still manages to solve a hefty portion of the case while giving herself a stomachache from eating too many apples and fending off nonsensical compliments from inattentive readers. My only real beef with Cards is that I don't like Col. Race being right about the suspect who is too upright and "white" a fellow to commit murder. There's none righteous, guys! Haven't you been paying attention?

The Case of the Constant Suicides by John Dickson Carr begins and ends as a hilarious rom-com about academics who meet on a train after feuding for several months in the Letters page of the Sunday Watchman. In between, there's a murder mystery with Dr. Gideon Fell. The mystery is all right (someone has tried to defraud an insurance company, with extraordinarily convoluted results) but it crowds out the story of the Letters Page nemeses who are forced by devilish circumstance to share a sleeping compartment, which I liked a little better and which had to be wrapped up abruptly as a postscript to the murder business. It's funny, though, and fast-moving.

What I'm Reading Now

Dumb Witness is one of the few Christie title changes that I really like. The original title was Poirot Loses a Client, because the old woman who wrote an anxious, evasive letter to Poirot at the start of the book is dead by the time he receives it. "Dumb Witness" focuses attention on the book's most likable character, a good dog who has been ignominiously framed for someone else's attempted murder. Hasting's affinity for and friendly conversations with the dog (a terrier called Bob) are by far my favorite part of this story, which is otherwise fairly typical - grasping heirs, knee-jerk xenophobia, big crumbling houses, wide-eyed lady's companions, bluff untrustworthy doctors, and so on. Not that I'm complaining! But Hasting's imaginary dog monologues really are a special treat. He makes the dog sound exactly like Hastings if Hastings were a dog.

What I Plan to Read Next

Aristotle Detective, the amazing ~~true~~ story of Aristotle, the ancient philosophy guy, who also solves fictional murders, or at least one murder. The back-cover blurb claims that Aristotle is "the best detective to come along since we said good-bye to Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot." WE'LL SEE.

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What I've Finished Reading

Could I possibly have enjoyed The Man in the Brown Suit more? Maybe we could all have done with a little less colonial condescension along the African tourist route, but that's in character for Anne “the Adventuress” Beddingfeld, whom I suspect has more than a few things in common with Agatha Christie. This book includes a brief but lively description of surfing, and this glimpse into Anne's internal monologue:

"This is South Africa," I kept saying to myself industriously. "South Africa, South Africa. You are seeing the world. This is the world. You are seeing it. Think of it, Anne Beddingfeld, you pudding-head. You're seeing the world."

There are actually two narrators: Anne, who is a delight, and the unreliable memoirst Sir Eustace Pedlars, whose diary fills in some helpful details along the way. TMitBS is a rom-com nearly as much as a mystery-adventure – of the Hollywood Comedy Atavism type, wherein the plucky career girl wants nothing more than to be slung over the shoulder of The Right Man and dumped on the floor of a rustic cabin while he paces around going, “Don't tempt me, Anne!” (one of many actual lines spoken in this book). There's enough dubious philosophy about men and women to fill a small but very dubious book. Some readers will probably find this annoying. I found it funny. Christie and I are just going to have to agree to disagree about whether or not strangling is attractive.

Technically, this is another story in which all labor unrest is the work of criminal masterminds, but the writing is so much more assured than in The Secret Adversary (the refreshingly strangulation-free adorableness of Tommy and Tuppence notwithstanding) that I just went with it. Great fun all around.

What I'm Reading Now

“That's queer,” I ejaculated suddenly beneath my breath.

Poirot Investigates is a collection of eleven short stories in which. . . Poirot investigates. The first, “The Adventure of the Western Star,” is a cleverish diamond-heist plot with surprise ethnic slurs and a a twist that is either racist or a depiction of the casual racism of its characters, take your pick.

In “The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor,” Poirot solves a case of suspicious death using a combination of word-association and fake ghosts. “The Case of the Cheap Flat” is mostly a joke about how you can't get a cheap flat in London. I enjoyed “The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge,” wherein Hastings has to be the detective because Poirot has the flu! Of course he makes a botch of it, despite being guided by delightful Poirot telegrams:

Of course black-bearded man was not Havering only you or Japp would have such an idea wire me description of housekeeper and what clothes she wore this morning same of Mrs. Havering do not waste time taking photographs of interiors they are underexposed and not in the least artistic.

<3

Still in the middle of A Conspiracy of Paper, whose first-person narrator is still getting in the way a little.
I don't think there's anything wrong with him particularly, but it's harder to sell the kind of atmosphere Liss is selling (an atmosphere of generous historical infodumping) when a supposedly contemporary narrator keeps taking it upon himself to explain his own cultural assumptions at length to his audience. A good old-fashioned third person omniscient might have gone over better. Partly I'm having trouble keeping the story straight, which is undermining any suspense that may have been intended. But I'm still reading it, so it can't be too bad, right? I don't think it's bad. We'll see what happens by the end.

What I Plan to Read Next

I've got another round of Agatha Christie waiting for me, starting with The Secret of Chimneys, but I might read Maisie Dobbs first. It's a contemporary historical mystery about an ex-WWI nurse who opens a detective agency in 1929, and the front-cover blurb enjoins me to "Be prepared to be astonished." New York Times Book Review, I am always prepared to be astonished.

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What I've Finished Reading

I've just finished Murder on the Links for the second time, and it's just as bafflingly dull as it was the first time. I'm not at all sure why: it's got plenty of twists; there's an unofficial Detective Competition, Poirot is Poirot and Hastings is an idiot. There's no shortage of alarming discrepancies, dark secrets, and layer after layer of people shielding one another from justice. But I lost more time dozing off in the middle of chapters than actually reading.

No such complaint about The Mysterious Affair at Styles – it's just as energetic and suspenseful as Links is inexplicably boring.

Is it the pacing? Is it France? I don't know what happened with Links. Hastings acquires a girlfriend and she's pretty likable, though what she sees in Hastings is never made clear (he is a decent chap who enjoys a good breakfast and has Opinions About Women).

What I'm Reading Now

The Man in the Brown Suit begins unpromisingly with spies, but continues DELIGHTFULLY with a young first-person narrator, Anne “Anne the Adventuress” Beddingfeld, whose late father was “one of England's greatest living authorities on Primitive Man” and who finds herself, shortly after his death, alone in the world save for information pertaining to a suspicious subway accident and just enough money for a passage to South Africa. Some sort of shenanigans are building aboard the ship, but what? I hope it's not spies.

David Liss' A Conspiracy of Paper is narrated by its main character, Benjamin Weaver, a Jewish ex-boxer and persuader-of-all-trades in eighteenth-century London. So far it's mostly a research delivery system, but not a bad one. Weaver does a lot of rough things in this rough city, and his matter-of-fact narration (with occasional supplementary digression on why he prefers not to hit women) can be both awkward and disconcerting, but he has my attention.

What I Plan to Read Next

Poirot Investigates and Watson's Choice, followed by some books I bought at the Friends of the Library book sale.

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What I've Finished Reading

The Good Detective by H.R.F. Keating, who was president of the Detection Club from 1985-2000. This is a police story, kind of rough and laddish and also very 90s, with its ecoterrorists and pointed pronunciations of "Ms." Ned French is a CID man who, years ago, bullied a young fanatic into confessing to planting a bomb that killed four people. Now, new information has come to light and the case is being reopened. Since Ned and his supervisor deliberately falsified records to make their interrogation look less torturey, this can only mean trouble for Ned and the CID. Will the crusading lawyer ruin Ned's takedown of a dangerous new crime family with her nosy ways? What does it mean to be. . . a good detective?

( Spoilers ahoy )

What I appreciated: this book doesn't fall into the Law and Order: SVU trap of making its criminals EXTRA SUPER TRIPLE HEINOUS in an attempt to make an emotional case for unscrupulous policing. There are no serial killers or torture dungeons, just some unattractive middle-aged wankers who are out to make a buck and don't care about beating a few guys to death along the way. I don't know if the sordidness is really successful, but it's an honest attempt.

I also appreciated how unabashedly pasted on the sexual tension was. At the first meeting between Crusading Lawyer and (Not Actually) Good Detective, the narrator says, in effect, "Suddenly, there was sexual tension! Ned couldn't figure out why." Their relationship becomes a driving force of the plot, but no one ever does figure out why. Sometimes that's the true mystery.

What I'm Reading Now

I'm excited to be reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles, because even though I've been reading Christie off and on since 2014, this is the first Christie, and reading it feels like embarking on a long and important journey. . . OF DEATH. It's a great debut novel, brisker and smarter than The Secret Adversary, which will be Christie No. 2. It's a nice job of misdirection to have Hastings, our affable Jam Watson, announce to his hosts at Styles that he has "always had a secret hankering to be a detective."

"But really, seriously, I am awfully drawn to it. I came across a man in Belgium once, a very famous detective, and he quite inflamed me. He was a marvellous little fellow. He used to say that all good detective work was a mere matter of method. My system is based on his -- though of course I have progressed rather further."

Alas, the dream is destroyed once the man himself turns up, now a refugee under the protection of the philanthropic Mrs. Inglethorpe, whose murder is soon to confuse everyone. Poirot is a little more demonstrative here than I remember him from the future, but can you really blame him? He "clasped [Hastings] in his arms and kissed [him] warmly."

"Mon ami Hastings!" he cried. "It is indeed mon ami Hastings!"

The edition is odd - an attractive new paperback with elaborately reproduced handwriting (not handwriting font) for the handwriting parts, but full of typos; about a quarter of the "mon amis" are printed, "Mom ami."

What I Plan to Read Next

More from 1921's most promising debut author, Agatha Christie! I've actually read a couple chapters of A Conspiracy of Paper, too, but I don't have anything to say about it yet.