April 14, 2008 at 2:54 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense, Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror
53. The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite: Love Detectives by Agatha Christie (Mystery, Short Story Collection) 552 p. (280 p.)
The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite collects all of Christie’s short stories featuring Mr. Satterthwaite and Mr. Harley Quin. It also includes a novel, Three-Act Tragedy, and a novella, Dead Man’s Mirror, which are Hercule Poirot stories featuring Mr. Sattertwaite in a cameo role. I didn’t actually re-read those, since it hasn’t been long since I last read them, and since they don’t include Mr. Quin, and so don’t really fit the atmosphere of the short stories.
The book opens with The Mysterious Mr. Quin, a collection originally published in 1930, which first introduced the characters of Quin and Satterthwaite, and includes 12 short stories. All the stories are told from the perspective of Mr. Satterthwaite, a kind, elderly gentleman, well-off, a bachelor, slightly snobbish, a connoisseur of art and music, and a man who enjoys his comforts. Christie often describes him as the playgoer type—a man sensitive to impressions, interested in the drama of life.
In The Coming of Mr. Quin, Mr. Satterthwaite is the guest at a New Year’s Eve house party when the subject of Derek Capel’s suicide is raised. Some years earlier, the house belonged to a friend of the current owners, who shot himself, though no one was ever able to discover the reason why. Suddenly, not long after midnight, there are three loud knocks at the door, and the host goes rises to open it.
Framed in the doorway stood a man’s figure, tall and slender. To Mr. Satterthwaite, watching, he appeared by some curious effect of the stained glass above the door, to be dressed in every colour of the rainbow. Then, as he stepped forward, he showed himself to be a thin dark man dressed in motoring clothes.
Mr. Quin’s car, it seems, has broken down, and he’s come to the house hoping to stay warm while his chauffeur fixes it. It soon emerges that Mr. Quin was also a friend of Capel’s, and the party continues to wonder about his suicide. Mr. Quin has a strange idea that mysteries may actually be easier to solve some time after the fact, because events begin to appear in their true perspective only after the passage of time. As he comments, “the contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.”
As they continue to discuss the problem, new interpretations of the old facts begin to emerge. It isn’t long before Mr. Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite are able to put together a true picture of the death of Derek Capel, not only finding the truth, but uniting a pair of unhappy lovers, as well.
The other eleven stories follow much the same lines. Although the stories don’t always take place long after the crime has been committed, the solution always hinges on a re-examination of the evidence putting the facts into their proper perspective.
In The Shadow on the Glass, the shooting of two young people seems to be connected to the ghostly figure of a Cavalier, known to appear in the glass of an upstairs window. When Mr. Quin turns up unexpectedly, his presence prompts Mr. Satterthwaite to solve the case. At the ‘Bells and Motley’ is the story of a chance encounter between Quin and Satterthwaite at a country inn, where half an hour’s conversation reveals the solution to an old mystery. It’s followed by The Sign in the Sky, in which Mr. Satterthwaite manages to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death by the evidence of a mysterious sign seen by a servant.
The Soul of the Croupier is an odd story, one which contains no crime at all, only the union of lovers which is a theme throughout all the stories. In it, a young American man becomes ensnared by an ageing but beautiful adventuress, who has a past known only to one man. The able stage-management of Mr. Quin leads to a satisfactory resolution.
Similarly, The Man from the Sea does not deal with solving crime, but with preventing tragedy and uniting lovers. When Mr. Satterthwaite, on vacation on a Spanish island, meets a suicidal man on the edge of a cliff, he listens to the man’s story. Not long after, he finds himself listening to another story, one with unexpected points of similarity, and finds a way to make things right for both his new acquaintances—with, of course, the invaluable, behind-the-scenes assistance of the mysterious Mr. Quin.
Mr. Satterthwaite got up, trembling a little.
“I must get back to the hotel,” he said. “If you are going that way.”
But Mr. Quin shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I shall go back the way I came.”
When Mr. Satterthwaite looked back over his shoulder, he saw his friend walking towards the edge of the cliff.
In The Voice in the Dark, a conversation with Mr. Quin stimulates Mr. Satterthwaite’s memory, giving him the solution to an old deception and a new murder. An unexpected encounter with Mr. Quin at the opera in The Face of Helen leads Mr. Satterthwaite to an acquaintance with a pleasant, ordinary young woman whose beautiful face sparks tragedy wherever she goes, and the opportunity to prevent a murder.
One of my favourite stories in the collection is The Dead Harlequin. At the showing of some watercolours by a new artist, Mr. Satterthwaite buys a painting that sparks his imagination: a dead Harlequin lies on a black-and-white-tiled floor, while the same Harlequin looks in at the window. The setting is a place he knows, the terrace room at a country house called Charnley. He also feels that he recognizes the face of the Harlequin, an old friend of his. Impressed with the artist’s work, Mr. Satterthwaite invites the young man to dinner with himself and a friend. He half-expects Mr. Quin to show up that evening, and he does—as do two other unexpected guests, leading to the solution of a fourteen-year-old murder.
The Bird with the Broken Wing is a rather melancholy, creepy tale of the suicide, or possibly murder, of a young woman. Not beautiful, but with an air of tragedy, she intrigues Mr. Satterthwaite because she has got a quality of enchantment he’s rarely seen. When her body is found hanging on the back of her bedroom door, Satterthwaite is sure that a murder has been committed.
When Mr. Satterthwaite travels to Corsica with a Duchess in The World’s End, a chance encounter on a day-trip to a tiny mountain village leads to the vindication of a man accused of theft, and the restoration of joy to a very unhappy young woman. Of course, none of this would be possible without Mr. Quin, the man who comes unexpectedly, and leaves as suddenly as he arrives.
The last story in The Mysterious Mr. Quin is Harlequin’s Lane, my favourite. When the two professional dancers hired to perform in a village harlequinade are injured in a car accident, a former dancer takes the place of Columbine, while Mr. Quin, naturally, dances the part of Harlequin. The brief description of the dance and of the story of Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, and Pierette was something I loved as a child. This story, more than any of the others, embodies the magic that makes the Quin and Satterthwaite stories so special.
As I said, I skipped Three-Act Tragedy and Dead Man’s Mirror, which aren’t actually Quin and Satterthwaite stories at all. The collection ends with two short stories published in other collections: The Love Detectives and The Harlequin Tea Set.
In The Love Detectives, a minor car accident leads to Mr. Quin’s presence at a murder investigation. With his prompting, Mr. Satterthwaite is able to see through some tricky evidence and solve a murder, saving the life of the person who would probably have been convicted of the crime.
The last story is The Harlequin Tea Set, which makes a perfect end to the book. On the way to visit an old friend, Mr. Satterthwaite meets Mr. Quin in a coffee shop, and later manages to prevent a terrible tragedy. It’s a good mystery, and I really want that tea set for myself!
I was always attracted by the image of Harlequin as a child, a happy trickster dressed in a bright rainbow of colours. I love how Agatha Christie’s stories show the everyday, ordinary, matter-of-fact world of Mr. Satterthwaite alongside the mysterious, magical, unearthly world of Harley Quin. That she never feels the need to solve the mystery, to expose the secret of Mr. Quin, is one of the greatest charms of the stories for me.
It’s that wonderful, supernatural quality of Harley Quin that leads me to count this toward [ouatii], as well as as a bonus read for the [aac].
Pages read: 14,566
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Once Upon a Time II, Quin and Satterthwaite
April 3, 2008 at 2:28 am · Filed under Books Etc
Books read: 10 - 6 new to me and 4 re-reads.
Pages read: 2,826.
Time to complete the challenge (from first book to last book): 4 days.
I have never in my life completed a challenge so fast. And probably never will again, because there’s no other author I can think of who is so quick and easy to read, and yet so immensely enjoyable. It was lovely to wallow in Christie for a few days, visiting my old friends Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Tommy and Tuppence, and Mr. Parker Pyne, and making some new ones, as well.
I haven’t quite finished doing all the Christie re-reads I would like, so look for reviews of A Caribbean Mystery (which is the one Miss Marple novel I don’t own, so the one I don’t remember well at all) and possibly The Complete Quin and Satterthwaite (the only recurring characters I haven’t revisited yet. Except Hastings, but I know his stories too well to re-read them in their entirety! Although, it’s been quite a while since I read The Big Four…)
So, I’ve completed my first challenge of 2008! Eight months and 28 days early. I feel very…efficient. Or something.
Tags: Anything Agatha Challenge
April 3, 2008 at 1:50 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
51. Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories by Agatha Christie (Mystery, Short Story Collection) 346 p.
It’s funny to remember it, but when I was younger, I didn’t really like Miss Marple. In fact, I found her quite dull. Right up until the point when she became my favourite of Agatha Christie’s characters. Old and gossipy, Miss Jane Marple has spent her life learning all about human nature, while hardly ever leaving her little village of St. Mary Mead.
This is amply demonstrated in The Tuesday Club Murders. At Miss Marple’s home are gathered her nephew Raymond, artist Joyce Lemprière, retired Scotland Yard Commissioner Sir Henry Clithering, clergyman Dr. Pender, and a lawyer, Mr. Petherick. At Raymond’s suggestion, they decide to play a game: each will tell the true story of a baffling mystery only he or she knows the answer to, and the others will try to guess the solution. Although they invite Miss Marple to play only out of kindness, thinking an elderly spinster who has spent her whole life in a small village cannot possibly know anything of murder, Miss Marple gets the solution every time!
Some time later, when Sir Henry is again visiting the village, a dinner party which Miss Marple attends leads to the same game—with much the same result. In the thirteenth story, Sir Henry is once again in St. Mary Mead, when the apparent suicide of a young girl turns out to be murder. These thirteen stories form the largest part of the collection. The rest is made up of the seven Miss Marple stories that were published in the collections The Regatta Mystery, Three Blind Mice, and Double Sin.
The Miss Marple stories are uniformly excellent. I adore her rambling conversation, and her village parallels. This collection contains some of Christie’s funniest passages, like this one from The Thumbmark of St. Peter:
“Now, I dare say you modern young people will laugh, but when I am in really bad trouble I always say a little prayer to myself—anywhere, when I am walking along the street, or at a bazaar. And I always get an answer. It may be some trifling thing, apparently quite unconnected with the subject, but there it is. I had that text pinned over my bed when I was a little girl: Ask and you shall receive. On the morning that I am telling you about, I was walking along the High Street, and I was praying hard. I shut my eyes, and when I opened them, what do you think was the first thing that I saw?”
Five faces with varying degrees of interest were turned to Miss Marple. It may be safely assumed, however, that no one would have guessed the answer to the question right.
“I saw,” said Miss Marple impressively, “the window of the fishmonger’s shop. There was only one thing in it, a fresh haddock.”
She looked round triumphantly.
“Oh, my God!” said Raymond West. “An answer to a prayer—a fresh haddock!”
“Yes, Raymond,” said Miss Marple severely, “and there is no need to be profane about it. The hand of God is everywhere. The first thing I saw were the black spots—the mark of St. Peter’s thumb. That is the legend, you know. St. Peter’s thumb. And that brought things home to me. I needed faith, the ever-true faith of St. Peter. I connected the two things together, faith—and fish.”
Sir Henry blew his nose rather hurriedly. Joyce bit her lip.
Pages read: 13,904
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Miss Marple, short story collection
April 2, 2008 at 1:35 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
50. Parker Pyne Investigates by Agatha Christie (Mystery, Short Story Collection) 277 p.
Mr. Parker Pyne, a retired government statistician, runs a rather unusual business. His advertisement in the Times agony column reads:
ARE YOU HAPPY? IF NOT, CONSULT MR. PARKER PYNE, 17 Richmond Street.
The experience and knowledge acquired in the course of his career has made Parker Pyne an expert on human happiness. As he says in the speech he gives prospective clients, there are only five main causes of unhappiness, and once you know the cause, the cure shouldn’t be hard to find. For a fee, Mr. Parker Pyne provides that cure.
In the first six stories, we see Parker Pyne at home in England, solving problems from his London office. In the last six, he goes on vacation to the East, but finds that his Times advertisement precedes him wherever he goes. Parker Pyne handles any situation with aplomb, from bored city clerks to cases of murder.
This was a very quick and enjoyable read. I’ve read this book before, but not in a long time, so it was fun getting to know Parker Pyne again. He also has odd story in other collections, but this is the only book he has all to himself, since he never appears in a full-length novel. I find these some of Christie’s most successful short stories; since Parker Pyne isn’t, strictly speaking, a detective, she had more freedom about the kinds of stories she could tell.
Pages read: 13,904
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Parker Pyne, short story collection
April 2, 2008 at 11:20 am · Filed under Book Reviews, Mystery and Suspense
49. Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 224 p.
This definitely isn’t one of my favourite Christies, although it was entertaining. The truth is, I’m not fond of any of the books Christie wrote after 1965’s At Bertram’s Hotel (although that one remains one of my favourites.) I find them mostly vague and confusing, and this one is no exception, although I enjoyed it more than most.
At a literary luncheon, a woman called Burton-Cox confronts Mrs. Ariadne Oliver about an old tragedy. Mrs. Burton-Cox’s son is involved with Celia Ravenscroft, one of Mrs. Oliver’s goddaughters, and may be contemplating marriage. Mrs. Burton-Cox wants to know whether it was Celia’s mother who killed her father, or the other way around…
Although she firmly resolved not to pass on information to such an odious woman, Mrs. Oliver does become interested in the case. Teaming up with her old friend, Hercule Poirot, she goes in search of “elephants”—people who may remember something, however inaccurate, about the fifteen-year-old case.
This book strained my credulity in a few ways. Fifteen years isn’t a particularly long time, and it seems absurd that it would be difficult to find people who remembered a murder-suicide case. Even in the book, the difficulty wasn’t so much finding people who remembered, as much as finding people who had ever known anything in the first place. Both Mrs. Oliver and, very uncharacteristically, Poirot, were unbelievably vague about dates and sequences of events, and even sometimes about names—so much so that I had a hard time figuring out what was supposed to have happened to who, and when.
There was also Desmond Burton-Cox’s total dismissal of his mother who, although she wasn’t his birth mother, adopted him as a baby. I really don’t buy into Christie’s idea that adopted children feel and think so differently from their adoptive parents that they don’t truly love them, unless that love is inspired by gratitude. I shouldn’t let this get me riled up, since I already knew that in Christie’s world, adoptions are always bad news, but for some reason it particularly annoyed me here.
I suppose the main problem I had with this book is that there was no sense of urgency about it. The deaths were in the past, and there wasn’t really any question of further danger to anyone investigating the crime, or to anyone else involved with the case. The only reason for the investigation was curiosity, and I found I didn’t much care what the solution was. Even when it was revealed, it just wasn’t very interesting to me.
All this isn’t to say that Elephants Can Remember is a bad book, because it isn’t. Ariadne Oliver is always entertaining, and the writing was good. I might even have liked this more if I hadn’t just read so many Christies that, in my opinion, are much, much better.
Pages read: 13,627
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Ariadne Oliver, Poirot
April 1, 2008 at 8:21 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
48. The Pale Horse by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 288 p.
Although one of Christie’s recurring characters, Ariadne Oliver, does make brief appearances in this novel, its hero and narrator is Mark Easterbrook, a young writer and historian. Through a series of coincidences, he becomes aware of a sinister business which apparently uses the occult to arrange “natural” deaths, in exchange for money.
Christie creates quite a creepy atmosphere in The Pale Horse. The plot relied unusually heavily on coincidence; from reading the book, you’d think Much Deeping was the only village outside of London and that England had a population of about 150! Still, the story was engaging, and even though I predicted some parts of the solution, I really didn’t figure out the most important parts, or see the end coming at all.
All in all, quite a good mystery, and a thoroughly enjoyable read.
Pages read: 13,403
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Ariadne Oliver
April 1, 2008 at 3:18 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
47. Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 320 p.
When I decided yesterday to get started on the Anything Agatha Challenge, I didn’t really intend to finish all 10 books at once, but it looks like that’s what’s going to happen! That’s okay, though—I’m having a wonderful time rediscovering my love for Agatha Christie, and reading all these novels that are completely new to me. Where have all these great books been hiding all these years, while I’ve been thinking I’d long ago read just about every Christie novel there was?
Ordeal by Innocence is, along with Crooked House, one of Christie’s two favourites among her own novels. I can see why. The solution to the mystery depends even more than usual on the personalities of the people involved, rather than alibis and physical evidence. I have to admit that this is my favourite kind of mystery—I love Dorothy L. Sayers’s books, but I find the investigations in them a little dry and tedious, relying as they do on technical details and timetables.
This book isn’t just a mystery novel, though. Christie sets out to explore the consequences of a murder investigation, not on the guilty, but on the innocent. It’s a theme she uses at other times, particularly in the short story The Four Suspects (from The Thirteen Problems or The Tuesday Club Murders), but she never makes it as prominent as it is in this story.
Dr. Arthur Calgary, a scientist and polar explorer, returns to England after two years to find that he possesses information vital to an old murder trial—he can actually provide an alibi for a young man who has been convicted of murder. Open inquiry, however, it turns out that Jacko Argyle has already died of pneumonia in prison. Feeling guilty, although he is not actually to blame, he visits the family to deliver news that Jacko, who was convicted of killing his mother, Mrs. Argyle, is actually innocent and will be posthumously pardoned.
Calgary isn’t quite sure what reaction he expects, but some combination of resentment and relief seem appropriate—but that’s not the reaction he gets. Far from resenting him for having, however inadvertently, contributed to Jacko’s death, the family would rather he had left well alone and not raked up the old tragedy—because if Jacko didn’t do it, some other member of the family is a murderer. After two years, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of being able to prove the killer’s identity beyond a shadow of a doubt—which means the whole family may be under suspicion for the rest of their lives.
Ordeal by Innocence is a deft study of the psychology of suspicion, charity, love, and family relations. Yet another fantastic “new” Christie that I can credit to this challenge!
Pages read: 13,115
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge
March 31, 2008 at 10:29 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
46. Crooked House by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 235 p.
This novel was not at all what I was expecting. A young man, Charles Hayward, meets and falls in love with Sophia Leonides in Egypt during the war. When he returns to England two years later, he finds that her grandfather has been murdered, and her entire family is under suspicion.
Charles’s father is the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, and as Sophia’s unofficial fiancé, Charles has access to the house and the people involved in the case. For Sophia’s sake, and his own, he investigates the case. On the surface, it looks simple: Aristide Leonides was 85 years old, and his wife, Brenda, only 34. A young tutor living in the house, Laurence Brown, is just Brenda’s age, and may have been her lover. It seems obvious that one or other or both of them must be guilty—except that there are several circumstances that don’t fit that theory.
The police are baffled, especially since no other member of the family seems to have an adequate motive. Charles, encouraged by his father and Sophia, hangs around the house, searching for clues to the mystery in his conversations with everyone involved, but not really getting anywhere. The only person who seems to have any ideas about the crime at all is 12-year-old Josephine, Sophia’s younger sister. She claims that she knows who did it, and that she only lacks a few final pieces of evidence—a claim that is only believed after she twice escapes being murdered herself.
Aside from being a very entertaining read, Crooked House was quite surprising. I really didn’t seen the ending coming at all, and although I had several vague theories about the case, not one of them turned out to be correct. I thought I knew Christie really well, but this challenge is teaching me how many wonderful things I’ve missed!
This was one of Christie’s two favourites among her own works. The other, Ordeal by Innocence, is coincidentally my next pick for the challenge. I’m quite excited!
Pages read: 12,795
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge
March 31, 2008 at 5:07 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
45. Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 224 p.
Partners in Crime features Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, the husband-and-wife team who first appeared in The Secret Adversary and went on to star in N or M, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, and Postern of Fate. I’ve always found the latter three strange and confused, but I adore early Tommy and Tuppence.
Somewhat bored with life as a London housewife, Tuppence feels she’s grown to take the good things in her life for granted, and vetoes Tommy’s solution:
“Shall I neglect you a little?” suggested Tommy. “Take other women about to night clubs. That sort of thing.”
“Useless,” said Tuppence. “You would only meet me there with other men. And I should know perfectly well that you didn’t care for the other women, whereas you would never be quite sure that I didn’t care for the other men. Women are so much more thorough.”
Instead, she wishes for something exciting to happen—and only moments later, she gets the answer to her wish. Tommy works in an unspecified government intelligence agency, and his boss, Mr. Carter, offers the couple the chance to do a bit of field work. Tommy and Tuppence agree to take over a small detective agency, working on perfectly genuine cases while they keep an eye out for espionage.
The Beresfords take to detecting like ducks to water, amusing themselves (and me) by using the methods of various fictional detectives, including both Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Their efforts are amateur, but aside from one or two embarrassing incidents, they generally manage to carry the day.
Partners in Crime is partly mystery, and partly a hilarious parody of fictional detectives’ methods and mannerisms—in fact, Tommy and Tuppence spend most of their time imitating the mannerisms rather than the methods, which only makes it funnier—as do their clients bemused reactions to them in their various roles.
This book was another re-read for me, but I’d forgotten just how wonderful it is, and I had an even better time revisiting Tommy and Tuppence’s adventures than I anticipated.
Pages read: 12,560
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, short story collection, Tommy and Tuppence
March 31, 2008 at 12:43 pm · Filed under Book Reviews, Favourite Books, Mystery and Suspense
44. The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie (Mystery) 352 p.
Like Sparkling Cyanide, The Mystery of the Blue Train is a novel-length adaptation of a previously published short story. The Plymouth Express, which first appeared in 1923, tells of the murder of an American millionaire’s daughter on a train. The novel, although it has a more complex plot and deeper characterization, follows essentially the same lines as the short story.
Ruth Ketteridge, the spoiled, egocentric daughter of a very rich man, is found strangled in her compartment on the Blue Train, which carries wealthy passengers escaping a London winter for the warmth and sun of the Riviera. There are no shortage of possible murderers, and the victim’s estranged husband and her lover both come in for their share of suspicion. There is also the matter of some missing rubies, a gift from Ruth’s father and worth half a million pounds. Poirot, who was also a passenger on the Blue Train, begins to investigate, and soon turns up all manner of complications.
I’m very familiar with the story of The Plymouth Express, and I can’t say it’s ever been one of my favourites. Actually, I’m not a huge fan of the Poirot short stories in general—they’re fun as puzzles, but they lack the engaging personalities who form a great part of the charm of Christie’s novels, and the mysteries are rarely as fully developed as they ideally ought to be. The Mystery of the Blue Train has neither of these drawbacks.
The protagonist of the story is Katherine Grey, a young woman who, after a decade as a companion to a difficult elderly lady, has just been left a small fortune in her will. She travels by the Blue Train to the Riviera, and falls into conversation with Ruth Ketteridge. After the murder, meets Poirot and becomes further embroiled in the case.
Although the story is told in the third person, it mostly follows Katherine, and the book is the better for it. She’s very sympathetic, possessing both intelligence and a sense of humour. We also get to see a lot of Poirot, and he’s at his twinkly-eyed best.
This was actually a re-read for me, but as I’d only read the book once, and that long enough ago that I had no real memory of the plot, I thought it would be a great pick for the Anything Agatha Challenge, and it certainly was. I remembered liking the story, and my memory was accurate, for once; The Mystery of the Blue train is definitely one of Christie’s better novels. It didn’t matter at all that I knew the solution from the beginning (especially since I doubt I would have figured it out for myself!)
Pages read: 12,336
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, 888 Challenge, Agatha Christie, Anything Agatha Challenge, Poirot
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