So, le premier book du bus ride for today was
Agatha Christie's
The Murder on the Links, 2nd in the Hercule Poirot series, involving Poirot being summoned in advance, with the company of his, well,
mostly trusty friend Hastings, to investigate an anticipated murder which turns out to be not all it seems.
It's one of the dozen or so that I also own in French graphic novel adaptations (translated to English), which I've selected to load up on the Sony as the first to read, because I need some way to filter and prioritize the lot, and doing strict chronological/publication order doesn't particularly appeal to me (especially since I don't think I'd care to potentially read multiple Poirots/Marples one after another and thus overdose).
Overall, this was a very complicated-seeming but reasonably decent whodunnit. There was a lot of misdirection (acknowledged on a meta-level as deliberately planted doubtful clues for one of the in-story plots, while the actual writing also deliberately planted its own doubtful clues while telling us all about the in-story plot ones).
Surprisingly, I did manage to figure out the identities of two of the mysterious personages involved, and even to a certain extent their actual involvement before Poirot went and explained it all to Hastings. Given that I'm usually really bad at these things and the general convolution noted above, I'm inclined to think that this particular case was overcomplicated to begin with, with all the shenanigans with the multiple murder weapons and abruptly expanding circle of mysteriously-backgrounded suspects etc.
But then, it's an early work and was still fairly entertaining. And while there was quite a lot of contrivance and convenient misunderstandings, IMHO, the ultimate whodunnit and the complicating factors did make sense in the end.
Mind you, I'm starting to wonder if there was some kind of 20s/30s mystery writer trend for having the
with one of the murder suspects and kind of aid and abet them along the way before
It seems to me that I've seen it at least once in one of
Georgette Heyer's mysteries when I read the
entire lot of them after a Sourcebooks sale, and I've heard it happens in
Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey series as well. And I've seen it in at least one other Christie I've read, also.
And I sometimes wonder how people who don't actually read French view Poirot's frequent untranslated* francophone interjections. As some kind of colourful foreign decoration which doesn't need to be understood? Random noises that Belgian detectives make when excited? A frustrating exercise in WTF is he just saying?
Anyway, after finishing the novel, dug out my GN adaptation of TMOTL by
François Rivière &
Marc Piskic to compare. Overall reasonably decent. Artwork reflected the period with a stylized look like an Art Nouveau-influenced Art Deco style. All the major clues and developments/reveals were in place, but with just 48 pages in the album to slot them in, there are some really infodump-y lengthy word balloons and the dénouement is rather rushed.
It was nice to see everything illustrated though.
Mild recommend overall for TMOTL in either form. It's decent, but doesn't strike me as one of the better Poirots, or even one of the better retro-period sleuth mysteries in general. It was mostly entertaining, but I just got this feeling of too much twisting and turning just for the sake of twisting and turning and the sudden revelation of multiple things to clear up the confusion as to who actually dunnit by actually causing said confusion in the first place by requiring multiples of such in order to populate the red herring suspect pool who all had very dramatic-seeming reasons for seeming to not want themselves removed from it.
* This happens using German in the deuxième book du bus ride I started on the way back, which is more of
Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series from the second omnibus I bought, this time 3rd in the series,
The Redbreast, which is apparently the start of his Oslo-based adventures.
This one involves thwarting a potentially revenge/hate crime plot with its roots back in some WWII shenanigans involving Norwegian volunteers for the German Army, which is interesting to read about in the flashbacks.
And there from the flashbacks we get frequent German phrases, which are often immediately followed up by an English gloss (not sure whether this exists in the original or is a translator addition) which when used this often, gives something of a redundant feeling to the use of the language.
Otherwise, so far it's shaping up to be fairly intriguing and I think I've figured out some of the hidden identity/motive stuff. And given that it's dealing with a more conventional sort of premeditated amateur criminal motive rather than a gender-fixated obsessive psycopathic long-term serial killer, it's a much less violent/disturbing read than
The Snowman, in case anyone was wondering if the entire series was like that.