[ATDrake]

Finished another Agatha Christie, this time one of her suspense thrillers, Endless Night, which the "Clues to Christie" promo freebie listed among the author's own Top 10 picks of her favourites among her works.

The setup is that Mike Rogers, a working-class Englishman, one day meets Ellie Goodman, a wealthy American, on the site of an English country estate which is popularly thought by the locals to be cursed (and they are both warned off it by a local fortuneteller who reads their hands and prophesies doom if they stay).

Despite this, Mike and Ellie continue to see each other and are determined to make the place where they met into their future dream home, rumoured curse notwithstanding.

And of course, it all goes wrong.

This was very low-key in terms of the actual suspense, with occasional hints of the terrible things to come alluded to in the retrospective narrative, in between Mike and Ellie trying to settle down to a happy new life despite their class differences and interference from her extended family, many of whom are dependent in some way on Ellie's money, and potentially hostile locals who resent their moving on to the "cursed" land, and you keep waiting for disaster to happen and are never quite sure just when it will strike* or how, so it becomes a bit of a surprise when it eventually does.

It's actually a rather subtle work, with the clues as to what really happened laid out carefully in such a way that it's possible to see them in retrospect, but perhaps startling once you're told what's been going on, since this isn't one of her dedicated mysteries where you would normally expect to uncover a clear-cut culprit among a mass of suspects if you pay close enough attention.

I freely admit to being surprised by the reveal (and the aftermath of it, which seemed to suddenly dip into the melodramatic after the rest of the book had been fairly grounded until then), but it all added up and made a logical and terrible sense in terms of the foibles of human behaviour.

Also read the GN adaptation, done by François Rivière, with art by Frank Leclercq, which, while the art style was fairly standard "realistic" French BD stuff, was well-paced and had a deft balance of illustrative panels and word balloons/captions which followed the story quite well, right up until the last two pages where they suddenly crammed in and condensed the last few chapters. Oh well, 48-page album limit.

Recommended. It's a bit old-fashioned and takes more time to unfold than by modern standards of suspense thriller (despite being a relatively short book at ~180 pages on my Sony), but still a rather good story which will make you anticipate the outcome, and then (probably) surprise you with the ending.

* In line with the best Hitchcockian tradition of mystery being not knowing if there's a bomb under the table or not, and suspense knowing that there is, but not knowing when it's going to go off.