Quote:
Originally Posted by Loosheesh
Thanks for this reminder! Like you, I read Medicus as a freebie, liked it and bought Terra Incognita right away on the cheap; I started it (IIRC I completed the first chapter) but got distracted by other shiny books, and I never got back to it  I really should, plus I can get the rest from the library, I think. |
It'd definitely be worth it.
Terra Incognita is even better than
Medicus, which had a few rough patches due to it being Downie's first novel. TI has much smoother writing, plotting, and a pretty decent and harder-to-guess whodunnit, IIRC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Loosheesh
Have you watched the TV adaptations of these two stories (where they egregiously inserted Miss Marple  )? I now regret watching them because I want to read the stories; I'm wondering how faithful the adaptation is. |
Sorry, no. I've only seen one or two of the Christie adaptations mainly because a few of my favourite middling-obscure British actors who don't get enough work had a few cameos in them.
(ETA: I just hit up the Wikipedia articles to compare, and they say that the Marple EN is very faithful, but TSOC changes a lot, including the whodunnit. I like the quoted Radio Times review's ensuing snark: "and the plot has more holes in it than the murder victim".)
But
Endless Night is definitely worth the time to read if you've already got a copy or can get one through the library, gratuitous Miss Marple shoe-horning* notwithstanding.
The Secret of Chimneys, IMHO, is rather more meh and I'd confine it to a library read unless you can pick it up dirt cheap. (I just noticed that the 99 cent Christie sale @ Kobo Canada is now off, and HarperCollins have repriced the novels at $11.99 and those individual short stories at $2.99† in all the stores.
)
As for what I'm reading now, apparently, more Poirot for the forseeable future. It turns out that almost all my remaining Christie adaptation GNs are for Poirot novels, and there's a cluster of them corresponding with the early books in the series, so I might as well read the next half-dozen in order.
Currently on
Agatha Christie's
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which does indeed exist as a GN adaptation, but is not one of the ones which I presently own.
* And now I'm kind of morbidly curious as to how they did slot her into the story. Probably not enough to go pick up the DVDs from the library, though.
† I can understand $12 CAD + tax for a classic novel with an excellent reputation or a set of over a dozen short stories (even if they seem to have jacked the price up considerably from the $6.99 many of them were pre-sale), but $3 per single story? WTF kind of crack are they smoking in the marketing department?!?!?