So, I finished some more
Agatha Christie, including
The Big Four, but I'll do a separate post on that later since I needed some time to let it percolate through the little gray cells exactly in what ways I thought it not only failed as a mystery/thriller in general, but as a Poirot in particular. I think I have it now, but I might as well get the easier write-ups on the next few Poirots I read (in part to help determine if it was just my prior expectations, or was TBF really and truly incongruent with the overall feel of the series as well) out of the way first.
Anyway, read
The Mystery of the Blue Train,
Peril at End House, and
Lord Edgware Dies in short succession after
The Big Four.
Of the lot, the best was
Peril at End House, which had a very clever setup in which Poirot (with the assistance of Hastings) is called upon to try and protect a young lady who's been having mysterious attempts on her life from the anticipated next.
This had a rather good walkthrough of Poirot's techniques, as he draws up the lists of the suspects and their various possible means, motive, and/or opportunity and tries to reason out who's got the conjunction of such which would make them the best candidate, only to have to keep revising it as he re-examines the evidence.
While the most probable motive is pretty much spelt out in the story, the actual whodunnit was both surprising and ingenious (though I did manage to guess a piece of the puzzle, involving one of Christie's frequent mistaken identity tricks).
I also own this in the GN adaptation done by
Didier Quella-Guyot with art by
Thierry Jollet, and overall it's a decent but bland interpretation, which omits a few of the most helpful hints (I suppose technically not crucial to solving the case for the Gentle Reader if they're very attentive/suspicious of the other stuff, but they do make the solution seem more obvious in retrospect than the few remaining ones). The art is not outstanding, but nice enough, and the pacing is overall good, but it does cram the revelations of the last portions of the book into the few final pages (ah, 48-page album limit), and makes a minor change to the fate of the culprit.
Recommended in the novel version. A very unexpected use of Poirot, with an excellent setup and surprising outcome.
The Mystery of the Blue Train is another one that I also own in GN, but is not one of the better novels, IMHO. There was just so much obvious misdirection is obvious pointing at certain suspects that it became obvious that the primary culprit for the main crime was someone else entirely (whose identity I did guess, if not the particular means they ended up using or their motive for actually commiting murder instead of achieving their goal by other means).
Also, shoehorned-in unconvincing True Love™ at first glance which ends up being A ClueŽ. I hope that character makes him sign a pre-nup. Not to mention jolly old English stereotypes about criminally-minded histrionic mercenary French demimondaines and faux aristos who latch themselves onto their Anglo betters.
The GN adaptation of this, written & illustrated by
Marc Piskic, is much better than the actual story merits. The art on this is really quite atmospheric and imaginative, with dynamic panel layouts and cinematic "camera" changes, and really nifty visual touches like a conversation between two characters being linked across panels by the telephone wire from one going to the receiver of the other, and a number of pages with the action set on the train having across the top a station timeline showing all the stops on the route. It does make the relatively young character of Katherine Gray look rather middle-aged, though, perhaps as some sort of subconscious callback to Miss Marple, who's also a St. Mary Mead resident?
Frankly, this seems like a skippable novel in the series. It's not actually terribad, but there's insufficiently well-done in either the case, or the characters, or even the storytelling, to recommend seeking it out unless you're a completionist. The GN is pretty nice, though, and worth a look if you can get it from the library.
Lord Edgware Dies actually does have a really clever setup and unfolding of the case, except that it tries to mislead you as to that in such a way that for much of the book, it looks considerably more boring and paint-by-numbers than it actually turns out to be.
That ended up making it a bit of a slog, as not only did everything seem to be so obvious, and yet so obviously wrong (and Poirot even goes so far as to tell Hastings* so, multiple times) and everyone evidently chasing down the wrong trail again and again, that the overall effect is clumsy, rather than as deft as it should have been, until just about near the end, when it starts to pick up a little before all is finally revealed.
Mild recommend for the curious. This does have a very clever case in it, which is worth seeing for the sheer twisty audacity of it, but it's let down by the execution of the storytelling which is just slightly off and doesn't quite seem to get on track soon enough.
* Incidentally, this seems to be the second Hastings novel in short succession in which he's been admiring attractive women with nary a mention or even reminisce about the lovely young wife he'd been so desperately in love with and willing to do anything to save from uncertain death just a short few books ago, as if he'd never been married at all, much less left their apparent home in the Argentine to assist with murder investigations in England once more.
I kind of wonder now if something unfortunate happened to "Cinderella" in some sort of intervening short story I haven't read the way one of Watson's wives died between Holmes' cases, or if, say, she'd just gone and filed for divorce at some point, naming Poirot as a co-respondent in the suit citing her husband's desertion, and is now living happily ever after in South America, with or without a new Prince Charming, and Hastings is too embarrassed to acknowledge this, so stiff-upper-lips it in his narrative by pretending none of it ever happened.