So, in between attending to other things (thanks, B&N, for removing the easy website download button for everyone's books, and for making your un-updated software also fail bafflingly on at least two versions of Mac OS X
), finished another batch of
Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novels.
Best of the lot was
Murder on the Orient Express. This was very carefully laid out, explored Poirot's methodology well, and after carefully baffling you as to whocouldhavedunnit in what amounts to a locked room had a rather ingenious solution which made total sense and reminds me of my favourite out of the proposed explanations to one of my favourite and highly recommended murder mystery comedy films, which I'll spoiler tag in case you've seen it and haven't read MOTOE:
I have the GN adaptation of this by
François Rivière with art by
Solidor, and while at first the style of the art seemed rather ordinary undistinguished
ligne claire, like the MOTOE novel it turned out to be deeper than it looked, with some very nifty panel layouts from which you could envision a film based upon it, and with deft pacing and dropping of the essential clues and explanation, allowing for the 48-page album limit. And it's got a cute cartoony portrait of Christie in the back as well.
Very highly recommended. This is one of her best (and also one of Christie's top 10 personal favourites, according to the "Clues to Christie" freebie).
Murder in Mesopotamia, which I just finished today, contains the case alluded to from which Poirot was traveling away in MOTOE (and like MOTOE, exists in a GN adaptation which I don't own and the library was out of).
This was interesting for some of the archaeology bits and the POV of someone observing Poirot's methods who isn't nearly as impressed with him as Hastings is.
Once again, the solution is clever and makes sense, but the entire thing struck me as rather baroque in design and execution, even if I did manage to guess whodunnit (after all the other likely suspects seemed to have been eliminated), even if not why that particular person would have bothered given the information we thought we'd had about them at the time, as well as one of the hidden identity tricks that Christie seems to love.
Medium-mild recommend for series followers. This seemed interestingly different in tone and setting from the usual Poirots, and the case is pretty clever. But there's something just slightly off about it which keeps it from being one of the top-tier Christies, and not to mention it is rather filled with annoying old-timey stereotypes about foreigners and women, freely expressed in that annoying old-timey way.
Three-Act Tragedy is another one of the clever baroque ones which makes total sense where I guessed whodunnit, and even part of their reasoning for why, but missed out exactly the degree of enormity of the motivation and execution of the crime, which as a result of that, had a pretty complicated setup and a certain amount of contrivance which was kind of explained in story as the dastardly plot required a certain amount of contrivance.
This is also another one where Poirot kind of drifts in and out mid-case, as the principals only really call him in once it becomes obvious that murder is being committed (after having joked that having an investigator around at the first party would probably end up with giving him something to investigate, you should know better than to tempt fate like that; but then, even when Poirot quietly retires to the countryside to garden, people start killing his neighbours, so
c'est la vie).
Thus, it's rather interesting to see the lead "guest" characters try and take over the amateur sleuth roles for themselves, with varying degrees of success.
Medium recommend if you're following the series. This does have a rather clever case and some interesting points, but again falls short of being one of her top-tier works and isn't quite worthy of a standalone commendation.
The ABC Murders is another Hastings novel, and we finally do get a mention of his previously-apparently-forgotten formerly-beloved wife, who's briefly noted as taking care of the South American ranch while Hastings again spends several months gallivanting around solving crimes with Poirot (well, ostensibly he's seeing to some investments in England which require the personal touch; just like murder does).
But the weird thing is that Hastings never seems to think of her, speak of her, or even write to her/receive letters/telegrams/phone calls from her after that one brief line, not even when you'd think that "Cinderella" would naturally come up in conversation when Poirot teases Hastings about having a thing for pretty young auburn-haired girls or how devoted lovebirds meet during his crime cases, which I thought would be the point where either one of them would reminisce that that was indeed the case for the Hastingses.
Since they apparently seem to still be married and Wikipedia says that Hastings only shows up in another two or so novels from this point forth, I think I'm now going to pretend that they have this amicable separation in what amounts effectively to an open marriage, where "Cinderella" is able to take advantage of the more socially respectable status of an officially married woman with a retired officer husband to live her own life far from the class constraints of the British Isles, while setting Hastings free to discreetly admire bright young things while obtaining the adrenaline rush and feeling of useful life accomplishment by solving crime with his bestest buddy. For the next two or so novels he appears in, at least.
Anyway, this seems to be a more experimental novel on Christie's part, combining Hastings' narration with a dramatized re-enactment of the murders from one of the suspects' POV, which it turns out there's A Reason® for, and not the one you'd think from having jadedly read a lot of modern authors' gloaty-sounding serial killer internal monologues inserted into the otherwise sleuth-POV text (Y HELO THAR, Jo Nesbø!).
I rather liked the formation of the Legion of Super-Sleuths from the friends and family of the victims in this, which led to what amounted to a quickie class in how-to do the "order and the method", as well as "the psychology" of the criminal mind.
At first this seemed to be one of those somewhat draggy cases like
Lord Edgware Dies where everything is so obvious you can't help but wonder why it's being laid out like this and you think it must be obviously wrong and it seems tedious to go over the wrongness with such exactitude. And like LED, it does turn out to be wrong, but for a rather un-obvious reason which is rather clever (but again on the baroque side, as these things tend to be when the setup and execution are this complicated).
Medium-high recommend for Poirot readers. This is one of the best of the Hastings novels, IMHO, and the actual case is pretty clever and unexpected and makes total sense in the end, and the writing depicting the personality mix of whatever the Poirotian equivalent of the Baker Street Irregulars should be called is enjoyable.
Now currently on
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Valley of Fear, which it took me a while to dig up my old freebie B&N Classics Edition of, since some things about Christie's
The Big Four struck me as being probably callbacks/take thats to a few things that showed up in particular Sherlock Holmes stories, and I wanted to see if that was indeed the case before I finally commented on it.