January Talking Meme Day 7: Agatha Christie

Talking Meme Index

For today, quailfence asked what my three favorite Agatha Christie books were. A very fair question, given that I read 28 of her works last year. In descending order, and with no mystery spoilers, my favourites were:

1. Five Little Pigs

A Poirot novel I'd never heard mention of, which I find really surprising. It's a top-tier Poirot to me. I suspect that this is partly because the book doesn't easily lend itself to being filmed as a bunch of actors in snazzy outfits on a luxurious vacation.

It's the rare Poirot cold case. A young woman has asked Poirot to prove the innocence of her mother, who was convicted of murder sixteen years ago. The woman was only five years old at the time, she has no clues to offer Poirot, and so all he has to go on are the accounts of the five other people who were present on the day of the murder. The book's structure is simple. Each of those people get a chapter where Poirot interviews them. In those interviews Poirot asks them to write up an account of that long-gone day, and we later get to read those accounts.

Christie has great character work here, where her stock characters just seem to pop out that much more. The mystery's resolution fits both logically and emotionally, and while Poirot novels rarely linger emotionally with me, this one did, with its great sense of loss and care.

2. Appointment With Death: A Stage Play

Speaking of luxurious overseas vacations...

I accidentally picked this up when I intended to get the Poirot novel, and I'm very glad I made the mistake because I liked it much more than the novel. The play, like many of Christie's adapted-to-stage Poirots, is Poirot-less.

In both stories the mystery centers around the matriarch of an American family vacationing in Jerusalem and Petra. The woman is mother to four adults, the father long dead, and it becomes quickly apparent that she's been emotionally abusive to them for so long that they all seem not-quite grown, gravitating towards her and having very few connections to people outside the family. A feeling of claustrophobia surrounds this family, that's for sure.

Anyway, murder happens, with lots of lies following, and the solution is both cruel and clever. Only minus I'd give this book is the Christie-typical badness in the portrayal minor comic-relief Arab servant.

3 Lord Edgeware Dies

An actress tries to get Poirot to help her get a divorce from her husband, but instead he's murdered, and she's the only suspect. But that doesn't make any sense, because at the time she was across town at a dinner party where twelve other people, none of them with any reason to lie, swear she didn't leave at any point.

This is a fun "impossible situation setup" murder. Also the only one of these three that features Captain Hastings, Poirot's occasional partner in mystery-solving who's often blinded by women, so he has his own entertainment value here. Oh, and this one has more than one murder, which ratchets up the tension. One of the murders made me sadder than I anticipated which is perhaps why I've bumped this up over Peril at End House, which is also quite good.

Downsides: filler and uh, a hat-trick of random prejudice across a few pages in the opening chapter, though IIRC it's a character's words and not the narrator.