Reading Update

I swear I've been reading things other than Christie mysteries this year, those other things are just long long reads...

Marple: Twelve New Mysteries

So, this one isn't actually by Agatha Christie but is a Miss Marple short story collection by twelve authors, each putting their own spin on the classic detective. I'm less familiar with Marple. Of the novels I've only read A Murder Is Announced and a few other short stories I've come across in my Poirot endeavour, but I found this a fun collection nonetheless. There are the pastiches, with another murder in the vicarage or quiet town genealogy sparking up into violence, and then the ones that put a new spin - Miss Marple in Manhattan, Miss Marple on a steamer to Hong Kong, Miss Marple dining at Cambridge, etc. Was a fun read, my favorites were The Jade Empress by Jean Kwok, The Disappearance by Leigh Bardugo, and The Murdering Sort by Karen M. McManus.

Dead Man's Folly by Agatha Christie

The crime novelist Ariadne Oliver gets a bad feeling about the murder puzzle hunt she's organizing, so of course she invites her friend Hercule Poirot to the party. Her instincts are proven right. While I'm glad to return to the more classic setting for a Christie mystery after the badly-handled Hickory Dickory Dock and there's a satisfying reveal to a certain character's speech pattern, I didn't care too much for this one's resolution. It required a perpetrator to engage in way more shenanigans than necessary, without the appropriate characterization to support it.

I adore Oliver whenever she shows up though, and she was as delightful as ever here.

Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie

Murder at an all-girls boarding school. Poirot makes a late entrance, but the means by which he does so is so pleasing to me that I cannot criticize it. In the meantime, I enjoyed the POVs of the school's competent headmistress Bulstrode, clever student Julia Upjohn and that of Julia's overly credulous and tennis-obsessed friend. Also good: all the adults being bewildered when they ask Julia where her mother can be contacted and Julia going, I don't know, she's on a bus in Anatolia somewhere. The resolution to the mystery makes sense, with some Christie-typical misdirection, and I didn't mind there being less Poirot.

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding by Agatha Christie

A short story collection, mostly Poirots, one Miss Marple. I thought Under Dog was fun, even with the silly hypnosis scene, and Greenshaw's Folly was satisfying in its simplicity.