Reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper

A TALENT TO DECEIVE: AN APPRECIATION OF AGATHA CHRISTIE by Robert Barnard:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/28/2008]

A TALENT TO DECEIVE: AN APPRECIATION OF AGATHA CHRISTIE by Robert Barnard (ISBN-13 978-0-892-96911-1, ISBN-10 0-892-96911-3) is an analysis of Christie's work. Unlike many books about Christie, this is no mere recounting of plots, but a look at the techniques she used, how her style and characters changed over the years, and so on. In short, it is a book worth reading.

And I want to note one chapter in particular, because some of what it says relates to my comments on various Christie stories over the years. In the chapter on Christie's thrillers (as opposed to her mysteries), Barnard talks about Christie's racial slurs against various groups, particularly the Jews. "These references were never removed in later editions, any more than the even more offensive allusions in Dorothy Sayers have disappeared from Gollancz editions to this day [1980]. Christi's American publishers, however, have silently edited them out, which may conceivably be good for race relations but is bad for the social historian." This is, of course, precisely what I have been saying.

But Barnard also notes that "things did change over the years. In the novels of the 'twenties one can be fairly sure that any Jewish character will be ridiculed, abused or rendered sinister. Even as late as the early 'thirties Christie can perpetrate a remark such as: 'He's a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one.' However, as she records in her AUTOBIOGRAPHY, about that date she had a meeting in the Near East with a German Director of Antiquities whom she describes as ideally kind, gentle and considerate--until the mention of Jews, at which 'his face changed and he said: "They should be exterminated. Nothing else will really do but that."' The remark came apparently as a complete shock: 'It was the first time I had come across any hint of what was to come later from Germany.' A more politically sensitive person might have sensed the rise of organized anti- Semitism earlier; might even has expressed shame at her own unthinking acceptance of repulsive attitudes. But at any rate from that date offensive references to Jews cease in her novels."

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Agatha Christie's mysteries:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/14/2006]

I have been re-reading a lot of Agatha Christie novels lately, in conjunction with listening to the BBC adaptations of them. I will not comment individually on each one, but I will note a few motifs that seem to recur. (I hope these will not be considered spoilers, since I will not mention specific books for them, or even any titles at all, but if you want to avoid all possibility of spoilers, you may want to skip this.)

I have listened to nineteen adaptations of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple stories. In these, one very common "trick" seems to be the serendipitous remark or event (eight books out of nineteen). By "serendipitous remark" I mean something like the following: The murder was done with an icicle, which then melted. Later, when Hercule Poirot is thinking about the case, someone else in the room wonders, "Now where did I put that doohickey? It couldn't have just vanished into thin air." And Poirot realizes that the murder weapon could have vanished into thin air, etc. (I made this example up; it is not one of the ones Christie uses--at least in any of the stories I read!)

What is strange about this is that sometimes this remark Or happenstance) is omitted from the adaptation. The result is that sometimes the key clue to the solution just is not there. The writer is skillful enough to make the other clues carry the load, at least superficially, but at times one does wonder just what made the detective realize that a key witness had lied (or some such).

Another oft-repeated idea is the mis-identified body (eight out of nineteen, including one book with two mis-identified bodies!). A corpse is found and identified--somehow--as Fred Smith. Then later, we find the solution hinges on the fact that it is not Fred Smith at all, but John Wilson. The reasons for the mistaken identification vary, but none of them would work very well today with DNA testing. Then again, a lot of older mysteries would be solved very rapidly when the CSI team discovered that the red stain on the shirt was red ink, not blood, or that the bullet was dropped from the clock tower, not fired. (I made these up too.)

Another slightly less common but nevertheless re-used idea is the false target (six out of nineteen). This comes in two forms: the victim whose death is purely accidental to the real murder, either as window-dressing or mis-direction, or the murderer making it appear that he is the real target of the attacks.

What this means is that while each individual book seems to be a well-constructed mystery, when one reads a lot of them in a row, it becomes easier and easier to solve the mysteries. All one has to do is figure out who the corpse really is, assume some of the deaths are window-dressing, and wait for someone to say something just a bit too out of the ordinary.

(Then again, I have also said that theme anthologies and single- author collections are also a mixed blessing. Trying to read seventeen dragon stories in a row makes the later ones seem repetitive, even if they are not. So reading nineteen Agatha Christie mysteries in a row is really not recommended either. Having said that, with PBS now running four new "Miss Marple" stories, I will end up watching them and then reading those books soon as well.)

AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL by Agatha Christie:

NEMESIS by Agatha Christie:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 08/10/2007]

I recently watched the BBC "Mystery!" adaptations of Agatha Christie's NEMESIS and AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL, both of which bore astonishing little resemblance to the novel. Oh, Miss Marple was actually in the two novels. (Don't laugh--the "Mystery!" adaptation of BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS added Miss Marple to a story that did not originally have her in it.) But in NEMESIS, hardly anyone else in the production is from the novel, the situation is greatly changed, ... even the size of the legacy has shrunk considerably. In fact, the only things retained are the motive (although somewhat modified) and the name of the killer. In AT BERTRAM'S HOTEL, whole subplots have been removed and new ones added, innocent characters changed to criminals, and so on. When "Mystery!" started adapting classic works, they seemed to feel some responsibility to stick to the original work, but that seems to be a thing of the past.

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To order Nemesis from amazon.com, click here.

BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS by Agatha Christie:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/22/2006]

The BBC is producing a series of "Mystery" shows featuring Agatha Christie's Miss Marple. The first season included "The Body in the Library", "Murder at the Vicarage", "A Murder Is Announced", and "What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw", and were reasonably faithful. In the second series, though, they depart wildly from the original novel for "By the Pricking of My Thumbs" (ISBN 0-451-20052-7). First of all, the original is a Tommy and Tuppence Beresford novel without Miss Marple in it at all. In the teleplay, Miss Marple is added but does not do very much and was apparently put in just so they could bill it as a "Miss Marple" story. In addition, the teleplay removes large portions of the plot and motivation, and then replaces it by expanding a very peripheral part of the story. One normally expects the BBC to do a faithful adaptation of whatever the source work is, but in this one they did not. (It is true that or someone unfamiliar with the original work, the teleplay will seem fine, but that is a separate issue.)

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HERCULE POIROT'S EARLY CASES by Agatha Christie:

[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/05/2008]

I finally got around to requesting from the library system HERCULE POIROT'S EARLY CASES by Agatha Christie (ISBN-10 0-396-07021-3). I'm pretty sure I had read these stories before, but I had forgotten that Christie's novel THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE TRAIN was basically just a longer version of "The Plymouth Express". One problem with short stories as Poirot mysteries is that there is much less opportunity to introduce suspects, clues, and so on. (I am reminded of the--possibly apocryphal--story of the radio "mystery" show on such a tight budget that they had money for only three actors: the victim, the detective, and the killer. There was not much mystery there!)

To order Hercule Poirot's Early Cases/I> from amazon.com, click here.

MURDER IS EASY by Agatha Christie (read by Hugh Fraser):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/18/2008]
I listened to MURDER IS EASY (a.k.a. EASY TO KILL) by Agatha Christie read by Hugh Fraser (ISBN-13 978-1-572-70490-9, ISBN-10 1-572-70490-X) on a recent trip. Or rather I listened to most of it, and then finished it in book form after I arrived. However, this was a bit confusing, as the audio version refers to the old woman as Lavinia Pinkerton (even with a reference to the name- sharing with the detective agency), while in the book she is Lavinia Fullerton. I cannot seem to find any indication of when the change was made, or why. As for the story, there may be one level too many of mis-direction for the story to be considered elegant--or maybe not.
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HICKORY, DICKORY, DEATH by Agatha Christie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 02/15/2008]
HICKORY, DICKORY, DEATH (a.k.a. HICKORY, DICKORY, DOCK) by Agatha Christie (ISBN-13 978-0-425-17546-0, ISBN-10 0-425-17546-4) is one of the more egregiously racist Agatha Christie books. Having the action take place in a hostel for foreign students makes it easy, of course. Christie seems to dislike Greeks in particular, this being just one of several novels of hers with unsavory or at least some questionable Greek characters (e.g., THE MYSTERY OF THE BLUE TRAIN; POIROT LOSES A CLIENT; ONE, TWO, BUCKLE MY SHOE).
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MISS MARPLE: THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES by Agatha Christie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/27/2006]
I just read MISS MARPLE: THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES by Agatha Christie (ISBN 0-425-09486-3). I had probably read most, if not all, of these before, but it had been a long time ago. What struck me most was how different the Miss Marple of the stories was from how she has been portrayed on screen. Margaret Rutherford was completely different--too large, too athletic, and so on. But even the portrayal in the 1980s BBC series by Joan Hickson is way off. In "The Blue Germanium", Christie describes Miss Marple thusly: "Mrs. Bantry ... fixed her gaze on the very upright old lady sitting on her husband's right. Miss Marple wore black lace mittens; an old lace fichu was draped round her shoulders and another piece of lace surmounted her white hair." Hickson dresses in a much more modern fashion, and does not ramble on about her knitting as much as she does in these stories. Admittedly, the latter characteristic does not appear in the novels, where Miss Marple takes a much more active role. The short stories, however, are entirely "thought exercises"--a group of people sitting around trying to solve a mystery they have been told. And even Christie seems to acknowledge that the image of Miss Marple has to be modified to allow her to be an effective main character in a novel. The Miss Marple of "The Blue Germanium" could never do what is done by the Miss Marple of (say) A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED.
To order Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories from amazon.com, click here.

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS by Agatha Christie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/03/2006]
I read MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (a.k.a. MURDER IN THE CALAIS COACH) (ISBN 0-425-17375-5) because I had just heard the BBC radio version and seen the 1974 movie. There seemed to be some gaps in explanation in these dramatic versions, and I was curious if these were in the book itself. And, yes, they were. It remains a complete mystery how Poirot comes to some of his conclusions. (At one point, in fact, he just says "I sense a good cook instinctively" as if that made any sense.) Christie's stories seem to rely on something not just extremely unlikely, but almost unfair. (And she has *at least* three stories which turn on the intentional misidentification of a corpse! That is just pushing it.)
To order Murder on the Orient Express from amazon.com, click here.

PASSENGER TO FRANKFURT by Agatha Christie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/20/2006]
PASSENGER TO FRANKFURT by Agatha Christie (ISBN 0-312-98170-8) is subtitled "An Extravaganza by Agatha Christie". This is Christie foray out of the mystery genre into the international thriller genre, and fails (in my opinion) because she relies on too many of the "tricks" that work in her mysteries. I talked in the 07/14/06 issue of the MT VOID about some of these: the mis-identified corpse, the deceptive murder, and so on. One I did not mention at the time was the coincidence, both meaningless and meaningful. A meaningless coincidence would be that the mysterious new lodger is actually the long-lost son of the local squire, but his return turns out to have nothing to do with the murder of the squire. A meaningful coincidence would be that the aunt in England of the detective happens to know many of the people involved in a murder that took place in France. PASSENGER TO FRANKFURT seem to rely too much on the latter. In addition, I think Christie works well on a small palette: a murder in a resort, a theft in a manor, etc. When she tries to write global conspiracies, she ends up out of her depth.
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THE SITTAFORD MYSTERY by Agatha Christie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/13/2006]
I wrote in the 09/22/06 issue of the MT VOID about how Miss Marple had been shoe-horned into the "Masterpiece Theater" production of Agatha Christie's BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS. For that, though, they at least kept the basic story. For Christie's THE SITTAFORD MYSTERY (American title, MURDER AT HAZELMOOR) (ISBN 0-312-97981-9), they not only added Miss Marple, but also changed three of the "Five W's" (who, what, when, where, and why). (I will not say which ones, so as not to give too many spoilers.)
To order The Sittaford Mystery from amazon.com, click here< /A>.

TEN LITTLE INDIANS by Agatha Christie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/16/2004]
And while we're talking about bowdlerizing, Agatha Christie's TEN LITTLE INDIANS has certainly been cleaned up. For starters, when it was first published in 1939 it was TEN LITTLE NIGGERS. The island in the novel was "Nigger Island", the figurines were "niggers", and the poem was "Ten Little Niggers". I'm not sure when the book was re-titled, and whether or not it was re-titled on both sides of the Atlantic; my British copy from 1969 still has the original title and text. But a recent United States edition titled TEN LITTLE INDIANS has the events taking place on "Indian Island", with Indian figurines, and the poem "Ten Little Indians". (This is *not* "One little, two little, three little Indians, ..." but rather "Ten little Indian boys went out to dine....") However, the expression "a nigger in the woodpile" was retained, probably because there was no easy way to change it.
There was another change made as well, though. The original text had several derogatory references to Jews in the first chapter, and these were taken out or modified to refer only to the specific character. So "That little Jew had been damned mysterious" became "Morris had been damned mysterious." And "that was the damnable part about the Jews, you couldn't deceive them about money" became "that was the damnable part about Morris, you couldn't deceive him about money".
I suppose this is all rather mild--after all, the Nancy Drew novels are apparently re-written entirely from scratch and the only thing retained between editions is sometimes the title. Still, it does tend to deceive readers as to attitudes in the early part of the 20th century. I commented a while ago on the anti-Jewish attitude in George Orwell's DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON, and one finds similar slurs in G. K. Chesterton's FOUR FAULTLESS FELONS and some of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Those have not been sanitized for modern audiences. Is it because Christie herself was still alive and wanted the changes made, while the other authors were no longer around to approve changes? Perhaps. But it is telling that the anti-Jewish remarks in TEN LITTLE INDIANS were apparently removed only when the derogatory references to blacks were removed. Clearly the latter was a publishing necessity, at least in terms of the title, and so it was easier to make the former changes at the same time as well.
[And more Christie quotes refletcing the anti-Semitism of the times (in this case 1933, when MURDER IN THREE ACTS was written:
A handsome young fellow, twenty-five at a guess. Something perhaps a bit sleek about his good looks. Something else--something---- Was it foreign? Something un-English about him.
...
Egg Lytton Gore's voice rang out, "Oliver, you slippery Shylock----"
"Of course" thought Mr. Satterthwaite, "that's it--not foreign--Jew." [pages 14-15]

and
"But if you ask me, the firm's not far off Queer Street. There was a Jewish gentleman came to see Madam, ..." [pages 116-117]

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THEY DO IT WITH MIRRORS by Agatha Christie:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 04/06/2007]
I have written before about how many Agatha Christie mysteries revolve around the mis-identification of a corpse (eight out of the nineteen novels I looked at). It is also true that Christie has a lot of live characters who are masquerading as someone else: siblings, offspring, spouses, .... Sometimes someone else will be in on the masquerade (similar to Doyle's HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES deception), but often everyone else is taken in.
It seems clear from this that Christie had issues with identity, and I recently noticed another manifestation of this in THEY DO IT WITH MIRRORS (American title MURDER WITH MIRRORS) (ISBN-10 0-396-08867-8, ISBN-13 978-0-396-08867-7). In this novel, Jane Marple is called in to try to protect her old school friend, Carrie Louise Serracold. But everyone calls this friend by a different name. To Jane, she is Carrie Louise. To her companion Jolly, she is Cara. To her granddaughter, she is Grandam. To her stepson Stephen, she is Madonna. To her husband, she is Caroline. And to her husband's secretary Edgar, she is Mrs. Serracold. Here everyone knows that all these names refer to one character, but in other novels, one often discovers that a nickname conceals a true identity. What this says about Christie I leave to the psychologists, but it does seem as though she re- uses the issue of identity more than just as a trick; one has to start believing that Christie herself had some personal issues with it.
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BLACK COFFEE by Agatha Christie and Charles Osborne:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 03/23/2007]
BLACK COFFEE by Agatha Christie and Charles Osborne (ISBN-10 0-312-97007-2, ISBN-13 978-0-312-97007-9) is, like THE UNEXPECTED GUEST, a novel expanded by Osborne from a play by Christie. As with that book, this is shorter, more straightforward, and more predictable than novels actually written by Christie. If you're looking for a quick read, though, it will do the trick. (If you wonder why I am reading these, I am trying to catch up on all the Christies I have not read. I think I have read all her works written under her own name except for the collections PROBLEM AT POLLENSA BAY and WHILE THE LIGHT LASTS, and two stories from THE LISTERDALE MYSTERY.)
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THE UNEXPECTED GUEST by Agatha Christie and Charles Osborne:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/27/2006]
THE UNEXPECTED GUEST by Agatha Christie and Charles Osborne (ISBN 0-312-97512-0) is not actually by Christie--it is by Osborne, based on a play by Christie. As such, it is much "thinner" than most Christie novels, and the solution is actually fairly predictable. Because it started out as a play, it has a much smaller cast of characters than the usual Christie novel, which in turn makes solving the mystery a bit easier. And because Osborne does not flesh it out very much, it is only about 50,000 words long--very short for a novel these days.
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