Review: The Murder on the Links - Agatha Christie

I mentioned a while back that Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books are, for me, a surefire cure for an impending reading funk. Well, so are Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, and feeling dissatisfaction with a couple of books I attempted to read, I turned instead to THE MURDER ON THE LINKS, originally published in 1923 as the second book in the Poirot series. It's been reprinted many times, and there are several different e-book and print editions available on Amazon since it's now in public domain.

In this one, Poirot and his friend Captain Hastings are summoned to France by an urgent message from a wealthy English businessman who has a villa near Calais. It seems that the man made his fortune in South America, and now some mysterious threat from his past has cropped up. He mentions Santiago, Chile, but doesn’t go into any details, just asks Poirot to come to France and help him, promising to pay any fee Poirot requests. Poirot and Hastings answer this plea for help, but they’re too late. When they arrive, they find that the man has been murdered, stabbed in the back and left next to an open grave on a golf course that’s under construction next door—hence the title.

Well, not surprisingly, not everything is as it seems. Even though his would-be client is dead, Poirot investigates and along the way clashes with an arrogant French detective. Several beautiful women have to be questioned, including the dead man’s wife, his possible mistress, the possible mistress’s daughter, and a lovely but mysterious theatrical performer Hastings encounters several times. A number of pieces of possible evidence have to be examined, among them a broken watch. We get a disappearing murder weapon that reappears lodged in the chest of a second victim. We get discussions of train schedules. (Cozy mysteries love them some train schedules.) We get our intrepid pair of detectives shuttling back and forth from England to France as the trail leads hither and yon. And then we get the solution to the mystery . . . no, wait, that’s not it, this is the solution . . . no, wait, that’s not right, either. This is the real solution . . . I think.

Some of this might get a little bit tiresome if not for the fact that Christie was such a good writer. The pace crackles right along even when people are just standing around talking. Poirot is a fascinating character, as always, and the dialogue is excellent. Hastings is dense but likable in his role as Watson. I sometimes think Poirot is a little too mean to him, but there’s not much of that in this book.

In the end, I really enjoyed THE MURDER ON THE LINKS. I don’t know how it’s regarded by Christie fans. I wouldn’t put it in the top rank of Poirot novels because the plot seems a little more far-fetched and melodramatic than usual, not surprising since it’s only the second book in the series and Christie was probably still figuring out what she was doing. But it’s still a solid yarn and very entertaining. I even figured out a pretty good chunk of the plot as I went along, although I didn’t have the murderer’s identity pinned down. I’ll probably read another one before too much longer.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Black Mask Detective Magazine, July 1951

This is the very last issue of BLACK MASK in its original run and features an eye-catching cover by Harry Barton. It's hard to go wrong with a sexy redhead, at least as far as pulp covers go. I've read enough noir novels to know there are a lot of ways you can go wrong with a sexy redhead in real life. There are only two original stories in this issue, a novelette by G.T. Fleming-Roberts and a short story by Robert C. Dennis. There are four reprints: a Harley Quin story by Agatha Christie (Christie's only appearance in BLACK MASK? I don't know, but it seems likely she wasn't a regular), a Flashgun Casey story by George Harmon Coxe, a Daffy Dill story by Richard Sale, and a non-series yarn by Francis K. Allan. There have been several attempts to bring back BLACK MASK since 1951, but I'm not sure I consider any of them the real deal, admirable though some of them were. If you want to check out this final issue, the whole thing is on-line and can be found here.

N OR M? - Agatha Christie

This is the third Agatha Christie novel I’ve read this year, which pretty much constitutes a binge for me. I’ve really been enjoying them, though, so I see no reason to stop. N OR M? (1941) is the second novel and third book overall in the Tommy and Tuppence series. There’s a collection of short stories, PARTNERS IN CRIME, which I haven’t read yet, between this novel and the first one, THE SECRET ADVERSARY (1927). I read THE SECRET ADVERSARY a little more than ten years ago and enjoyed it. Christie took a while to get back to Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, and so did I.

There’s a significant time jump between N OR M? and the previous novel. In THE SECRET ADVERSARY, Tommy and Tuppence weren’t married yet and were still young, adventurous, and romantic. In this novel, they’re still romantic and adventurous, but they’re middle-aged, the parents of twin grown-up children. Their son is a pilot and their daughter is a codebreaker. Tommy and Tuppence both wish there was something they could do to aid the war effort, too, as there’s a definite feeling that the Nazis will sweep through Europe and invade England next.

Enter an associate of the intelligence chief Tommy and Tuppence worked for in THE SECRET ADVERSARY. He has an undercover job for Tommy: ferreting out the identity of two German agents who are coordinating Fifth Column activities in England. Their code names are N and M, hence the title. The job involves Tommy being a guest at a boarding house on the English coast because the German spies are suspected of staying there, too. Tuppence isn’t asked to be part of the operation, but seriously, no one believes that’s going to stop her, do they? She goes undercover as well to help Tommy with his spy hunt.

From there things fly along at a fairly breakneck pace in Christie’s very smooth prose. A lot happens in the normally sedate English countryside, including a kidnapping and a shooting. Plenty of banter spices things up as Christie slips in clues here and there, but this is less of a formal mystery and more of a thriller. And a very entertaining one, at that, with some genuinely suspenseful scenes.

Now, did I figure out the mystery? Well, I knew who one of the German spies was almost right away, and for the same reasons that Tuppence lays out at the end of the book when everything is explained. There were several plot elements that had me thinking, “Well, that’s going to be important later on,” as soon as they were introduced, and I was right. I’d say that the identity of the other German spy can’t really be deduced from any information Christie gives the reader. You might guess who it is, but you couldn’t figure it out.

Or maybe that’s just me. I still had a lot of fun reading N OR M? even though it was predictable in some respects. Tommy and Tuppence are very likable sleuths. I need to read that short story collection, and I think there are two more novels in which they appear. I’ll get to them, hopefully sooner than ten years from now.

Below are some of the many, many reprints of this novel.

 

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? - Agatha Christie

I had such a good time reading an Agatha Christie novel a few weeks ago that I decided to give another one a try. I went with one of her stand-alones this time, WHY DIDN’T THEY ASK EVANS?, which was published originally in 1934 under the title THE BOOMERANG CLUE. I have both versions on my shelves, a Dell from 1966 of THE BOOMERANG CLUE and a trade paperback tie-in edition of WHY DIDN’T THEY ASK EVANS?, with the stars of the recent TV mini-series on the cover. I went with the newer one simply because the print is larger and easier to read, an increasingly important consideration at my age.

The book opens with a young man named Bobby Jones (not the famous American golfer, as Christie points out) playing a round on a course next to some seaside cliffs in Wales. Bobby is the son of the local vicar, a former naval officer who is at loose ends at the moment. When he hits a slice over a cliff, he looks for the ball and spots a body lying on the rocks below. Since he’s playing with the local doctor, Bobby scrambles down to check on the fallen man and finds that he’s still alive but badly injured. He regains consciousness long enough to say just one thing: “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” And then dies, seemingly the victim of an accident.

Ah, but we know better than that, don’t we? The man was murdered, and Bobby sets out to find the killer, with help from his childhood friend, the beautiful Lady Frances Derwent, who lives on a nearby estate. Frankie, as she’s known, tackles the case with as much enthusiasm as Bobby does, and their investigation sends them to London, among other places, and involves them with numerous potentially shady characters, including a drug addict, a sinister doctor, and the doctor’s beautiful young wife, who’s being held a virtual prisoner in her husband’s spooky sanatarium.

WHY DIDN’T THEY ASK EVANS? has a lot of thriller elements to go with its traditional mystery. The plot itself is a bit convoluted and bogs down slightly in the middle of the book, but it all fits together nicely enough in the end although there are a couple of things that stretch suspension of disbelief quite a bit. The main things that appeal about this novel are its extremely likable protagonists, the witty dialogue, and the headlong pace of much of it. Most of the time, Christie had me turning the pages eagerly to find out what was going to happen.

There is one twist at the very end of the book that I didn’t really care for, because it negated one of the things that I liked most about the novel. No spoilers, but you’ll probably know it when you come to it, if you haven’t read this one before. I wouldn’t put WHY DIDN’T THEY ASK EVANS? in the top rank of Christie’s work, but it is a good, solid, very enjoyable mystery yarn. Certainly worth reading, if you haven’t already. I might watch the TV adaptation, one of these days.

Peril at End House - Agatha Christie

I read a bunch of Agatha Christie novels when I was in junior high and high school, beginning with THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY, which I checked out of the school library when I was in the sixth grade. (Just for the record, that’s the same year I read GOLDFINGER by Ian Fleming and THE DEEP by Mickey Spillane. My reading tastes were nothing if not varied.) At any rate, my favorites of Christie’s work have always been the Hercule Poirot novels. There are a number of them I’ve never read, so I pick one up now and then and revisit an old friend.

Which brings us to PERIL AT END HOUSE, originally published in 1932. It’s the sixth novel in the series, and as it opens, Poirot is already talking about being retired. He and Captain Hastings, his friend/Watson/narrator, are vacationing at a resort hotel on the southern coast of England. Visible from the hotel’s terrace is a big, old house set on a point of land that juts out into the sea. That’s the End House of the title, of course. On a pleasant afternoon, Poirot and Hastings are sitting on the terrace when they see an attractive young woman cutting through the garden between the hotel and End House. Then somebody takes a shot at her, narrowly missing her. She doesn’t even realize how close she has come to death, but Poirot does, and when he questions her, he discovers that this is the fourth attempt on her life in as many days.

Well, Poirot can’t stand to see such villainy right under his mustaches, of course, so he sets out to discover who wants the young woman dead. That leads him and Hastings into a complex plot involving drugs, a missing will, fireworks, poisoned chocolates, a secret chamber, a large fortune, a séance, and, naturally, murder.

Christie is famous for her plotting, and justly so, but I’ll be honest, I figured out all but a few details in this one well before the end, including the murderer’s identity. That didn’t really detract from my enjoyment of the book, though. Christie writes really well, with good characterizations, some sharp social commentary (her books are usually considerably darker than what you think of when you think about cozy mysteries), and a really fast pace, especially when you consider the fact that the books consist mainly of people standing around talking to each other. (There’s a little action, and some books have more of it than others.) The banter between Poirot and Hastings always leaves me feeling a little sorry for Hastings, but at the same time you get a sense of the deep friendship between the two of them.

I had a really good time reading PERIL AT END HOUSE. It took me back to those long-ago days when I was devouring Christie novels. I may just read more of them. The past is looking more and more appealing to me.

Forgotten Books: The Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie

When I was in junior high and high school, I read a lot of Agatha Christie's novels, mostly the Poirots and the Miss Marples. In fact, the first Christie novel I ever read was a Miss Marple, THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY, which I checked out of our junior high library when I was in the sixth grade. (This was also the year I started reading Mickey Spillane, but his books weren't in the school library.)

For Agatha Christie Week on Forgotten Books, I wanted to sample a series of hers that I'd never tried, so I read THE SECRET ADVERSARY, the first novel to feature Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, although they're not yet married in this book and Tuppence is still Prudence Cowley.

They are friends, however, when this book opens. Tommy is a young veteran who was wounded in World War I. Tuppence was a volunteer in a military hospital during the war, and that's where she met Tommy. By 1920, when this book takes place, they're both at loose ends, so they decide to join forces and become adventurers. This is sort of a hare-brained idea, of course, but by coincidence (and the manipulations of the author), they quickly become involved in an international conspiracy aimed at toppling the British government. Christie sets this up neatly with a nice prologue set on the sinking Lusitania after it's been torpedoed by the Germans in 1915.

The plot gallops along with Tommy and Tuppence being plunged into the shadowy world of international espionage and battling a Moriarty-like criminal mastermind who hides his identity behind the alias Mr. Brown. This novel is more of a thriller than a mystery, although there are certainly some mystery elements, including a murder and the true identity of Mr. Brown. Mostly, though, we've got skulking, chasing, getting hit on the head and taken prisoner, escaping, double-crosses, stunning revelations, and a lot of clever banter between Tommy and Tuppence.

Tuppence has a few moments of ditziness reminiscent of, say, Pam North from the books by Richard and Frances Lockridge, but for the most part she proves to a smart, capable investigator, as does the more stolid Tommy. Christie's writing isn't as slick and smooth here as it would be in her later books, but THE SECRET ADVERSARY is still very entertaining and well worth reading. I'm glad Agatha Christie Week prompted me to give it a try.

Forgotten Books: A Corpse for Christmas - Carter Brown (Alan G. Yates)

Since Friday falls on Christmas Eve this week, I thought it would be a good idea to read a Christmas-themed mystery as my Forgotten Book. Or in this case, re-read one.


When I was growing up in the Sixties, Carter Brown books were everywhere. You couldn’t find a paperback rack without at least a couple of Carter Brown titles in it, and the used bookstores had shelves after shelves of them. And I was a fan. What teenage boy wouldn’t be? The books had fast-paced plots, racy dialogue, and McGinnis covers. I gobbled ’em up.


One of them I remember reading was A CORPSE FOR CHRISTMAS, but that’s all I recalled about it. So I scrounged up a copy (ordered it off ABE, to be precise) and read it again. The results were sort of mixed. This is one of the books featuring Lt. Al Wheeler, probably the best-known of Brown’s detective characters. I’ve always liked Al, and he’s his usual abrasive but charming self here. The action takes place during the last few days before Christmas, and at one point the murderer wears a Santa Claus suit, but overall there’s not much Christmas atmosphere in this one, despite the title. The fact that the fictional Pine City, where Al works as a detective for the sheriff’s department, is in Southern California probably has something to do with that. And Brown’s writing was never really very strong on any sort of atmosphere to start with, being concerned mostly with plot and dialogue.


Add to that an unimpressive cover and a fairly bland plot about the murder of a guy who owns a public relations company, and you have a book that’s something of a disappointment. However, it does pick up steam late, with more murders and a flurry of plot twists (the Carter Brown novels tend to be fairly complex and usually well-plotted), so I wound up enjoying it enough to consider the couple of hours it took to read it not wasted time. And it’s put me in the mood to read more Carter Brown books, although who knows when or if I’ll actually get around to it.


Now, as a bonus since the book I picked didn’t work out quite as well as I’d hoped it would, here’s a rerun of a post I wrote back in 2005, before the Forgotten Books series began and I suspect before many of you were reading this blog:


I'm a nostalgic kind of guy, and let's face it, I never really grew up to start with. I still read comics and pulps and old paperbacks. But some of my interests have faded away over the years. During my junior high and high school years, I read lots of British mysteries (along with all other sorts of mysteries). Many of them were by Agatha Christie. I haven't read anything by her in years, though.

Until recently, when on a whim and a desire to revisit that part of my earlier years, I picked up a copy of her novel MURDER FOR CHRISTMAS. This is a Hercule Poirot novel that I never read back in the Sixties, and he was always my favorite among her characters. I'm afraid I never cared much for Miss Marple. Anyway, I've now read about a third of MURDER FOR CHRISTMAS, and I'm enjoying it very much. True, at this late date the plot seems almost like a parody of itself: a dysfunctional British family, plus a couple of mysterious outsiders, gathers at the family's country estate for Christmas, and the obnoxious patriarch of the family winds up being murdered. Naturally, Hercule Poirot happens to be visiting one of the local police officials, so he's drawn into the investigation.


Sure, it's a hokey set-up, and characters tend to have conversations with each other about things they already know, simply as a means of filling in the readers on the backstory, but I'm willing to forgive that. The characters themselves are pretty interesting and Christie does a good job of sketching them in without going overboard on the background. The prose is fast-paced and quite readable, and I haven't figured out who the killer is yet. (Unlike a novel I read recently by a current big-name thriller writer, where I saw every single plot twist for the entire book in the first fifty pages or so.)


So, while I doubt that I'll ever gobble down Agatha Christie mysteries like I did in the old days, I'm having a lot of fun with this one and will probably read a few more now and then.

The Big Four - Agatha Christie

I recently got the urge to read an Agatha Christie novel, an impulse that comes over me from time to time. When I was a kid, I read a lot of Christie novels, the first one being THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY, which I checked out of the school library when I was in the sixth grade. This was back during the days before the balkanization of mystery fandom, when you could read Agatha Christie one day and Mickey Spillane the next and never think anything about it.

Anyway, the book I picked up was THE BIG FOUR, a novel I’d seen mentioned every now and then on the Golden Age of Detection Yahoo group. I knew it was something of an oddity for Christie, not really a straight murder mystery like most of her other books but rather an attempt to write an Edgar Wallace-style thriller. (I say that having never read an Edgar Wallace book myself, you understand, but I seem to remember that from the GAD group.) The plot finds Christie’s most famous detective, Hercule Poirot, facing off against a group of international criminal masterminds, the Big Four of the title. They’re led by Li Chang Yen (a brilliant, sinister Chinaman . . . wonder where Christie got that idea . . . what do you think, Sir Denis Nayland Smith?), and their ranks include an American, a French woman, and the assassin of the group, the mysterious Number Four, a master of disguise who might be anybody. Accompanied by narrator and faithful companion Captain Hastings, Poirot foils half a dozen or so plots by the Big Four in this episodic novel (something else it has in common with the early Fu Manchu books) before finally having a big showdown with them.

I really have to wonder if Ian Fleming ever read this novel, because some of the bizarre assassination methods, as well as the villains’ death ray and their secret stronghold inside a mountain, really reminded me of the James Bond books. Well, probably the movies more than the books, now that I think about it. But for a book originally published in 1927, there’s a lot of stuff that showed up later during the secret agent boom in the Sixties.

Despite the fact that there are elements here I like, I’m not sure the book ever really works. Christie just doesn’t seem suited for global-scale action-adventure. The writing seems rushed in places, but at the same time, there’s never really much sense of urgency. And even though stuff Blows Up Real Good, there’s no real sense of that, either. Still, I enjoyed THE BIG FOUR overall. Several of the individual cases that make up the larger story arc are interesting and well-plotted. Poirot is, well, Poirot, even when he’s taking on antagonists more suited for James Bond. Captain Hastings is as dense as ever, and whether you find that endearing or annoying is up to the individual reader. This seems to be regarded as one of Christie’s worst books, and I can understand why. So if you haven’t read her work before, this isn’t the place to start. But it’s still a pleasant enough way to spend some time if your expectations aren’t too high.