Who can argue with classic Christie? The Queen of Detective Fiction. Also the prime example of the locked room mystery.

But it was a little too far-fetched for the solution to be satisfying to me. It was impressive that Poirot could figure it out. Also impressive that Christie could weave such an intricate plot. But the kind of conspiracy it depicts seems outside the range of likely human behavior. Christie is at her best when she’s excavating the murder that lies in each of our hearts. When I’ve got a little bit of the villain in me. That just didn’t seem to me to be the case here.

Funny story: Part of the backstory for this novel is based on the Lindbergh kidnapping. Just a few months after reading it, I heard an old story from my mom’s side of the family. They’re Swedish, and as a child, my grandfather had had very blond, curly hair. On a car trip from Washington, D.C. to North Carolina, they were pulled over by the police and had no end of trouble proving that my grandpa wasn’t the Lindbergh baby. So that’s a weird little codicil to my few words on Murder on the Orient Express.

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Third Girl by Agatha Christie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I’m not sure this is the best of Christie’s work. We’ve got 1) pretty obvious authorial self-insertion, 2) insane coincidences and 3) I’m pretty sure drugs don’t work the way Christie thinks they do.

I guess I don’t have a whole lot to say about it. I think maybe the problem is that for most of the book, the crime hasn’t happened yet, so it’s just Poirot being super nosy and getting into a bunch of people’s business just because a hippy girl said something weird to him.



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Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In Lucrecia Martel’s 2008 film The Headless Woman, at one point the gardener is digging in the backyard and hits cement; it turns out there’s a swimming pool under there. A classmate suggested that this was the most interesting thing about the film. What’s buried. (For my part, I thought the most interesting thing about the film was that the absolute only soundtrack (I mean sound that’s played to the audience but the characters can’t hear) was a single sustained microphone feedback tone, very quiet and very high pitched–unless I misremember.)

Anyway, that’s what Sleeping Murder is about. Both literally and metaphorically, wickedness has been deeply buried and has to be dug up by the sleuths.

It’s interesting to me how the villain creates a fake world for the sleuths that prevents them from seeing the past correctly, and that fake world doesn’t dissolve until they’ve dug down deep enough to hit the root of wickedness. It’s almost like the Mahayana Buddhist idea of the Veil of Maya.



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Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In my edition this is called Death in the Air, which I guess is the US title. It’s one of those ones where she gives us one really suspicious clue amid a bunch of nonsense, right there on page 72, and nobody but Poirot notices, and nobody reading it notices either. I didn’t. But, like, it’s totally obvious. Dude has a lighter. What does he need an empty matchbox for?

Anyway, pretty good mystery. And there’s some fun metafictional stuff with the suspect who’s a writer of murder mysteries.



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At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Here are the flaws in this book, in my opinion: 1) Most of the detecting is done by some guy named Father, who is not Miss Marple. Miss Marple is just a clever, observant, author-pupeteered-lucky eyewitness. Boo to that. Don’t just sprinkle my Marple on like flavor-text. She’s got to be the detective! 2) Only one corpse and it happens too late in the book. By the time I got to the first dead body, every single clue had already been dropped, the story was basically over. That’s too late in the game. 3) The big reveal about the true nature of the hotel is too obvious. I won’t spoil it by saying what it is. But if I did you wouldn’t be missing much suspense.

Of course, I can’t construct a novel like this, so I shouldn’t be too critical! But compared to Nemesis or Death on the Nile, it’s just not as good.



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