Random Jottings

The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie

Some of my favourite Christies are her stand alone novels, no Poirot or Miss Marple or the annoying Tommy and Tuppence, many of which are relatively unknown.

I love The Man in the Brown Suit. This was published in 1922 and features an intrepid young heroine, Anne Beddingfield, an orphan in search of adventure one of whose favourite pasttimes was watching the Perils of Pauline.  There is a Master Criminal, known as 'The Colonel' a beautiful Russian actress determined to bring him down, stolen diamonds, a victim under a Tube train and a dead body of a glamorous woman found in the country house of Sir Eustace Pedlar.  

I do love these various covers....

The hunt is up for the Man in the Brown Suit seen at the murder scene and also near the area of the Tube where that death occurred. A piece of paper is found by Anne which the police missed finding (naturally) at the murder scene with a mysterious date on it and the name Kilmorden Castle.   This turns out to be a cruise ship leaving in a few days and with gay abandon Anne decides to blue her entire inheritence on a ticket.

In the middle of the night a handsome man bursts into her cabin, he has been shot and, as all good heroines do, instead of screaming for help she hides him and promptly falls in love with him.

"For the first time I took in the details of his appearance. The close cropped dark head, the lean jaw, the scar on his brown cheek, the curious light grey eyes that looked into mine with a sense of reckless mockery hard to describe. There was something dangerous about him"

So we have a real mix here of dashing hero and plucky heroine, a sinister criminal mastermind and somebody determined to kill off our hero, the Man in the Brown Suit, because as we all know he did not do the murders and is destined to marry Anne and live happily ever after.

One of my favouite characters in this book is Sir Eustace Pedler, on his way to South Africa to view conditions there and report back to the government. He is large and lazy and tries to avoid work as much as possible and he supplies a great deal of humour in the narrative.

"The only costume that fitted me for the fancy dress dinner was that of a Teddy Bear.I don't mind playing bears with some nice young girls on a winter;s evening in England, but it is hardly an ideal costume for the Equator. However, I created a great deal of merriment.....dancing was a hot affair. I danced twice with Anne Beddingfiled and she had to pretend she liked it. I danced once with Mrs Blair who didn't trouble to pretend and I victimised various other damsels whose appearance struck me favourably"

This is a John Buchanesque ripping yarn and tremendous fun from start to finish. I love these early books of Christie and if you are not familiar with this title please do seek it out.

I can also recommend They Came to Baghdad which I am currently reading and Destination Unknown all of which have Somebody seeking World Domination. Tremendous fun and I always get the feeling when reading these that Dame Agatha had enormous fun writing them.

Recent reading

I have had problems with the blog the last week or so as my host, Typepad, who I have been with for years, had a new update etc etc and like all updates it caused mayhem and the blog was unavailable. An irritant for me, but checking on Twitter I could see how upset so many users were who were running businesses and were losing customers and orders.

Well they finally got it sorted and my post on Magpie Murders finally was able to be logged on.  SInce posting I have finished Moonlight Murders, a follow up to Magpie, and enjoyed its complexity and fun very much.  I am not sure if there will be another in this series, I do hope so.

I have also re-read the Karen Pirie books by Val Macdermid. I have read all her output and this particular series is my favourite.  I revisited them as I knew there was a tv adaptation coming up of A Distant Echo and I wanted to refresh my memory.  The TV dramatisation was a huge hit with large ratings and I gather another is in the pipeline.  I did not care for the actress who played the title role very much and I thought she was totally unlike the Karen of the books, but I put that to one side a she was very good indeed.   There were minor irritants with the characters, gender changed for one main protagonist for no reasont that I could understand, and the ethnicity of others was changed, presumably to tick diversity boxes as it made no difference to the story at all. I do find this virtue signalling that casting directors go in for rather boring and wish they would not do it but hey ho.   By the last episode it did not really matter as the tension was racheted up and it really had me gripped.   Do catch it if you can. Also if you read the books then please do read them in order.

I then turned to Marple: twelve new stories featuring the famous Christie creation. Twelve writers producing "new" Miss Marple tales.  This really irritates me as it is totally unneccessary and the main reason for this exercise is Money using the Christie name. 

I found most of them heavy going and nearly all lacking the  gentle wit and Marple touch. Oddly enough the only one which rang true in any way was the story penned by Val Macdermid. She got it right. The rest did not.  But it is out in time for Christmas and that is the obvious reason.

I have already written about the Alan Rickman diaries which I found disappointing and revealed a tormented, self absorbed persona in one of my favourite actors. Why they were ever published is beyond me. They were clearly personal and not written with publication in mind. I presume the reason is, once again, money.

As an antidote to this I turned to Patricia Wentworth. I have read all the Miss Silver cases and loved them but the author wrote many other crime stories and Dean Street Press (one of my very favourite publishers) have reprinted many more of these. I read three in one day (well it was raining and my arthritis was playing up so it was a day on the bed with hot water bottles) and they were huge fun. Madly dramatic and a bit over the top but thoroughly enjoyable. I read The Amazing Chance, Dead or Alive and the Red Lacquer Case and gave myself over to sheer in fun.

Left you Dead by Peter James.  I read this mainly because I have waded through all the Inspector Grace books but they really had become rather tedious and on at least a couple of occasions when it seems to me he had no idea what to do with a character he just killed them off. He did it again in this book.  I really enjoyed them when I started and I do wonder why authors carry on when they are clearly tired of churning them out. There was an interview with Lee Child in the paper today and he said that is why he stopped writing the Reacher books. 

Sadly though there will be no more Grace books because when I was writing this post I discovered that the author had died.  He was hugely successful and enjoyed by many including me though, as I said, I had rather lost interest in them.

Another of my favourite authors, Andrea Camilleri, died last year and he left several books behind for publication after his death. He was in his late eighties when he passed and the last few books showed a lack of focus which is understandable.   The final Montalbano book, Riccardino, was, I am sorry to say, really poor.   I have loved the Montalbano books with Catarella and Fabrizio and they have given me hours of enjoyment and many laugh out moments.

I mentioned in an earlier post the novels of Susan Scarlett AKA Noel Streatfield which I simply wallowed in, no other word, and they come once more from the Wonderful Dean Street Press. Well I read a couple more and have one left and am saving it up for a treat. Does that make sense?   Do check them out.

And finally, after a rather disappointing run, I turned to Agatha Christie.  I have recently rewatched the superb Miss Marple series on the TV and I re-read Murder at the Vicarage, Moving Finger, a Pocketful of Rye and A Murder is Announced and loved them all over again. I think Christie was a superb writer with a deftness of touch as well as steel and also she was funny,

There is one line in the TV version of A Murder is Announced which is pure Christie but I cannot find it in the book, so assume the script writer came up with this gem.  Miss Marple is having tea with Dora, and they are discussing a young man on the list of suspects.

"you know he is a communist don't you Miss Marple?"

"Oh dear, he must be very lonely in Chipping Cleghorn"

Priceless.

2020 Reading - Part 2

I have just realised the days are moving quickly and I will soon be in 2021 before I talk about my reading this year. So here goes with the second lot.

The Crown in Crisis; the Countdown to the Abdication by Alexander Larman.   This is one of the best, if not the best, of all the books I have read about the Abdication and believe me, I have read the lot.   I reviewed it here

Lady in Waiting - Anne Glenconner.   A brilliantly witty book. Lady Glenconner sounds a redoubtable personalilty, the kind of lady you would find running the WI, opening village Fetes, chivvying you along in the kindest way. I found myself warming to her.  A close friend of Princess Margaret who I always felt got a vicious press. I am sure she was not the easiest person around but the acts of kindness and the support she gave her friend Anne showed another side to her.  Lady Glenconner had two children die and one gravely injured in a car crash and she spent months by his side helping him recover.  She also seemed to be married to a total lunatic.  Great read.

Agatha Christie's Poirot - Mark Aldridge.   I have reviewed this here and it is a book that every Christie lover should have on their shelves.  Brilliant.

Double Lives - Helen McCarthy. Of course this is going to make my list because the author as well as producing a brilliant book, is my daughter. Four years hard slog and lockdown stymied everything.   It has garnered excellent reviews and I am so proud of her.

I have had a canter through my reading list and have to mention the following authors whose books I always read with great enjoyment:

Jane Casey - her Maeve Kerrigan books are excellent. Gripping police work and the relationship between Maeve and the gorgeously sexy Josh is tantalising. So looking forward to the next one.

Linda Castillo - her crime novels are set in Amish country and I have read them all.  I cannot help but feel that there is a similarity to Midsomer Murders in that there is an enormous amount of death and destruction in a small area. Anne Cleve stopped writing her books set in Shetland as she felt she could not bump off any more of the inhabitants....but the Castillo books are well worth a read.

Jane Thynne - her Clara Vine books are simply wonderful and I gather a new one is on the horizon but in the meantime may I urge you to read The Words I Never Wrote.   I raved about it earlier this year but it had only been published in the US.  Now it is due in the UK and worth every penny. Here is my review

Moray Dalton - a Golden Age detective writer and a new discovery for me. Published by Dean Street Press I can highly recommend them. I gather there are more in the offing.

E C R Lorac and Carol Carnac - yes they are the same person and the detective novels are published by British Library publishing in their Classic Crime series.   I have discovered many new unknown writers through this series and Lorac is one of my favourite of these - the other being Freeman Wills Croft.

Peter Lovesey - the Peter Diamond detective series set in Bath. I forgot to mention them in my first post. A re-read and simply terrific.

Elizabeth von Arnim - I am going to embark on a re-read in 2021 but would mention here that the British Library, yes those great peeps again, published Father, one of her relatively unfamiliar works this year and has more in the pipeline. Keep an eye out for them.

So I think that is that. I have read far less this year or rather I have not noted down all the titles I read, as I usually do, because I have read such casual stuff that half the time I have forgotten it as soon as it is closed.   My brain went walk about in 2020 and I am pretty sure that I am not alone in that.

I have a few interesting books lined up for the next few weeks. One, a biography of Cary Grant which was fascinating, is due to be published in 2021 so will leave reviewing until we have left this year behind.

I am not sure 2021 is shaping up to be any better at the moment, but thank heavens for books and reading. I simply cannot fathom how those who do not read survive, I really don't.

Looking forward to a good reading year and lots of lovely comments from you all which I really appreciate. Thank you.

Re-reading Agatha

I recently reviewed Laura Thompson’s biography of Agatha Christie which I had mixed feelings about, but after finishing it I wanted to tackle some of her books again. I have read all of her output several times and it is always interesting to see what other readers think are her best books, or their favourite books with which I quite often disagree.

There seem to be two camps of Agatha readers - you either love/hate Poirot or you are a Miss Marple fan. I like both. Though perhaps Miss M has a slight edge.

The first book in which Miss Marple appears is The Murder at the Vicarage. This is a classic village setting. A vicar, his young and lovely wife, an overbearing local magistrate Colonel Protheroe, and a collection of gossips including Miss M.  The vicar returns after being sent off on a wild goose chase to find Colonel Protheroe murdered in his study.  Within twenty four hours two people confess to the crime, the Colonel’s second wife who happens to be having an affair with a handsome artist, who also confesses, and who is painting her portrait.

The story is seen through the eyes of the narrator, the vicar, and he is witty and insightful and, at the same time, rather endearing as he is madly in love with his young wife while realising that she is really not the right material for the wife of a vicar. Miss Marple is slightly sharper edged in this book and is seen as being more of a “nasty old pussy” that in the following books in which she features. Dame A softened her slightly while keeping her investigative edge.

I had not read this title for some time and had forgotten just how good it was.

I then turned to At Bertram’s Hotel, another Miss Marple, which is not one of Dame A’s best, with a slightly unbelievable motive for murder, but the description of the hotel and its afternoon tea is simply superb. Miss Marple, on a visit there, is amazed that it hasn’t changed since she was a girl. It does not seem quite real. And of course, it isn’t......

Five Little Pigs - I regard this as her finest book. The depth, the characterisation and the narrative trick of having five people involved in a murder some 25 years earlier and asked to describe it - with the resultant differing viewpoints - is masterly. I remember reading this for the first time as a thirteen year old and finding it absolutely riveting. I still do.

I have also re-read Sparkling Cyanide, Sad Cypress (one of my favourites), Why didn’t they ask Evans (one of her earlier stand along ones set in the 1920/30s and huge fun), Destination Unknown, scientists keep disappearing and it is clear that a world wide conspiracy is behind it - or is it? One of my favourite Christies.

And then of course her titles set in Egypt - Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death, Murder in Mesopotamia. I read all these again with huge enjoyment.

And The Man in the Brown Suit which I LOVE and here is an earlier review of this particular book. Sir Eustace Pedlar is one of my favourite characters in Christie which shows off her with and humour.

Finally, I turned to the Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I am not sure that there is anybody left who does not know the twist to this one but just in case I will not mention it. This is mentioned  along with the Man in the Brown Suit in the link above.

I have not read any Tommy and Tuppence again - I do find these two acutely irritating. A few years back the BBC had a crack at a series starring David Walliams and A N Other. It was truly abysmal and it died a death and quite rightly too.

PS - I have been hunting images of her books on the internet. Many of them are wonderful and I have chosen two old ones that I love

 

Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life - Laura Thompson

It is one hundred years since the first Agatha Christie was published “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”.  This biography by Laura Thompson was first published in 2007 and has been updated and revised with a new introduction to celebrate this occasion.

I read this when it came out and I am wondering whether I found it as irritating as I did this time around but it seems I did not review it on Random.  The book is brilliantly written but veers wildly between flights of fancy and fact. The author relies enormously on interpreting the books Agatha wrote under the name Mary Westmacott and, yes I agree they are very autobiographical in nature, but they cannot be used as a basis for verisimilitude.  I have read all of these titles and they are very revealing and give a glimpse into Dame A’s thoughts and psyche but they ARE novels and I do not believe that they should be treated as authentic resources. 

Everyone knows that Agatha Christie vanished for ten days and caused a huge upheaval. Theories abound why she did it.  My take on this is that she went away for a few days to a “spa” in the hope that Archie her errant husband would worry, come and find her and they would be reunited. She actually sent a letter to her brother in law informing him of this so that he would pass on the information to Archie but for some reason this did not happen.  He was suspected of doing away with her, the entire thing got out of hand and when he finally found her he was furious at the damage that had been done and a reconciliation was out of the question. She ran away to teach him a lesson and then had to have recourse to the amnesia excuse to cover it up.  I think she felt humiliated and distraught at what had happened and that is why she would never discuss it and refused to do so for the rest of her life. 

What is clear is that hearing that her husband was in love with another woman (he told her just after her beloved mother had died with huge insensitivity) brought her close to a breakdown which would explain why she embarked on this disastrous course of action.

The section of the book dealing with this episode is called The Quarry and it is pure fantasy.  We are told that on the evening she disappeared she had dinner and was hoping to hear Archie’s car and would constantly check through a chink in the curtains to see if he was coming. “She smiled at the maid Lily who cleared the plates and looked concerned at how much was left on them....the clock ticked heavily........the fire was dying in the grate. She sat on and on” and so it continues more fiction rather than fact.

Throughout this biography Laura Thompson points us in the direction of quotes and settings from her books that reveal that she never got over Archie, her attitude to husbands, elliptic references which could be to this disappearance and on and on and on.   It is the kind of biography which I find acutely irritating. I call it the Surely she Must have Felt and it is Clear she must have Thought style and it is all supposition.

But then we come to her later life when she marries Max Malllowan and the whimsicality vanishes and we have good solid biographical writing of great verve and huge interest full of detail and colour.  She uses sections of Agatha’s own autobiography and her letters which show how satisfying this part of her life was with the travelling to the archeological digs and how much she enjoyed it all. Her books set in this part of the world are among her best (Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death, Murder in Mesopotamia) and it is clear she felt happy and comfortable there.

Her relationship with her daughter Rosalind seems to have been a difficult one and it is clear that she was not a devoted maternal person.  She found Rosalind “tricky”, very matter of fact and cool (Hastings daughter in Curtain is said to be based on her) and though they were clearly fond of each other it was never easy.

I suppose the conclusion as to whether one has enjoyed a book or not is how one reads it and this proved, despite all I have said above, to be a fascinating biography and one I could not put down. I read it solidly over two days and by the end of those two days it was bristling with stick it notes as I marked up things I wanted to mention. Well I simply cannot as there are too many but I have checked one which I wanted to refer to.

There is a masterly section on English Murder which is worth reading on its own in which she discusses Agatha’s place among the pantheon of Sayers, Marsh, Allingham et al and I was delighted when she used the word “simplicity” to describe her writing as it is the way I have always viewed it.

”Simplicity sets Agatha apart. It was hard won as her notebooks make clear but she knew that it was the desired end. The finished product had to be impregnable. Its geometry had to be capable of being turned this way and that like a jewel in the sunlight. It had to be constructed so that it could be satisfyingly dismantled. Then everything had to be hidden from view”.

Because of this her books are quite often misunderstood and dismissed which I think it totally wrong. After reading Laura Thompson’s biography I have re-read several of her books - some Poirot, some Miss Marple and some stand alone, and I have admired them all over again for this very characteristic - there is no feeling, as we sometimes get with Sayers and Marsh, that the author’s private feelings and prejudices (or love of their detective) are intruding. The story is the thing and that is that.

Yes I found aspects of this book irritating but I also found it totally fascinating and obviously a labour of love for the author.  Well worth reading.

100 years of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie had her first murder mystery published in 1920 - The Mysterious Affair at Styles in which we meet Hastings and Poirot for the very first time.  I am sure that when she created these characters she did not realise that they would have to be ageless because by the time she finished her Poirot books he should have been about 150..

A hundred glorious years of Dame Agatha and this is a cause for celebration. I discovered her books when I was about eleven and home from school with German Measles and was considered highly infectious. I did not feel ill and was rather bored being immured in our flat. My mother was out at work and my sister, who worked in the library nearby, was deputed to come home and check up on me and she brought me an Agatha which she thought I might like. It was And then there were None though it was called by a politically incorrect title then. I read it and was totally enthralled and totally gobsmacked at the ending. So when Judith came home that evening I asked her to bring me some more and the next day she came home at lunchtime with about a dozen and I was off,

Dame A is best known for Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, thanks to the power of television and film, but she also writes stand alone stories and many of these are tremendous fun. She wrote several novels in the 1920's featuring gay young things and house parties and champagne (The Secret of Chimneys, the Seven Dials Mystery, Why didn't they ask Evans to name three) featuring intrepid female heroines and secret societies and mysterious countesses with white complexions and red lips.  One of my favourites is the Man in the Brown Suit. This was published in 1922 and features one of those intrepid young heroines I have referred to, Anne Beddingfield, an orphan in search of adventure one of whose favourite pasttimes was watching the Perils of Pauline.  There is a Master Criminal, known as 'The Colonel' a beautiful Russian actress determined to bring him down, stolen diamonds, a victim under a Tube train and a dead body of a glamorous woman found in the country house of Sir Eustace Pedlar.   The hunt is up for the Man in the Brown Suit seen at the murder scene and also near the area of the Tube where that death occurred. A piece of paper is found by Anne which the police missed finding, naturally, at the murder scene with a mysterious date on it and the name Kilmorden Castle.   This turns out to be a cruise ship leaving in a few days and with gay abandon Anne decides to blue her entire inheritance left to her after the death of her father (and it is not much) on a ticket.

In the middle of the night a handsome man bursts into her cabin, he has been shot and, as all good heroines do, instead of screaming for help she hides him and promptly falls in love with him.

"For the first time I took in the details of his appearance. The close cropped dark head, the lean jaw, the scar on his brown cheek, the curious light grey eyes that looked into mine with a sense of reckless mockery hard to describe. There was something dangerous about him"

So we have a real mix here of dashing hero and plucky heroine, a sinister criminal mastermind and somebody determined to kill off our hero, the Man in the Brown Suit, because as we all know he did not do the murders and is destined to marry Anne and live happily ever after.

One of my favouite characters in this book is Sir Eustace Pedler, on his way to South Africa to view conditions there and report back to the government. He is large and lazy and tries to avoid work as much as possible and he supplies a great deal of humour in the narrative.

"The only costume that fitted me for the fancy dress dinner was that of a Teddy Bear.I don't mind playing bears with some nice young girls on a winter;s evening in England, but it is hardly an ideal costume for the Equator. However, I created a great deal of merriment.....dancing was a hot affair. I danced twice with Anne Beddingfield and she had to pretend she liked it. I danced once with Mrs Blair who didn't trouble to pretend and I victimised various other damsels whose appearance struck me favourably"

This is a John Buchanesque ripping yarn and tremendous fun from start to finish. I love these early books of Christie and if you are not familiar with this title please do seek it out. Great stuff.

Then one of Dame A's most famous or, should I say, notorious books The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

There was uproar when this book was published. Readers and publishers felt that Agatha Christie had played a trick on them and had been unfair.   But, as with all of her books, the clues and the pointers are all there. She never hides a fact then whips it out at the end which some contemporary mystery writers do. The clues, the hints, the conversations, the questions - she lays it all out and challenges you to solve the murder and find the culprit. Well, of course we hardly ever do. I find when reading contemporary crime novels I can guess who the murderer is quite easily, but with Ngaio Marsh, Sayers, Christie and others of the Golden Age of Crime, I always am in a puzzle.

When writing about an Agatha I have to be careful. I have read them all but have to remind myself that others have not and new readers are coming along all the time and having been roundly ticked off on Amazon by a reader who read one of my reviews and got cross I gave the end away, I have been much more circumspect. So here we go and let me see if I can give you a taste of the story and leave the detection to you.

The narrator is Doctor Sheppard and when the story opens he has just returned after a patient has died. Her name is Mrs Ferrars who, according to local gossip, had probably poisoned her husband who had died a year or so earlier. It was felt that as he was a bad lot this might have been justified but it was never proved. Now it would appear she had committed suicide.

Dr Sheppard lives with his sister Caroline who I find one of Dame Agatha's most delightful creations. I get cross when people sneer at Christie and say she cannot write and is no good at characterisation as they are totally wrong. Here she is on Caroline:

"The motto of the mongoose family, so Kipling tells us, is Go and Find Out. If Caroline ever adopts a crest I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant. One might omit the first part of the motto as Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don't know how she manages it but there it is. I suspect that the servants and the tradesman constitute her Intelligence Corps. When she goes out it is not to gather information but to spread it. At that too. she is amazingly expert"

The Sheppards have a new next door neighbour who they assume, from his appearance, is a retired hairdresser. Not so. It is Hercule Poirot fulfilling his dream of retiring and growing vegetable marrows. Alas, it is not as fascinating as he had hoped it would be and when the local squire, Roger Ackroyd, is found murdered in his study he is only too happy to join up with the police in solving the mystery.   

A letter has arrived for Ackroyd just before he is murdered. It is from the recently deceased Mrs Ferrars who had told him that she was being blackmailed over the death of her husband and that she would tell him the identity of the person involved.   When the body is discovered the letter has vanished......

This is one of the author's most famous books and the twists and turns are pure Christie and, on my latest re-reading, I confirmed what I have said above, the clues are all there. There is great enjoyment in re-reading Dame Agatha knowing the solution as you can have fun spotting all the signposts and the pointers that you miss the first time around or, as in my case, the second or third.

I find the Christie books that I enjoy the most are those told in the first person. With Poirot we have Captain Hastings and his slant on everything is pure joy. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hastings is no longer around and Hercule decides to adopt Doctor Sheppard as his new Watson and it makes for an amusing relationship. When Dame A uses the first person I always feel that part of her character seeps through and I find myself wishing I had met her as the warmth and kindness and the slightly cynical view point of life is evident. Another example of this is Sir Eustace in The Man in the Brown Suit (see above) . Very funny and delightful. Do check it out.

A final word. You will be reading this book from the viewpoint of the narrator and all events and happenings are filtered through his eyes. He will see things you will miss, he will miss things you will see and remember, NEVER take anybody's word for anything when you read an Agatha or else you will end up the proverbial without a paddle.

I can say no more about this title as I dare not give you, the first reader of the story, the slightest clue. Dame Agatha will do that and good luck on solving this mystery.  I freely admit that when I first finished this book I put it down and thought well blimey....or words to that effect.

We are lucky to have Laura Thompson, the biographer of Dame Agatha, coming to the Felixstowe Festival this year. She has updated her biography and it will be re-issued in April. I am really looking forward to hearing this talk and am sure it will be a sell out.  I will let Random Jottings readers know all about booking and tickets when the website is up and running and as I am the one who is in charge of that you will definitely know...

Agatha Christie had her first murder mystery published in 1920 - The Mysterious Affair at Styles in which we meet Hastings and Poirot for the very first time.  I am sure that when she created these characters she did not realise that they would have to be ageless because by the time she finished her Poirot books he should have been about 150..

A hundred glorious years of Dame Agatha and this is a cause for celebration. I discovered her books when I was about eleven and home from school with German Measles and was considered highly infectious. I did not feel ill and was rather bored being immured in our flat. My mother was out at work and my sister, who worked in the library nearby, was deputed to come home and check up on me and she brought me an Agatha which she thought I might like. It was And then there were None though it was called by a politically incorrect title then. I read it and was totally enthralled and totally gobsmacked at the ending. So when Judith came home that evening I asked her to bring me some more and the next day she came home at lunchtime with about a dozen and I was off,

Dame A is best known for Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, thanks to the power of television and film, but she also writes stand alone stories and many of these are tremendous fun. She wrote several novels in the 1920's featuring gay young things and house parties and champagne (The Secret of Chimneys, the Seven Dials Mystery, Why didn't they ask Evans to name three) featuring intrepid female heroines and secret societies and mysterious countesses with white complexions and red lips.  One of my favourites is the Man in the Brown Suit. This was published in 1922 and features one of those intrepid young heroines I have referred to, Anne Beddingfield, an orphan in search of adventure one of whose favourite pasttimes was watching the Perils of Pauline.  There is a Master Criminal, known as 'The Colonel' a beautiful Russian actress determined to bring him down, stolen diamonds, a victim under a Tube train and a dead body of a glamorous woman found in the country house of Sir Eustace Pedlar.   The hunt is up for the Man in the Brown Suit seen at the murder scene and also near the area of the Tube where that death occurred. A piece of paper is found by Anne which the police missed finding, naturally, at the murder scene with a mysterious date on it and the name Kilmorden Castle.   This turns out to be a cruise ship leaving in a few days and with gay abandon Anne decides to blue her entire inheritance left to her after the death of her father (and it is not much) on a ticket.

In the middle of the night a handsome man bursts into her cabin, he has been shot and, as all good heroines do, instead of screaming for help she hides him and promptly falls in love with him.

"For the first time I took in the details of his appearance. The close cropped dark head, the lean jaw, the scar on his brown cheek, the curious light grey eyes that looked into mine with a sense of reckless mockery hard to describe. There was something dangerous about him"

So we have a real mix here of dashing hero and plucky heroine, a sinister criminal mastermind and somebody determined to kill off our hero, the Man in the Brown Suit, because as we all know he did not do the murders and is destined to marry Anne and live happily ever after.

One of my favouite characters in this book is Sir Eustace Pedler, on his way to South Africa to view conditions there and report back to the government. He is large and lazy and tries to avoid work as much as possible and he supplies a great deal of humour in the narrative.

"The only costume that fitted me for the fancy dress dinner was that of a Teddy Bear.I don't mind playing bears with some nice young girls on a winter;s evening in England, but it is hardly an ideal costume for the Equator. However, I created a great deal of merriment.....dancing was a hot affair. I danced twice with Anne Beddingfield and she had to pretend she liked it. I danced once with Mrs Blair who didn't trouble to pretend and I victimised various other damsels whose appearance struck me favourably"

This is a John Buchanesque ripping yarn and tremendous fun from start to finish. I love these early books of Christie and if you are not familiar with this title please do seek it out. Great stuff.

Then one of Dame A's most famous or, should I say, notorious books The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

There was uproar when this book was published. Readers and publishers felt that Agatha Christie had played a trick on them and had been unfair.   But, as with all of her books, the clues and the pointers are all there. She never hides a fact then whips it out at the end which some contemporary mystery writers do. The clues, the hints, the conversations, the questions - she lays it all out and challenges you to solve the murder and find the culprit. Well, of course we hardly ever do. I find when reading contemporary crime novels I can guess who the murderer is quite easily, but with Ngaio Marsh, Sayers, Christie and others of the Golden Age of Crime, I always am in a puzzle.

When writing about an Agatha I have to be careful. I have read them all but have to remind myself that others have not and new readers are coming along all the time and having been roundly ticked off on Amazon by a reader who read one of my reviews and got cross I gave the end away, I have been much more circumspect. So here we go and let me see if I can give you a taste of the story and leave the detection to you.

The narrator is Doctor Sheppard and when the story opens he has just returned after a patient has died. Her name is Mrs Ferrars who, according to local gossip, had probably poisoned her husband who had died a year or so earlier. It was felt that as he was a bad lot this might have been justified but it was never proved. Now it would appear she had committed suicide.

Dr Sheppard lives with his sister Caroline who I find one of Dame Agatha's most delightful creations. I get cross when people sneer at Christie and say she cannot write and is no good at characterisation as they are totally wrong. Here she is on Caroline:

"The motto of the mongoose family, so Kipling tells us, is Go and Find Out. If Caroline ever adopts a crest I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant. One might omit the first part of the motto as Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don't know how she manages it but there it is. I suspect that the servants and the tradesman constitute her Intelligence Corps. When she goes out it is not to gather information but to spread it. At that too. she is amazingly expert"

The Sheppards have a new next door neighbour who they assume, from his appearance, is a retired hairdresser. Not so. It is Hercule Poirot fulfilling his dream of retiring and growing vegetable marrows. Alas, it is not as fascinating as he had hoped it would be and when the local squire, Roger Ackroyd, is found murdered in his study he is only too happy to join up with the police in solving the mystery.   

A letter has arrived for Ackroyd just before he is murdered. It is from the recently deceased Mrs Ferrars who had told him that she was being blackmailed over the death of her husband and that she would tell him the identity of the person involved.   When the body is discovered the letter has vanished......

This is one of the author's most famous books and the twists and turns are pure Christie and, on my latest re-reading, I confirmed what I have said above, the clues are all there. There is great enjoyment in re-reading Dame Agatha knowing the solution as you can have fun spotting all the signposts and the pointers that you miss the first time around or, as in my case, the second or third.

I find the Christie books that I enjoy the most are those told in the first person. With Poirot we have Captain Hastings and his slant on everything is pure joy. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hastings is no longer around and Hercule decides to adopt Doctor Sheppard as his new Watson and it makes for an amusing relationship. When Dame A uses the first person I always feel that part of her character seeps through and I find myself wishing I had met her as the warmth and kindness and the slightly cynical view point of life is evident. Another example of this is Sir Eustace in The Man in the Brown Suit (see above) . Very funny and delightful. Do check it out.

A final word. You will be reading this book from the viewpoint of the narrator and all events and happenings are filtered through his eyes. He will see things you will miss, he will miss things you will see and remember, NEVER take anybody's word for anything when you read an Agatha or else you will end up the proverbial without a paddle.

I can say no more about this title as I dare not give you, the first reader of the story, the slightest clue. Dame Agatha will do that and good luck on solving this mystery.  I freely admit that when I first finished this book I put it down and thought well blimey....or words to that effect.

We are lucky to have Laura Thompson, the biographer of Dame Agatha, coming to the Felixstowe Festival this year. She has updated her biography and it will be re-issued in April. I am really looking forward to hearing this talk and am sure it will be a sell out.  I will let Random Jottings readers know all about booking and tickets when the website is up and running and as I am the one who is in charge of that you will definitely know...

Agatha Christie week

I had reached a reading hiatus last week when I was mooching around and could not settle to anything so when that happens to me I re-read. As I have just visited Agatha Christie’s house I decided to pull down a few titles from the tottering piles that I own and have had a good week catching up.

When you first read an Agatha you do not know who the murderer is and you NEVER guess (well some smarty pants might but I never have), the second time around you spot clues you missed the first time as you know Who Dun It and the third time and further reads will yield even more clues that you still did not notice and on it goes.

I decided to read Dead Man’s Folly. This is a Poirot story. Mrs Oliver (who I think we all know is Agatha herself) is asked to concoct a murder mystery game for a summer fete at Nasse House. The description of the house and the grounds is Greenway and this was why I wanted to have another look at it as I have now been at the scene of the crime. It goes without saying that the murder game takes a nasty turn and a body is found. The murdered girl is found in the Boathouse which I walked to and there are descriptions of the walks and the route the contestants have to take. Well I followed this round the grounds and it brought the book vividly to life.

I then read A Murder is Announced. I love this story and I loved the TV adaptation of it - it is a Miss Marple and the sublime Joan Hickson was in it. She is the best Miss Marple in my opinion. An advertisement announcing a Murder is put in the local paper and the village all arrive at the house expecting a Murder Game. We all know what will happen and it does.

There is one simply sublime line of dialogue in this which always makes me laughing.

Inspector to Miss Marple when discussing one of the suspects: “He is a Communist you know”

”oh dear” said Miss Marple “ he must be very lonely in Chipping Cleghorn”....

Perfect.

Taken at the Flood - another Poirot.  The Cload family have always relied on their rich uncle who has always promised that they will be his inheritors when he dies. They lead busy lives and are successful in their professions but there has been a lack of worry as they know that they are financially secure because of the Uncle.  He is killed in a raid in the war but before this happened he has suddenly and unexpectedly remarried a very young woman and she gets all his money. Well, it would be very handy if she dies but she is young and healthy and has a brother keeping an eye on her. But but but.....

The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side - one of her later novels and Miss Marple again. In this one we revisit Bassington Hall, the scene of an earlier murder the Body in the Library, only now it belongs to a film star and her director husband. They hold an open house and in the middle of the guests arriving one of them Mrs Babcock, who is involved with the local St Johns Brigade, drinks a cocktail and five minutes later is dead. She has no enemies and her death is a total mystery.  The first time I read this title and found out the solution I was taken aback at the audacity of Dame Agatha.

I read Halloween Party yesterday. Not one of her best. Now I am onto A Caribbean Mystery - a Miss Marple and enjoying it very much. I remember an updated version of it with Julia Mackenzie as Miss Marple (far and away the worst of the lot) and they put in a sex mad priest tortured by his feelings into the mix.  The only priest in the book is a chatty, genial Canon...

I call her Middle Period the time when she wrote her best books - Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Evil under the Sun and my top favourite, Five Little Pigs which I think is wonderful, superbly plotted and I wave this in the face of anybody who says she cannot create real people.  The TV adaptation of this was spot on and excellent.

And my other favourite out of her stand alone books is Crooked House. Took my breath away when I first read it. It was made into a film a few years ago. Dire...................

I have a new book on the go now but will always return to Dame Agatha whenever I get stuck.

Random at Greenway - the home of Agatha Christie

I have wanted to visit Greenway for a long time. I hesitate to say it was on my bucket list as I have no intention of kicking the bucket just yet, but it was certainly on A List.  There are various ways to get there but I decided to drive. I ignored the fact that I think my satnav seems to be suffering from a nervous breakdown whenever we arrive at a destination and we set off. It appeared to be a 25 minute drive.  It took us an hour. I am slightly puzzled at my relationship with Hildegarde (I am calling her that as the satnav is of German origin and pronounces names in a most peculiar manner) as she seems to have a habit of telling me to take a turn up a street just as I sail past. When we are lost and she needs to ‘calibrate’ the route she takes her time and leaves me driving I know not where and swearing madly.  

I will draw a veil over the drive except to say that I now now the surrounding countryside on the way to Greenways very well indeed. And, quite frankly, even if we had taken the straightest route we would still have gone down a long windy curly hair raising narrow road to get there. Meeting something coming the other way tested my driving skills to the limit.

Well we arrived and yes it was worth it.  The house overlooks the River Dart and the views are wonderful. It was a lovely day, the sun had come out, a slight breeze so walking was a pleasure and I just loved it all. I had wanted to go for so long that I had wondered if I might feel a bit of a let down but not so.

The house is a comfortable homely sort of place. It feels like a home and that is not always the case when you visit a National Trust property. You cannot imagine kicking off your shoes and collapsing on a sofa. You could here. The cupboards full of china and knick knacks she and her husband Max collected added to this. Yes, there was fine china around, but also a lot of stuff that was probably bought because they liked it. I recognised a few cups and saucers in there as I had some the same. It all added to the ambience.  But I will let the pictures below give you an idea...

The view coming up the hill from the river. Such a familiar frontage from those of us who have watched the Poirot series with David  Suchet.

 

River Dart and the pleasure boat coming up the river

Here I am sitting on the wall of hte Battery. It was here that Amyas Crale painted his portrait of Elsa Greer and then died of poison. This was in my favourite Agatha Five Little Pigs.

And here is the river from the Boat house where the body of Marlene was found in Dead Man’s Folly

 

And some photos of the glorious grounds.  I walked down to the Boathouse and the Battery and back. It took me an hour with rests on the way but so glad I did it.

A glorious place to visit. I would go again next week if I could but it is a long long drive to Torquay........

 

Tom Adams and Agatha Christie Covers

I was sorting through my bookshelves about a year ago and tidying up etc and I came to my shelves of Agatha Christie titles. A motley collection of paperbacks and old hardbacks with some recent editions among them.  The covers I liked the most were, I discovered, illustrated and designed by Tom Adams. They are rather surreal and at times reminded me of Dali. When I checked it appeared I had about ten titles, published by Fontana, which featured Tom Adam’s work. I decided to do a bit of research on this artist about who I knew very little and came across a book Tom Adams Uncovered, the Art of Agatha Christie and beyond. It looked fascinating so I ordered it and when it arrived went through reading and checking the covers.

There were UK and US covers and though many of them are quite easy to track down there are a few which are trickier and which elude me. I decided I was going to get rid of my mixed collection and replace them with all the work of Adams.  

I struck lucky when I visited a second hand book shop in Felixstowe and came across a cardboard box full of Fontana paperbacks and had a rummage. Came up with fifteen that had Adams as the illustrator. They were priced very competitively so I walked off with the lot.  I arrived at home and started checking them using the Tom Adams Uncovered title and straight away discovered that not all the covers were by him. After doing a huge amount Tom Adams stopped doing them but because they had been such a good selling point the next illustrator who came along was instructed to use the same style and he/she did it very well indeed. It is quite difficult to tell the difference but if you look closely you can make out which is the original and which not.  Most of the UK editions will have Tom Adams name on the back of the book but some of the US ones do not so you need to be careful.

(I should make it clear that the covers designed by Tom Adams only form part of this book - his other work is featured as well and is really interesting but I am just focusing on Dame A for the purposes of this post)

Agatha Christie has had so many wonderful book jackets and covers but I have found the later ones somewhat lacking. I have some of the early editions from Collins with their lurid but marvellous covers and illustrations from 2000 onward have been somewhat pedantic, in my opinion only of course.

I really dislike covers which tie in with a film or TV adaptation. I have already let rip about the recent Ordeal by Innocence tie in which features the actors used by the BBC. The adaptation was so changed that the book cover should be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act. And I have no desire to look at the smirking face of Johnny Depp on the cover of the Murder on the Orient Express recent movie edition.  (I will refrain from commenting on Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of Poirot. The less said the better......)

I need to double check again and see which Adams covers I still have to obtain. I think it is about eight but they are the hard ones to get hold of, natch.

It is funny how you can decide you want to collect something and then get a tad obsessed about it but it does mean that every time you go to a second hand book shop you have that thrill of the chase and the thought that you never know what you might find.

I am also tracking down Freeman Wills Croft at the moment, ditto E C Lorac and Carol Carnac and am coming up with quite a few. I found an early EC Lorac title the other day and was delighted until I saw the asking price. £4000. I decided to leave it...

Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie or should that be the BBC?

The BBC have just shown their latest Agatha Christie adaptation.  I tuned in with low expectations. I always do. It is safer that way. And my low expectations were justified. I watched the first episode, switched off and fumed.

It was the usual. Glamorous house, beautifully furnished, high production values, gloss everywhere, pouting female characters, sexy secretary, portentous looks from each member of the household in close up with threatening music, shots of dripping blood (in slo mo natch) and with the dramatic pace of a slow sloth. It was pretty awful.

Last year the Beeb produced a version of And then there Were None. Again it was beautifully done, with lots of period settings, gay young things in tea frocks and pouting lips and this time set in a huge expensive house on an island which was cut off from the mainland by the tide.  One by one the visitors who have all been invited there start being murdered. Now when I first read this book I found it terrifying and scary and though I obviously knew who had done it when I watched this BBC version, it lacked any sort of tension and the acting was poor and, once again, the pace was soporific.  At the time it was shown the craze for Poldark was at its height and Aiden Turner from said show, was in  it and spent an inordinate amount of time running around in nothing but a towel and showing off his manly chest. I gave up on that one too,

And then the BBC, never slow to realise what they think the public want, did Witness for the Prosecution shown over three nights. I did not even bother to watch this, Why make myself irritated thinks I? But bear in mind this is a short story. Yes a short story, one of Christie's best, incisive and a diabolical twist at the end. It is probably about thirty pages long. So once again the pace was funereal.

Much against my better judgement I watched the first episode of Ordeal by Innocence. This was a serious mistake as by the end I was frothing at the mouth. Dame Agatha was a master plotter and a brilliant writer. Her stories are incredibly filmic as are her characters so why, for god's sake why do the powers that be at the BBC (oh and elsewhere) think that they can improve on perfection?  Characters are changed completely in this version.

A stranger shatters the peace of the Argyll household still recovering from the murder of Mrs Argyll by one of her adopted children, Jacko, who was always a problem and a devious piece of work. He always swore he had an alibi at the time of the murder when he was given a lift by a passer by. This passer by was never found. Jacko died in prison and now Dr Calgary turns up to say that Jacko was telling the truth. He had given him a lift. Dr Calgary had been involved in an accident and then went off to the Antarctic on an expedition and had no idea what had happened.

Now in the original story Dr Calgary is a sane man in his late thirties with a strong sense of justice and wanting to right a wrong. In the BBC version he is young, obviously mentally unstable and has spent time in an institution. WHY?

Leo Argyll the widower is on the verge of marrying his secretary.  In the book Leo is a quiet intellectual man rather sidelined by his wife and his secretary was a quiet woman totally devoted to him. In the TV version Leo is played by Bill Nighy who, wonderful though he is, has an air of permanent cynicism about him and a wry amusement that is totally at odds with the character of Leo. And the quiet secretary is now a sub Marilyn Monroe type with blonde curls and a habit of  gazing at herself in the mirror and yanking her boobs up to show a bit more cleavage. Wrong on all accounts.

Oh and for some reason which escapes me the BBC changed the name of Argyll to Argyle.   Essential to the plot obviously...

This cover shows the tie in with the BBC adaptation. It should be sued under the Trades Description Act. If you have watched the BBC and have yet to read the book then thinking you are going to find the same story within its pages, well you will be in for a shock that is all I can say.

I could go on and on an on.  But the final insult was still to come.THEY CHANGED THE IDENTITY OF THE MURDERER. Yes they did. FFS Why? and how arrogant of the producer to do this. Apparently, she wanted to bring the story 'up to date'. Dame Agatha's grandson who manages the Christie estate and who should know better, said he pondered long and deeply before agreeing with this change. Not long or deeply enough in my opinion. No doubt the cheque helped....

Poor Dame Agatha. If she could see what they are doing to her stories she would turn in her grave. We have had Miss Marple shoehorned into stories in which she never appeared, an appalling adaptation of the Tommy and Tuppence stories (the BBC again) which fortunately sunk without trace after the first series, a version of The Body in the Library with the McEwan Marple changing a heterosexual pair of lovers into a lesbian couple (presumably so we could see them exchange a passionate kiss on the beach - which we did), Cards on the Table, a Poirot story with David Suchet changing the identity of the murderer, the Poirot Suchet version of Appointment with Death changing the character of the victim to a ludicrous degree and also included a mad nun (who never appeared in the book) and the Julia McKenzie Miss Marple version of A Caribbean Mystery had a sex mad young priest wrestling with his conscience as he lusted after one of the waitresses (in the book he is an elderly English canon). 

You are thinking oh gawd Elaine is off again and you are right. I am. But I simply cannot understand why these changes are made. Of course there are times when things have to be changed for reasons of dramatic drive, but all of these mentioned above do not make the story any better. So why do it? In the latest version of Death on the Orient Express directed by Branagh, an extra character was added, Pilar Estravados who is,in fact, a character in Hercule Poirot's Christmas. Again, why?

And the less said about Branagh as Poirot the better. I lasted half an hour before giving up on it.

Right after that rant I am now off to make myself a nice cup of tea. I had better make sure the strychine is at the back of the cupboard and I do not mix it up with the sugar....