Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie

This is one of my most favouritest Agatha Christie novels. I adore Poirot (although not more than Miss Marple) and I’m quite fond of Ariadne Oliver with all her foibles, so this makes for a comfy, cosy mystery with characters I love.

A bossy, bully of a woman approaches Mrs. Oliver at a luncheon and has the audacity to request Mrs. Oliver to ask her goddaughter who killed whom in her parent’s double suicide some 10 years before. Mrs. Burton-Cox feels she has a right to know since her son will be marrying Mrs. Oliver’s goddaughter. Despite being incensed about such an intrusion, Mrs. Oliver’s curiosity is aroused and she presents the question to Hercule Poirot. Together they set off on a hunt for elephants who can remember back to days past. Their search leads them into a labyrinth of sisters, dead children, travel abroad and absent children. It takes Poirot’s little grey cells to unravel the stories that elephants tell.

This one is clever. Very clever. The clues are all there, but it’s a matter of sorting out which are relevant, what order they come in and what really happened instead of what was perceived to have happened. It’s a case of “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” (Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four). Elementary, or not if you’re not Christie or Doyle. I give this one 5 out of 5.

Destination Unknown by Agatha Christie

Hilary Craven is a woman whose life has fallen apart. Her husband left her, her small daughter has died and she has no reason to live any more. No longer attaching any importance to her life, she decides to commit suicide in a Moroccan hotel, only for her latest endeavour to fall apart on her when she is found out and prevented by a spy who happens to put two and two together. He makes Hilary an interesting offer. If she is going to die, why not do so in the service of her country? It seems that scientists all over the world are going missing and it is presumed they are either defecting to or being kidnapped by the Russians. The need Hilary to go undercover to see if she can ferret out just what is going on. Her interest in life renewed, Hilary embarks on a dark and dangerous journey into the heart of evil.

Although the style of this book is unmistakeably Christie, it’s not one of her typical books. It’s not actually a mystery as such, but a thriller with the element of a mystery. There’s no Marple of Poirot to lead the reader through the twists and turns and as such is disappointing and nice at the same time. Disappointing because Marple and Poirot are really her most beloved characters and those who enjoy Christie are usually big fans of both and like to see them again and again. Nice because it keeps Christie’s work fresh and new instead of relying on the same old formula time and time again. Even the venue is changed in this one from England to Africa, so no lush countryside or humungous country homes, but the mystery and intrigue of a country with strange customs and vast expanses of land with few inhabitants. The story itself is fairly simple and I’m afraid rather full of holes, relying heavily on luck and coincidences. Having said that, it’s Christie and not really meant to be taken quite so seriously, so it’s easy to forgive its failings. What is particularly interesting to me reading it so many years on is not the plot itself, but how it reflects the political situation of the day. The Cold War was raging and the West feared the East as much as the East did the West and everyone lived in mistrust of each other. A disappearing scientist wasn’t simply a disappearing scientist but a political crisis. One fewer scientist in the West was a double loss because it was a gain for the enemy. There’s a curious mix of fear, idealism, obsession weaving it’s way through the characters giving today’s reader an idea of what the situation must have felt like back then. Christie exploits the romance of the age in this work, with a twist of her own which keeps it from becoming a cliché.

Even though I’ve never been a flaming feminist (probably mostly because the way has been cleared by other women who came before me), one thing I quite liked about this novel was that she made the heroine weak on the one hand, but strong on the other, just like we all are at times. It’s more realistic than just creating a strong, fearless woman who sets an obviously unattainable standard for other women. It sets a good example for how a woman can become strong given the chance. That might seem trite in today’s society, but looking at the period when it was written, I think it was an important message for women in general.

All in all, I give this one a 4 out of 5 rating for a Christie novel.

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie takes murder and Miss Marple, to the West Indies. I suppose there are only so many murders one little village can absorb without becoming wholly eerie, so Christie solves this problem by removing Miss Marple, as a form of respite after a long illness, to the Caribbean and plonking her down in a setting both unfamiliar and uninteresting to her. She becomes rather bored with the irritating and superficial guests at the hotel, who provide her with little food for thought and no great conversation. Even the weather is irritatingly uninteresting as the climate is so constant. Miss Marple is an old English lady who prefers her old English countryside to the more exotic, yet unvarying, climate of the West Indies. It seems she hardly knows how she will get through the next weeks until her return to her own beloved island.

Then Major Palgrave dies quite unexpectedly. At first it seems above board, but not having anything else to occupy her mind, Miss Marple begins to consider the situation and ultimately realizes that Major Palgrave must have been murdered, the only question is, why? The only visible solution is because he claimed to have a photograph of a murderer. Miss Marple gently eases the local doctor around to her way of thinking and suddenly the whole island seems to be full of danger instead of rest and relaxation.

I’m biased. I love Agatha Christie and I love Miss Marple, especially as played by Joan Hickson, so I’m loath to give this anything other than a 5 out of 5 for being a good, comfortable English murder, for all its being set in another country altogether, in the Christie tradition.

Mixed Mysteries

I'm really quite conscientious about posting for the Classics Challenge, but not about the other books I read. This is catch up time.

Spider's Web by Agatha Christie: This was a play written in 1954 and posthumously re-written into book by Charles Osborne. This is not a classic Christie, but it is brilliant. When I say not a classic, I mean that it is a good mystery, but you get two for one with it. It's a brilliant comedy as well. It's almost a spoof of Christie's other works. A man is murdered in a country house and his body is found by the wife of the man who rents that house. She tries, for various reasons, to get rid of the body in the hopes of keeping the police away from them. She enlists her friends to help her, but almost from the very beginning, everything goes wrong. One thing leads to another and another and another until the whole story is so confused that it's virtually impossible to figure out what's truth and what's fiction. It's almost a comedy of errors and I enjoyed that combination with the classic mystery very much. Two thumbs up for this one.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie - This is one of her classic Poirot mysteries and is, as usual, excellent. I like the hominess of Christie's mysteries. They're enjoyable without being graphic or violent and they're always a comfort read for me. Again, two thumbs up.

White Corridor by Christopher Fowler - Again another mystery (I like mysteries, have you guessed?). This is another of the PCU series which I quite enjoy. Again, they are homey type mysteries without the graphic details of modern crime novels. The PCU novels also have that little twist of the "supernatural" which I like. It's always interesting to see how Fowler works it out. Having said that, this wasn't my most favourite of the series. I found the parallel stories a bit disconcerting because it took him so long to connect them. Once they had been connected, I was happy with it again. I think that's just a matter of personal taste though and not a reflection of the writing.

The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin - I read this one because of the link to The Victoria Vanishes (another Christopher Fowler PCU book). It's a mystery set in Oxford in the 1940s. Like Spider's Web, it doesn't take itself too seriously and has a Wodehousian element to it. The bungling fool is led by the more serious professor and together they solve the mystery. Again, I liked this one. It's funny without being ridiculous and the twists and turns it takes are genius. Another two thumbs up.

Death's Jest-Book - Another one in Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series. Hill uses another device I'm not overly fond of in this book. One of his characters is an apparently reformed arch-enemy, Fanny Root, of Pascoe who is constantly writing Pascoe letters. Pascoe sees the letters as sinister simply because of Root's history and is having trouble convincing others that Root is writing him solely to brag about crimes he has committed, but cannot be touched for. Root's letters irritate me with their bragging tone and the criminal's continual insistence that he's a reformed character, but I imagine that was the point. That would be the natural reaction to them, so the author achieved his intent. Parallel to this is the story of Rye Pamona who escaped a serial killer in the last book, or did she? As with White Corridor, this wasn't my favourite in the series, but worth a read anyway. One thumb up, but keep in mind that that's personal taste.