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.
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I read two or three Christies a year. My favorite remains The Body in The Library because it's fun to see Dame Agatha really have to sketch in the lives of some pretty seedy dance hall types. The British have a long tradition of orchestras and singers--or did have, I should say, don't know about today--as vacation spots. Believe it or not, in the mostly lousy adaptation of a Stark/Westlake novel with Peter Coyote there are some nice moments (the nice moments are the very convincing opening eight minutes or so and then the music hall stuff--the rest of is truly deeply sincerely bad) using the trumpet driven music of the Christie era. Whenever I admit to reading Dame Agatha, my hardboiled buddies laugh. But I figure if she was good enough for Raymond Chandler, she's good enough for me.
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