#CBR11 Book 7: "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" by Agatha Christie

Page count: 279 pages
Audio book length: 7 hrs 12 mins
Rating: 4 stars

When out golfing one afternoon, young Mr Bobby Derwent finds a handsome stranger at the bottom of a cliff, near death. While his golfing companion goes to get help, Bobby sits with the stranger, who soon expires, but not before uttering: "Why didn't they ask Evans?" While looking for signs of identification, Bobby finds the photograph of a very beautiful woman in the dead man's pockets, but nothing else to give him a sign of the man's identity.

The local inquest rules the man's death a tragic accident. Yet Bobby can't entirely shake the feeling that there's something else afoot. Strangely, shortly after the inquest, the slightly aimless young vicar's son is offered a lucrative job in a law firm in South America, but feels he must decline. The next thing he knows, he wakes up in hospital, having been the victim of an attempted poisoning while eating a picnic lunch. It's almost miraculous that he survived. By this point, both Bobby and his childhood friend Lady Frances "Frankie" Derwent are convinced that the stranger was murdered. They decide to team up to discover why the stranger was murdered and what the significance of his last words were.

Over the course of my early teens, I pretty much read every Agatha Christie book that I could get my hands on. This is the very first one of Ms. Christie's books that I ever read. I got my love of books from my mother, and through my adolescence, I was a member of a subscription book of the month club. Only once I got older, did I realise just how generous my Mum actually was. I was rarely interested in every book, but if I asked for a book, she never said no. I'm pretty sure she easily gave me six to eight hardback books a year, just because I shared her love of reading (neither of my brothers are great readers).

After reading and very much enjoying this story, I went through my Mum's collection of Agatha Christie books (she's always enjoyed mystery as a genre and had quite a few). Then I took out any I could find at the local library. As I mentioned in my review of The Murder on the Orient Express, I was a big enough fan of Ms. Christie that I chose to write my 9th grade in depth term paper on her. I think I have also mentioned in a previous review that Christie's stand alone mysteries (not featuring Miss Marple, Poirot or even Tommy and Tuppence), usually with a romantic subplot are my favourite of her books.

Not that the romance is at the forefront here. Bobby and Frankie are very good friends, and grew up together, but she's the younger daughter of an Earl, while he's the third son of the local vicar and co-owner of a garage, they're not exactly social equals. There's some mild jealousy on both of our protagonists' part when the objects of their affection gets a briefly smitten by a handsome gentleman murder suspect (Frankie) and the soulful, sensitive and slightly harried wife of a sinister country doctor who runs an asylum (Bobby). Naturally, it all works out in the end.

Bobby and Frankie go through quite a few elaborate plots in order to try to solve the mystery. There's several likely suspects, some handsome, some sinister. Frankie stages a car accident in order to worm her way into the household of one of the potential murderers. There's attempted murders, and abductions and all manner of hijinks before the mystery is finally solved and our intrepid amateur sleuths get their well deserved happy ending.

Like a lot of the Agatha Christie audio books on Audible, this one is narrated by Emilia Fox. She does a better job with the many varied voices in this one than in The Man in the Brown Suit, where she sadly had the love interest's voice be so gravelly, he sounded like full on Christian Bale Batman. Not the most attractive of qualities.

I'm glad I finally found the time to revisit this favourite of my early teens, and even more glad that it held up as well as I remembered.

Judging a book by its cover: This isn't exactly the most exciting of covers, is it? A colour palette in shades of distinctly brown, with the exception of the silhouette of the couple in the centre of the cover. Doesn't exactly scream excitement and mysterious goings on. I remembered this book fondly, and was glad to see that it lived up to my memory. The book deserves a more inviting cover design.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR9 Book 105: "Murder on the Orient Express" by Agatha Christie

Page count: 274 pages
Audio book length: 6 hrs 37 mins
Rating: 4 stars

Internationally famous private detective Hercule Poirot is on his way back to England after solving a mystery in Syria. He decides to take the Orient Express for part of his journey, only to discover that despite the train normally being quite empty during the winter season, it's so fully booked in first class that he has to stay the first night in a second class cabin. Poirot is approached by one of the passengers, a Mr. Edward Ratchett, who claims he has many enemies and that his life is in danger. He wants to hire Poirot to protect him. The little Belgian detective turns him down.

The second night on the train, when Poirot has been moved into a first class cabin, there are several strange occurrences, and in the morning, the passengers discover that not only has the train stopped entirely, due to large amounts of snow on the tracks, but Edward Ratchett has been murdered during the night. No one could have got onto or off the train, so one of the passengers is the likely culprit. Poirot is tasked with identifying the murderer before the train starts up again and the guilty party can escape.

Murder on the Orient Express is one of Agatha Christie's most famous crime novels. It's a wonderfully clever take on the "locked room" mystery and has been adapted into both film and TV more than once. I honestly can no longer remember if I read the book before watching the 1974 adaptation, starring Albert Finney along with a remarkably star-studded cast. I discovered Ms. Christie's mystery novels when I was around 11 or so, and proceeded to read my way through pretty much all the books I could get at my local library, first in Norwegian translation and later in the English originals. It turns out, by the way, that Agatha Christie's writing is not necessarily the easiest to get through when you're still learning English as a second language (it is, however, a great way to expand your growing vocabulary as long as you are diligent with a dictionary).

Fun fact - when asked to write an in-depth term paper on the topic of our choice in 9th grade (I will have been about 13), I ended up writing probably 40 pages on Agatha Christie - her life and literary career - and probably bored my fellow classmates, almost, but not as much, as the pretentious guy who chose Watergate as his subject. We also had to make a presentation on said term paper as well, and a nearly hour-long presentation about the intricacies of the Watergate scandal is not going to go down well with your average 13-year-old. Especially when most of the others wrote/talked about horses, their favourite sports, a pop group or similar. So while in my mind, they were much more interested in Agatha Christie than Nixon's corruption, hindsight forces me to admit that yeah, they were probably dead bored by my topic as well.

After giving you that charming insight into nerdy Malin's adolescence (I was just never going to fit in with the popular kids in school), back to the book review proper. I had considered re-reading this before the release of the new Kenneth Branagh adaptation currently in cinemas, and when a couple of my fellow Cannonballers revealed that the wonderful Dan Stevens narrated the book, I used one of my carefully hoarded Audible credits to get it right away. Not only do I find Dan Stevens extremely attractive (even when done up in CGI as the Beast), but he really does have a wonderful voice and I loved his narration of Frankenstein when I listened to that a few years ago. In this story, he has to voice a large number of characters of different ages and genders, and I generally think he did a very good job.

This is not a very long book, and if you have somehow been able to remain unspoiled for the solution to a mystery written in the mid-1930s, it's a really fun reveal once all the suspects have been carefully questioned and all the clues are examined. As the Branagh movie has gotten pretty middling reviews (I was somewhat sceptical after seeing Branagh's moustache in the promos), I doubt I'll actually spend my hard-earned pennies to see it in the cinema, but I'm glad I revisited the book.

Judging a book by its cover: I listened to this in audio book, so it's not like it strictly speaking has a cover, but the one that showed on the Audible website is this one, which seems to be one of the modern design covers for the book (at least it's not the movie tie-in version - shudder!) Is it strange that I think this could just as easily be a children's book cover? The train that magically made red balloons? It's more whimsical than suspenseful.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 115: "4:50 from Paddington" by Agatha Christie

Page count: 351 pages
Audio book length: 7 hrs 8 mins
Rating: 2 stars

On her way by train to visit her old friend Jane Marple for Christmas, Mrs Elspeth McGillicuddy is shocked to realise that she's witnessing a murder in the train running parallel. A tall, dark man in a dark coat is strangling a blond woman in a fur coat and there is nothing Mrs McGillicuddy can do. As soon as the train stops, she notifies the ticket inspector and the station master of what she saw, and when she arrives at Miss Marple's, the two talk to the police and report the crime.

No one else appears to have witnessed anything amiss, however. No dead bodies have been found on the train, and no women have been reported missing. There are suggestions that perhaps Mrs. McGillicuddy imagined what she saw, but she is adamant she witnessed a crime, and her friend Miss Marple, far too experienced with the dark deeds that people commit, believes her. Once her friend leaves to visit her children after Christmas, Miss Marple starts her own investigation. She discovers that the train the murderer would have been on comes to a sharp turn shortly before it enters the station in the town of Brackhampton. There is a sloping hill where a body could easily have been dumped.

As Miss Marple is old and incapable of going around to snoop for a dead body herself, she engages the assistance of a young friend, Miss Lucy Eyelesbarrow, a highly intelligent and competent woman whose made a name for herself as the perfect domestic servant. She can perform the duties of housekeeper, cook, nursemaid or nanny for the people she works for, always leaving the household much better off than it was when she left. Because of her dedication and skill, she's in high demand, but has some free time because of the holidays and Miss Marple's problem intrigues her. She manages to secure a post with the Brackenthorpe family, who live in the manor where Miss Marple suspects the body has been hidden. When Lucy finds the dead woman in an antique sarcophagus in one of the manor's outbuilding, there are several mysteries that need to be unravelled. Who is the dead woman, who none in the Brackenthorpe family claim to recognise? How did she end up hidden in their barn? And last, but not least, who murdered the young woman?

Lucy Eyelesbarrow acts as Miss Marple's eyes, ears and legs in the case, while the godson of Miss Marple's good friend, Inspector Craddock, is in charge of the investigation on behalf of the Scotland Yard. As in most good Agatha Christie mysteries, there's a fairly large cast of characters who could all be guilty of the murder, and the blond woman on the train is not the only one who ends up dead.

This audiobook was bundled with The Man in the Brown Suit, a kind gift from my BFF Lydia. As a young teenager, I voraciously devoured all the Agatha Christie novels in Norwegian translation in my local library, and I was pretty sure I'd read most of the books in her bibliography. I know I much preferred the stand-alones and the Poirot books to those with Miss Marple, and at no point when listening to this book, did I remember anything that made it likely I'd read it before. They do all blend together a bit, but I really think this was the first time I came across this particular story. While Agatha Christie didn't really write any bad books, this one very much suffered from being listened to right after one of my all-time favourites. While Lucy was an engaging enough character and Miss Marple obviously is a very clever old lady, a sedate manor mystery set in the English countryside set shortly after Christmas just cannot compete with Anne Beddingfeld's adventures in South Africa with diamond theft, cruise ships, civil unrest in South African and dashing young men in brown suits.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 114: "The Man in the Brown Suit" by Agatha Christie

Page count: 288 pages
Audio book length: 7hrs 59 mins
Rating: 5 stars

Anne Beddingfeld's father is a famous archaeologist and anthropologist. He dies, leaving Anne mostly penniless, but hungry for adventure. She kindly rejects the proposal of the village doctor and accepts her father's solicitor's invitation to stay with him and his wife for a time in London. Shortly after her arrival in the capital, she is witness to an accidental death. A man in a large overcoat reeking of mothballs falls onto the tracks of the train station, and a tall, bearded man claiming to be a doctor examines the body. The bearded man in the brown suit loses a scrap of paper, which also reeks of mothballs. Could he have been searching the dead body? The paper reads "17 122 Kilmorden Castle" - what could it mean?

The newspapers discover a connection with the dead man on the train tracks and a young woman murdered in the house of Sir Eustace Pedler. Not only that, but the man in the brown suit who Anne witnessed is the main suspect for the woman's murder. Then Anne discovers that the Kilmorden Castle is a cruise ship, sailing to South Africa. A first class ticket costs exactly the amount of money she was left after her father's debts were paid off, and Anne sees this as a clear sign that adventure is calling. With cheek and audacity, she gets the owner of the main newspaper hunting for "The Man in the Brown Suit" to agree to hire her on as a freelance reporter if she tracks down more information connected with the crime.

On the ship, the adventurous, but nearly penniless Anne befriends society beauty Susanne Blair and earns the admiration of both Sir Eustace Pedler, on his way to South Africa on a task for the Foreign Office and Colonel Race, a tall and striking gentleman rumoured to be working for the Secret Service. Among the travellers are also the suspiciously untanned Reverend Chichester, who claims to have been working in the depths of Borneo for years; Guy Pagett, Sir Eustace's secretary and Harry Raybourn, a mysterious young man who stumbles into Anne's cabin one night, having been stabbed by unknown assailants in the hallway. Sir Eustace claims the handsome young man is his other secretary, but Anne deduces that he is none other than the infamous "Man in the Brown Suit". After her brief evening encounter with him, she's convinced he didn't kill the woman in England, and becomes determined to clear his name.

The Man in the Brown Suit, along with They Came to Baghdad and Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (the first Christie I ever read), is probably my favourite Agatha Christie book, a fact my BFF Lydia knew very well. So trying to cheer me up when I was unable to read physical books while concussed, she sent me this as an audio book, bundled (really rather strangely) with the eighth Miss Marple mystery, 4:50 from Paddington. I hadn't realised, until I looked it up on Wikipedia to remind myself of the name of some of the secondary characters, that this was only Ms. Christie's fourth novel, which makes it even more of an impressive achievement. Apart from some very clunky info-dumping in the prologue, when two criminal henchmen sit around discussing the many nefarious acts of their employer, the shadowy "Colonel", in a way that no people ever would talk about a person they worked for, this book is a fun thrill-ride from start to finish.

There is Anne, the self-proclaimed adventuress, who loves "The Perils of Pamela" and wants to fall in love with someone strong, silent and dashing. Full of pluck and determination, she throws caution to the wind and travels to South Africa in search of a murderer, with barely a penny in her pocket, just convinced that it'll all work itself out somehow. Some might find her callous disregard for practicalities annoying, but I find her delightful and she's not wrong, things keep turning out in her favour, even if she keeps ending up in near-death situations.

This story has murder; stolen diamonds: abductions; dastardly henchmen; a cunning underworld kingpin; a dashing, wronged and emotionally vulnerable love interest and more. I like any Christie with a romantic subplot and my only gripe with the book is that Emilia Fox, who mostly does an excellent job with narrating, gave Harry Raybourn, our haunted love interest, a voice so dark and gravelly that it mostly reminded me of Christian Bale doing Batman-growling. See, Christian Bale's normal voice - lovely, luscious and sexy as heck. Christian Bale's Batman-growling - just not hot. Which is a shame, cause Harry Raybourn should be passionate and appealing. It didn't detract too much from my enjoyment, but means I can't rate the narration of the audiobook as highly as I'd like.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR7 Book 52: "They Came to Baghdad" by Agatha Christie - Cannonball, people!

Page count: 364 pages
Rating: 5 stars

In this book, we meet the adventurous Victoria Jones, a young woman with a knack for lying frequently and convincingly, who shortly after being fired from her most recent position as a mediocre shorthand typist, meets a handsome and charming young man in the park. They strike up a conversation, he confides that he is about to go to Baghdad and asks to take a couple of photographs of her as a memento. Victoria is smitten, and as the young man she's fallen head over heels for is going to be in Baghdad, she needs to go there to. A few days later, her contact at the employment agency calls to confess an American woman needs a companion to accompany her on her journey to the self-same city and Victoria can't believe her luck.

Unbeknownst to Victoria, who just wants to reunite with Edward, the young man in the park, there is a secret international diplomatic summit planned in Baghdad and there are sinister forces who are trying to sabotage it. A heavily disguised agent named Carmichael is dodging assassins all over the Iraqi countryside trying to get proof to his superiors about the conspiracy. An efficient and mysterious young woman named Anna Scheele surprises her American employer by asking for time off to go to England to visit her ailing sister. Richard Baker is an officious archaeologist on his way back to the archaeology dig of the illustrious Dr. Pauncefoot-Jones. Mr. Dakin is the official trying to ensure that the summit goes off without a hitch. He knows that there are a number of security risks and is hoping for the safe return of his agent Carmichael.

 Once in Baghdad, Victoria's brain is working overtime to figure out how she's going to manage for money when her job as companion for Mrs. Clipp is ended. On  one of her first nights in Baghdad, a wounded man staggers into hotel room and dies in her bed after whispering a few seemingly unconnected words. This man turns out to be none other than Carmichael, and  his death in her room puts Victoria in the centre of a dangerous conspiracy. When she uses her wits and what little information he gave her to track down her beloved Edward, she starts to suspect that he may not have been entirely truthful when he claimed during their brief meeting that he'd love for her to come and see him, and that there are a number of young women in the organisation he works for who don't look kindly on their new rival for Edward's affection.

Soon Victoria finds herself abducted and abandoned in a house in the Iraqi countryside. Ever resourceful, Victoria gets out of the house where she's been locked, but is stuck wandering far from civilisation.  Her little white lie that she's Dr. Pauncefoot-Jones' niece, in Baghdad to join him on his expedition come back to haunt her when she's rescued by none other than his assistant, Richard Baker, en route to the expedition in question. Will Victoria's gift for lying get her out of another sticky situation? Will she be able to figure out what the dying words of Mr. Carmichael meant, and help Mr. Dakin stop the shadowy conspiracy threatening the peace summit?

This book is much less of a murder mystery than it is a suspenseful adventure novel. Unlike the many more traditional Agatha Christie novels, where Miss. Marple or Hercule Poirot gather a number of assorted suspects in the drawing room of a country house (or train carriage, or fancy ship or whatever exotic location Christie decided to place them in for variety), this book mainly follows the brazen Victoria as she lies her way from a boring typist's job in London to being an essential, if somewhat unwitting part in an international conspiracy. While some might find her quite an unlikable heroine, I found her delightful. She's not so much a compulsive liar as a very good actress who thinks swiftly on her feet and improvises skillfully. She also doesn't really seem to lie to directly swindle people, just to take advantage of things she might not have otherwise, such as impeccable references or pedigree. She's a bit too impulsive than is healthy, but she discovers that herself when she reunites with Edward in Baghdad and starts suspecting that he may not be as smitten with her as she was with him.

When she ends up at the dig of Dr. Pauncefoot-Jones, she is lucky that the old archaeologist is extremely absent-minded and scatter-brained, wholly focused on his dig, so he can barely remember whether he has a niece at all, mistaking Victoria for an anthropologist scheduled to arrive at the dig some weeks later. Richard Baker, on the other hand, knows something is up with the strange woman he found wandering in the countryside. He just can't figure out why she would pretend to be his boss' relative, wildly fabricating her knowledge of archaeological artifacts.

Most of my favourite Agatha Christies are the stand-alone ones, often featuring a romantic subplot while there's murder mysteries and adventure. Books like Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (the first Christie mystery I ever read), The Man in the Brown Suit and this. I hadn't read this book for nearly a decade, when I decided to re-read it so it could be my 52nd book of the year. While the book started more slowly than I remembered, introducing the various minor players in the bigger game, to a reader who has no idea how they all connect, it gets moving plenty fast enough once we get introduced to Victoria. I only half remembered the ending, so watching all the pieces coming together towards the end of the story was almost as enjoyable as reading the book for the first time. I'm glad it still holds up. So with that - Cannonball!

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.