I thought I'd start with a classic Agatha Christie novel, because that's where a lot of my lit-love started. While far from her most famous book (see: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, or And Then There Were None), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd set a standard for the locked room British style of mystery writing that has certainly never been surpassed. It is also the lone Christie novel on the List (which I'll designate with a capital 'L' throughout this blog).
When it was first published in 1926, Christie was a young author with only 2 or 3 other novels under her belt. It featured her detective, the retired Belgian police officer Hercule Poirot. Poirot was a mass of idiosyncrasies and was very much in the vein of popular fiction detectives of the time. He famously relied on the 'little grey cells' in his brain to solve puzzles that made fools of lesser mortals.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd concerns exactly what the title would cause one to expect. Ackroyd, a wealthy man in a small British village, is found murdered in his study. Poirot, who has recently moved to the village in retirement to grow vegetable marrows, is intrigued by the case and soon discovers there are no shortage of suspects and motives. However, there appears to be a major lack of opportunity to commit the crime in between the time Ackroyd was last seen and the discovery of his body.
Christie stymied me most of the time, but this was one of the few novels that actually took my breath away upon finding out the identity of the killer. Some critics have dismissed the ending as a dirty trick, but a careful reading reveals that all of the clues are laid out during the narrative. Christie devised any number of incredibly clever stories, but a reader would be hard pressed to find one trickier than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
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A friend of mine lent this to me a few years ago, and I was totally gobsmacked by the ending. He told me that he'd read it when he was a kid, and that he couldn't stand the suspense any more and flipped to the last page. He was so irritated at his own lack of self-control that he immediately told his brother, who was waiting to read it. I knew his brother, too--I'm sure that if his brother had read it first, the exact same thing would have happened.
Ha! I used to have that temptation all the time, especially as I was reading most of the Agatha Christie novels when I was 13 or 14 years old (not a great time for self-control).
My Agatha Christie phase was a couple years earlier, 10-12 years old, I think. I never skipped ahead, but I did read them 3 or 4 times apiece, which is a little strange. I mean, most kids reread books, I think, but not murder mysteries...
When I reread one now, I am sometimes able to be surprised again because it has been so many years. Still, usually about halfway through, it will all click and I'll remember. The best thing about rereading these books as an adult is all of the relatively subtle class humor she injects. That was totally lost on my young teenage self.
Yes, I don't remember any class humor, but some things definitely stick with me--I remember I surprised some friends a few months ago by saying, "well, of course cyanide tastes like bitter almonds." Apparently not everyone knows that...
It is amazing the nuggets of information we pick up. Christie worked in a dispensary during the first World War and her knowledge of poisons was pretty comprehensive. In fact, there was one instance when a person used a Christie murder in real life.
Christie's own class bias and generational racism show through pretty clearly in a lot of her books, especially the later ones. Foreigners (even Poirot!) are often treated with a general disdain or are used for comic effect. Her dislike of the swinging 60s is on full display in books like Third Girl.
One book, I remember, has a character saying something like, "he's a queer fellow, though I hear that word means something different these days." And then they talk about having a "gay old time" a few pages later.
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