Agathon #14: The Sittaford Mystery (1931)

Tansy and I started out with a challenge to read every book written by Agatha Christie, in order of publication – we’re blogging as we go along. We spoil all the things!

Yes, it’s been a while, but we’re still going! The Sittaford Mystery is also sometimes called Murder at Hazelmoor.

KATHRYN: First I need to say that I didn’t actually note the giant spoiler on the front cover, until I was photographing it for the blog...



This feels like a fairly ‘typical’ Christie murder mystery, although it has the distinction of including neither Miss Marple nor Poirot. Instead the detective in charge of the case is an Inspector Narracott, who is described as competent and intelligent, but doesn’t have much in the way of defining features otherwise. Indeed for the first ten chapters of the book I was wondering if Christie had written a mystery in which the detective had no personality at all. Come chapter eleven, however, it becomes apparent that Inspector Narracott is not the star of the book at all. Enter Emily Trefusis, determined to clear her fiance, Jim Pearson, who has been wrongly accused of the murder.

Normally I would be thrilled with a plucky young lady intent on solving a mystery (think Tuppence or Bundle) but I did not warm to Emily. Yes she is a capable young lady, but one of her primary methods is to fool men into thinking that she is less capable than she is, so they help her. Maybe if I was reading this in 1931, this would appeal, but here in 2013 the idea makes me weary. Can’t she just be capable and awesome without hiding it? Emily also seems to be very brittle, which I guess might be the case if your fiance has been accused of murder. She doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor and it is really not clear why she wants to marry Jim Pearson in the first place, as he seems to be completely incompetent and not even in an adorable way. (It is explained away by Emily declaring she needs someone to giude and look after. Again, this doesn’t appeal to me as a 21st century woman. Too much work!!)

I’m not sure any of the characters in this book rang true, nor were any that likeable. Instead we get a series of cardboard cutouts - old retired army men, grumpy invalids, flighty young women, and anonymous policemen. And while there are clues scattered through the book, and tied up neatly in the end, it felt a bit like an anticlimax. There didn’t seem to be much at stake, and I didn’t really care who had done it.

Even the ‘red herring’ sub plot, which involves an escapee from nearby prison on Dartmoor, is fairly abruptly resolved - to the extent that once the escapee is (spoiler alert) recaptured, his daughter’s response can be pretty much boiled down to ‘Oh well, he’s got pneumonia now. It’s probably just as well if he dies...’

I noted in ‘A Murder at the Vicarage’ that Christie used a first person narrator to good effect to mask the identity of the murderer until Miss Marple chose to reveal him. So just for the record, ‘Sittaford’ used 3rd person/omniscient narration, and the reader follows more than one character. Once Emily works out who did it, we get a few vague descriptions of what she has found, including a declaration of ‘I know who did it now, but not why’, and then that scene fades to black until the final reveal. This kind of felt like cheating…

TANSY: My apologies for the long delay on this one, I read it back when I had pneumonia last year, really enjoyed it and then never got around to writing it up!

I liked Emily a bit more than you did, K. I found her quite likeable in that Bundle-Tuppence sort of way. I also very much enjoyed the way that her detective work revolved around the exchange of confidences - she feels a lot like a junior Miss Marple. I also liked the journalist she dragged around with her, Charles, and enjoyed their banter.

It was a bit odd that the murder mystery seemed to be less central than the ongoing theme that everyone could see there was something romantic going on between Emily and Charles, and that despite working to save Jim from prison, she was *obviously* going to ditch him for our hapless young reporter. The idea of course is that Emily is herself in denial about this - and the rather odd sort of punchline is in fact that she was right all along about her feelings for Jim and not actually fancying Charles, thank you very much, and she planned to marry the man she was actually engaged with.
While I agree with you that Jim was totally uninteresting, I did find it amusing that Christie was playing with (and debunking) the trope and that Emily did not in fact change her mind purely because Charles was in love with her. Almost like she (Christie) thinks that unrequited love isn’t remotely romantic and doesn’t deserve to be rewarded…

(I have an unfortunate glitch in my programming that responds far too sympathetically to unrequited love stories, and have been trying to debug myself for years to no avail, so I must admit at this point that I was shipping Emily and Charles like mad, damn it).

I think this book might be the point where Christie has realised she’s a bit too sharp and cynical for the genre she’s writing in - it’s set up almost as a parody of her own previous works, with all the details about the murder and the trick to it and so on. But maybe that’s just because she is using so many elements that are used in more iconic books or indeed dozens and dozens of her imitators? This is the first Christie set in a snowbound manor, yes?

It was all terribly clever with the trick to it, but there was something that felt a bit off about it - like a short story worth of plot held together with banter and flirting. Still, I did find it very readable even with a lung that didn’t work, so there’s that.

Coming up:
1932: Peril at End House, Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, Chief Inspector Japp
1932: The Thirteen Problems, Miss Marple Shorts
1933: Lord Edgware Dies (also Thirteen at Dinner ), Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, Chief Inspector Japp

Agathon #8 - The Big Four [1927]

Tansy and I started out with a challenge to read every book written by Agatha Christie, in order of publication – now we’ve dragged Nick along with us for the ride, and we’re blogging as we go along. We spoil all the things! (see Tansy's post for some of the most eye-opening coverart yet! http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/agathon-8-the-big-four/#more-7122)

TANSY:
Is it me or was this a really, really weird story? It’s like all of the early Agatha spy and espionage capers got crammed into a Poirot tale, and he’s spending most of his time pretending valiantly that he’s not in the wrong book. But he so is!

I liked having Hastings back very much, as I’ve missed his voice, though I am a touch irritated that Cinderella was packed off to South America and we don’t get to see her. The bit at the beginning where Hastings jumps off the boat and finds Poirot about to get on a boat himself to go see him is utterly adorable.

But the rest of it? O.M.G.

Is this the first time that Christie has written Poirot a story that feels like it’s supposed to be his last? Actually you could probably argue that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had that feeling, but this one seems designed as a swansong – and not a very successful one considering that the next novel up is also a Poirot story.

I’ve left it a bit too long between reading the book and reviewing it, but the whole Big Four guff wasn’t that much clearer while I was reading the thing – the whole elaborate story felt like a massive fake-out, and it was all the more disappointing that it was in the end quite a serious threat.

The relationship between Poirot and Hastings does feel very real and earnest, and is the only thing pinning the flimsy, melodramatic plot to the pages. The scenes where Hastings believes his wife has been kidnapped and that he has to betray Poirot (but still wants to warn him) are marvellous, very heartfelt and chilling, and make the book worthwhile, but the rest of it is pretty ridiculous.

My headcanon will remain that the whole thing was a massive con set up by Cinderella as an entertaining jape for her husband’s birthday, and to get him back with Poirot because he had been so sad without him and their adventures.

See what I mean?

KATHRYN:
No, Tansy, it’s not just you. This story is very weird. I do actually remember reading this back in my unformed years, when i just read whatever Christie was available in the library. So I was already expecting ‘cracked out’ going in (and was also really intrigued that Christie had followed up the the skill and subtlety of Ackroyd with ‘cracked out’). However, even with forewarning, ‘The Big Four’ appeared even more cracked out than I had remembered.

BUT! BUT! It’s not Christie’s fault! Well it’s still her fault, but there was a reason for this book, as was explained to me in the afterward that accompanied my version of the book (my version lives in a 1920s omnibus with Ackroyd and The Blue Train). Christie had lost her writing mojo, after the death of her mother and the breakdown of her first marriage. She also had a book contact to fill, and needed money. Therefore she took a bunch of short stories already written, which all referenced the idea of The Big Four, wrote some filler and an ending, and the rest is history! So, yes, the book is awful, but it is justifiably awful, and well done her on fulfilling her contract!

Learning this made me forgive a lot of the issues with the book, and it was a relief to learn that my main impression – that story felt like a random collection of short stories, rather than a novel proper – was completely reasonable.

It is also nice to have Hastings back, although he is an awful arse for a lot of the story. I was NOT impressed that he forgot about his wife for months on end. I’m sure Cinderella was perfectly able to take care of herself, but I did feel it reflected a rather large character flaw on Hasting’s – particularly when he goes google eyed over lovely young stenographers at the drop of a hat.

It was also lovely to see portrayal of a Brilliant Lady Scientist. Madame Olivier may have been nuts (and evil), but she’s also kinda Madame Curie on steroids, so I’m happy to have her. It almost makes up for the rather stereotypical portrayal of the Russians, Chinese and French…

So I’m not as disappointed with this book as I might have been, though I do hope it remains an oddity rather than something Christie revisits again.

NICK:
So, Agatha Christie gets her Sax Rohmer on. And her Conan Doyle. And a few others that haven’t lasted.

Much as I love (some of) the pulps the Big Four owes life to, I really didn’t like this book much.

It has many of the tropes of the pulps – ill-defined weapons that could change the course of naval war, Russian exiles, fancy killing devices, masters of disguise, inscrutable oriental master villains, plots to control the world, even an underground base from which to rule – the ending is almost like a Bond film in some ways.

The book feels almost completely “un-Christie”. Even though she often broke out of the “cosy” mystery genre for which she’s mostly remembered, it still feels very strange when she departs from the genre as thoroughly as she does in the Big Four.

The Big Four is competently written although, while the individual linked mysteries that make up the book are generally competent, I had no connection with the overall plot about the Big Four bad guys trying to control the world. It seemed excessive and overly flamboyant for both Poirot and for Christie herself, who is much better when the motivations of her villians are more venal.

There were some highlights, too. I kind of liked Madame Olivier – but Countess Vera Rossakoff, the fallen Russian adventuress, has always been one of my favourite side characters in the Poirot stories (as much as she owes to Irene Adler). She’s one of the strongest of Christie’s female characters, for mine, in that she acts through her own agency and largely seems in control of the events and not, as many others were, a mere puppet carried along by the events surrounding her.

COMING NEXT:
The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)
[Hercule Poirot]
The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)
[Eileen “Bundle” Brent, Superintendent Battle]
Partners in Crime (1929)/The Mysterious Mr Quinn (1930)

Agathon #3: Murder on the Links (1923)

Tansy and I have taken the challenge to read every book written by Agatha Christie, in order of publication and we’re blogging as we go along. We’re calling it the Agathon! . As a warning, there may be spoilers, though they will be signposted. Tansy's post is here: http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/agathon-3-murder-on-the-links-1923/

3 - The Murder on the Links (1923)
Featuring: Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings

KATHRYN SAYS: Well I’m happy to report that in ‘The Murder on the Links’, Poirot is not longer housesharing in the countryside with seven other Belgians, but is instead flatsharing in London with Hastings! We find him at breakfast, bemoaning the lack of interesting cases for him to solve - rather he is receiving requests to speak to the local Scout group. But, of course, an interesting letter then turns up almost immediately, urging Poirot to travel to France to aid a millionaire apparently in fear of his life.


Murder on the LinksBut I’m getting ahead of myself. The book actually open with Hastings meeting a mysterious and somewhat irreverent young lady on a train, AND HE FALLS IN LOVE. Perhaps not right there on the train, but during the course of the book, Hastings finds his Cinderella. And we’re not just talking about the normal misguided Hastings-love, but a full-blown, sacrifice-his-friendship-with-Poirot-if-he-must type of love. Indeed having read this book before, the thing I remembered most from my first reading was Hastings defiant actions to save his beau (Small spoiler: she didn’t do it, phew.). What’s more, Hastings’ Cinderella appears to be delightful. She is impertinent, devious, acrobatic, and not afraid to call him prehistoric when he expects her to be more horrified about a murder than she is.

Barring the fact that I have read this book before, ‘The Murder on the Links’ does make me question what I consider the ‘typical’ Poirot mystery. Rather than occurring in one location, there’s a lot of travelling in this book and scenes change quire rapidly. Furthermore, after wondering in my review of ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ whether there would ever be a Poirot book without the traditional Poirot-gathers-everyone-in-a-room-and-tells-em-who-dunnit scene, here we are in only his second book and THERE ISN’T ONE! Instead the murderer is revealed after Poirot sets a trap to catch them in the act.

As noted in previous reviews by Tansy, Christie still seems to be making a commentary on murder mysteries in her text, with the appearance of a rival Detective to solve the mystery - Monsieur Giraud. He is the polar opposite of Poirot and from Christie’s description we know we should not like him from the start. Poirot’s commentary on Giraud’s detective style is entertaining and I particularly liked his commentary on the ‘romantic’ idea that all important clues must be infinitesimal. As Poirot says, ‘A clue of two feet long is every bit as valuable as one measuring two millimetres!”

Finally, as a postscript, ‘The Murder on the Links’ was available from my library as a graphic novel, so I got that out too. Alas, I didn’t think much of the translation. I found a lot of characterisation and plot details missing, while the smooth rendering of Poirot’s figure seemed to border on parody. It simply didn’t have the emotion or drama of the original novel.

TANSY SAYS: Yep, we’re back in meta commentary territory again - or in fact, this being only Christie’s third novel, we’ve never left it. The story opens with reference to a compelling opening to a story (“Hell!” said the Duchess) and then goes on to rework it for Hastings’ own purposes. I also felt that the whole plot (which is utterly preposterous, relying on several coincidences colliding at once) hinged largely on a couple of people designing an imperfect murder mystery scenario based on the conventions of the genre. Christie’s universe is one in which her characters are immersed in the appropriate (for the story they’re in) body of pop culture, which goes to show that all those film & TV makers in the 90’s weren’t as smart as they thought they were!

I love Cinderella - though I’m not sure she’s ever as awesome as she is in that opening scene, bowling Hastings over with her unladylike declarations and wicked sense of humour. I haven’t yet decided if she’s played by Katherine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall, but she’s just that type, and I can’t for the life of me see what she sees in him!

Poirot is intriguing me as a character, probably because I was so uninterested in him in my younger days (I preferred Miss Marple) and because I never read these early books. He’s so enabling of Hastings’ bad behaviour, and a complete matchmaker, though he also delights in being several steps ahead of everyone. If he reminded me of Sherlock Holmes in his first book, his twinkly eyes in this one are making me think more of the Doctor. He seems to live on a different plane of reality to everyone else!

I think the solution is over-complicated for a Christie, as I said before. Such a mish mash of events colliding on the one night! I also think it’s odd that no one ever suggested that the young pair at the centre of the story might actually be brother and sister, which seemed to me to be a definite possibility considering the timing of the whole thing. On the whole, the pleasure of this one is from the interactions between Hastings, Poirot and Cinderella rather than the story itself, though I did appreciate that Hastings did so much working-out-of-stuff in his own brain, even if he was often wrong. And I liked the little detail with the daggers, and how the ‘one of a kind’ murder weapon was actually not, which can be seen as symbolic considering the storyline of the sisters, Bella and Dulcie.

As a side note, did you notice that the sisters in this story are called Bella and Dulcie? Their parents weren’t giving them a lot to live up to at ALL!

Can’t help thinking Poirot is so keen to marry Hastings off so he can be rid of him! Though I see there’s at least one more book coming which features the duo, so look forward to seeing how things turn out with the romance. Will we be seeing Mrs Cinderella Hastings? I loved the bit where her acrobatic skills and sturdy wrists came in super handy, and can totally see Poirot thinking she might actually make a better partner in crime.

COMING SOON
4. The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)
Anne Beddingfeld, Colonel Race
Poirot Investigates (1924)
Short Stories.
5. The Secret of Chimneys (1925)
Anthony Cade, Superintendent Battle

Agathon #2: The Secret Adversary (1922)

Tansy and I have taken the challenge to read every book written by Agatha Christie, in order of publication and we’re blogging as we go along. We’re calling it the Agathon! . As a warning, there may be spoilers, though they will be signposted. Tansy's post is here:  http://tansyrr.com/tansywp/agathon-2-the-secret-adversary-1922/


2 - The Secret Adversary (1922)
Featuring: Tommy and Tuppence, Inspector Japp (mentioned)

KATHRYN SAYS: I think it’s fascinating that Agatha Christie is now best known as a writer of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot murder mysteries, and here we are at book two at the Agathon and it’s a spy novel!

‘The Secret Adversary’ opens with childhood chums Tommy Beresford and Tuppence (Prudence) Cowell running into each other in London. World War I is over and there is a dearth of jobs for both ex-VAD women, like Tuppence, and ex-Army men like Tommy. They decide to form a joint venture the "The Young Adventurers, Ltd.", and hijnks ensue, as they are become embroiled in finding a missing American girl and tracking down a spy ring that is threatening to bring down the British Government. Even though I had already read it before, I found it quite exciting.

Is it a good spy novel? Well, given what I’ve read of John le Carre and Frederick Forsythe (who to be fair did write about the Cold War, whereas this is between WWI and WWII), I’m not sure it’s a particularly accurate one. Other than Mr Brown, the villians are cardboard cutouts -there’s a Russian and a German and a man from The Union (gasp!), and an Irishman from Sinn Fein. I have no idea how it actually relates to the politics of the time, but it comes over as a bit simplified. However, the level of detail in the political, erm, plot, contrasts signficantly against those parts of the novel that are rendered in lovely detail, such as the very detailed and specific description of how Tuppence went about posing as a maid for Rita Vandermeyer (and her qualifications for doing so). And, at the heart of this very jolly spy book, there is a murder and a mystery and Christie weaves these both into the story very well (though perhaps with a few less red-herring-y clues as in a Poirot novel). I also have to note that I *love* that this is a spy book where eating is important! Tommy and Tuppence are continually sitting down to buns or a good lunch of sole (particularly once they are ensconced at the Ritz).

After Tansy noted Hasting’s propensity for ill-advised love in her review of ‘The Mysterious Affair of Styles’, it dawned on me that Agatha Christie books actually have a fairly high romance quotient. Two books in and we are two for two on ill-advised marriage proposals, for example. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more romance in books to come. I don’t want to include spoilers for ‘ The Secret Adversary’, but I will note that Christie writes the sort of Repressed English Love that made me so fond of Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett, and this certainly something interesting to realise about both myself and Agatha.

So. In summary I love Tommy and Tuppence - or perhaps more accurately I am fond of Tommy and I love Tuppence (I have failed to wax lyrical about Tuppence’s independence and initiative, but yea she is awesome). Christie only wrote 5 Tommy and Tuppence books (4 novels and 1 short story collection) over 50 years, approximately one every decade and one of the things I’ve been looking forward to particularly in the Agathon is reading them in order, and watching how the characters grow and age with each book. I would love to know what prompted her to write about Tommy and Tuppence in her second book, after having made what appears to have been a promisinig start with Poirot in ‘Styles’ (if anyone can point me towards a good biography of Christie that tells me this, please leave comment!)

TANSY SAYS: Hijinks ensue indeed. This novel is utterly bonkers! It feels more like a screwball comedy than a mystery or spy novel, and I find it fascinating that once again we are getting meta-commentary about genre conventions from Christie in the mouths of her characters - in this case I was particularly charmed by Tommy’s ruminations on how hard it was to follow a person in a cab in real life, as opposed to the cinema!

The first quarter of the plot is so entirely dependent on crazy coincidence that I got the feeling that Tommy and Tuppence were both completely aware that they were in a novel, and determined to make the most of it. Halfway through the story, though, the banter and the jolly japes become rather grim in a scene which makes it clear (or did at least to me) that one of two people our rapscallion heroes have in their confidence is actually a bad un - and very cleverly, the novel twists back and forth on the question of which right to the end.

I’m glad we had this interesting point, because otherwise the disastrously long separation between Tommy and Tuppence threatened to bore me - Tuppence remains interesting when her partner in (solving) crime is absent, but Tommy rather less so, except when he is talking about Tuppence.

But oh - I wouldn’t have cared if the plot was ten times duller than it is, not when these two are around with their suppers at the Ritz and their pound notes, and simmering affections below banter and bluff. I’m rather sad to know that I won’t get to see *this* Tommy and Tuppence, the careless twenty-somethings on the verge of real life, in future books, but I am terribly interested to see how they grow up.

As a side note, I love the fact that this novel is so deeply rooted in its time - from the Lusitania to the war history of our heroes (Tuppences wartime career is hilarious in the detail she recounts) and all manner of other social detail. I always find it fascinating to read novels that feel like historical novels - that is, are aware of things which people would later find of historical interest, if that makes sense.

Also, I’m pretty sure that significant chunks of this novel were pinched for a Trixie Belden plot. Just saying.

COMING UP SOON:
3. The Murder on the Links (1923)
Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings
4. The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)
Anne Beddingfeld, Colonel Race
5. Poirot Investigates (1924)
A short story collection! (presumably involving Poirot :-)