I’ve always liked Destination Unknown, Sad Cypress and The Body In the Library.
I love the ones that give a really vivid snapshot of life in a certain place at a certain time, like They Came To Baghdad. The plot isn’t that satisfying:
it’s one of the neo-Nazi/Young Siegfried ones - New World Order conspiracy, etc
and frankly the absolutely fascinating, sexy, exciting bloke the heroine should end up with ends up dead early on (so she ends up with a boring dry stick IMO) but the initial descriptions of Baghdad of mid-last century are fascinating.
According to Iraqi friends of mine, many archaeological and historical sites in Iraq were destroyed beyond salvage in the last Gulf war, god knows what will happen if a new war happens. Still, it’s interesting and sad to see how Iraq was - how open, how busy, how bustling and multi-cultural - before the reign of Saddam came in.
There’s a great film of Endless Night - totally 70s setting, fabulous cast - to be honest I remember far more about the seventies-style house with moving bits to it than I do about the plot.
I find some of Christie’s work has weathered time better than others. The bolshevik-nazi-conspiracy-type stuff feels rather dated now, though one can imagine how relevant that would have been to the paranoia of the age. Likewise some of the early short stories with Poirot are a bit twee (I’ve just been re-reading a whole lot recently).
I just reread And Then There Were None and it is very clever - but it doesn’t have a happy ending in any way at all.
Other amusing title change: They Do It With Mirrors (UK) -> Murder With Mirrors (US).
Gah! I just looked up The Murder of Roger Ackroyd on a bookstore website to see about ordering it, when I saw a listing for Who Killed Roger Ackroyd. I followed the link, curious to know how this other book related… and the blurb gave away the solution to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Well, dammit! What’s the point in ordering either now?
Mrs McGinty’s Dead and They Do It With Mirrors are the two books that stand out in my memory, although I couldn’t tell you why. I had an Agatha Christie fetish and read many of her books, but haven’t picked one up in years. Oddly, I happen to be reading a biography* of her now…
- Not really a biography. One of those “What did she do in those days she was missing? Here’s my theory…” type books.
Hey ** cazzle **, I have a similar book called Agatha. Same book?
If it’s by Kathleen Tynan, it’s exactly the same 
Finding it a disappointment. I went on Amazon the other day to find a real biography, but somehow I got distracted and ended up buying $100 worth of Tudor histories and a Pratchett 
Will have to make a second attempt at getting a decent Agatha Christie biography - any suggestions?
I thought AC’s own book about her life was fascinating, although be warned she doesn’t mention the missing period at all. Her life really spanned the century (last century, now…).
Back when they had the Poirot series on every Monday night, I once told a friend I had to go home to watch Poirot. She said, “Perot? Ross Perot??!!”
At least it wasn’t “Parrot? Hercules Parrot?”
If you want to read an offbeat Christie book, try her attempt at a Sax Rohmer thriller… THE BIG FOUR (1929) Poirot goes up against a conspiracy of four criminal masterminds. The Fu Manchu analogue never actually makes an appearance, and most of the nefarious deeds are done by a master of disguise who keeps giving himself away.
Toward the end, Hercules formerly unknown twin brother Achille Poirot turns up.....As a thrilling pulp adventure, the book has no momentum or suspense, but its interesting to see Christie working in a different genre, and its fun to try and match her Big Four with the great villains who inspired them (the chameleon is apparently Bulldog Drummonds archfoe, Carl Peterson).
I liked her play, “Mousetrap” - which I believe is/was the longest running play in history.
When I was travelling through Europe the first time, I got hooked on her books and was reading them back to back…then I started to get pissed off because a few of the books I bought were books I had already read, with NEW TITLES! So, I am still not sure if I read them all, but I like her style and there was the “quaint” factor of the age of innocence…when young women were smitten and young men were foolhardy…
Yeah, thats the same one I have.
I did see an actual autobiography somewhere.
Aha! I believe that’s the very book I was referring to earlier! It’s a shame about what happened to you, though; something similar happened to me, when I read a mystery novel trivia book that I didn’t realize asked questions about the most spoiler-ific plot points one can imagine.
As for my favorite… I don’t know. I have a soft spot for A Carribean Mystery because seeing the TV movie version moved me to buy the book version, thus starting up my present-day reading habits at an early age.
I would love to see the TV movie of that. I first read A Carribean Mystery in Italian (I was trying to learn Italian, so decided to work my way through a novel).
Interestingly - perhaps because my progress was so slow and I was literally reading every single word with a dictionary - I correctly guessed the murderer almost as soon as he/she appeared, I usually never have a clue who it is.
It’s definitely still worth reading Roger Ackroyd even if you know who did it. It’s the sort of book that you want to read at least twice - like seeing Sixth Sense - because your second read-through has a whole different perspective.
Likewise I still plan to see the Mousetrap someday, even though some idiotfuck at college deliberately blurted out the murderer to a whole group of us, when we were chatting about Christie/Mousetrap. He did it deliberately, he said, because he thought it was a bad play and wasn’t worth seeing - somehow his personal opinion justified spoiling it for eternity for the rest of us. I am so, so sad I ever found out, and still angry towards such a selfish fucktard.
But I still expect to enjoy the play someday.