Recently I've been getting into the Agatha Christie stories. The local public television station is running the David Suchet Poirot series and I've been requesting the Geraldine McEwan Marple series from Netflix, and now I want to start reading through the Christie corpus. I read some of her books when I was a kid, but I haven't read any in the last fifteen years and I never read any series of hers to completion.
Which detective should I start with? Miss Marple? Hercule Poirot? Another?
I'm a Poirot girl all the way. It doesn't make a huge difference, but if you can, you should read them in order, because there are references that come up repeatedly, mainly to Poirot's infatuation with the one that got away, and to Hastings' wife (whom he meets in one story).
I was intending to read them all in the chronological order of events, as far as I can determine it. I say "of events" because the very last Poirot novel was written in the 1940s and locked away for three decades. It's really important in the case of the Tommy and Tuppence mysteries because they age as in real life. In the 1920s, they're in their 20s, and they're elderly in their last appearance in a Christie novel (Postern of Fate, IIRC).
The one nice thing about this is that I'm pretty sure I have The Mysterious Affair at Styles somewhere around here, and it's in the public domain if I don't.
Drat! I meant to vote for Miss Marple! I thought it was multiple choice so it showed as Mr. Quin.
I think you will enjoy all of the above. Christie was a great woman. The book that got away for me was a great volume of her travels with her husband, Tell Me How You Live. An Archaeological Memoir. I so wanted it in the used bookstore, but hadn't the three dollars to get it. When I came back, it was gone. But I had already read the poem she had adapted from Lewis Carroll, which lent her the title.
The original is my favorite poem of his. For brevity's sake Christie's is as follows:
A-sitting on a Tell
(With apologies to Lewis Carroll)
I’ll tell you everything I can
If you will listen well:
I met an erudite young man
A-sitting on a Tell.
“Who are you, sir?” to him I said,
“For what is it you look?”
His answer trickled through my head
Like bloodstains in a book.
He said: “I look for aged pots
Of prehistoric days,
And then I measure them in lots
And lots of different ways.
And then (like you) I start to write,
My words are twice as long
As yours, and far more erudite.
“They prove my colleagues wrong!”
But I was thinking of a plan
To kill a millionaire
And hide the body in a van
Or some large Frigidaire.
So, having no reply to give,
And feeling rather shy,
I cried: “Come, tell how you live!
And when, and where, and why?”
His accents mild were full of wit:
“Five thousand years ago
Is really, when I think of it,
The choicest age I know.
And once you learn to scorn A.D.
And you have got the knack,
Then you could come and dig with me
And never wander back.”
But I was thinking how to thrust
Some arsenic into tea,
And could not all at once adjust
My mind so far B.C.
I looked at him and softly sighed,
His face was pleasant too …
“Come, tell me how you live?” I cried,
“And what it is you do?”
He said: “I hunt for objects made
By men where’er they roam,
I photograph and catalogue
And pack and send them home.
These things we do not sell for gold
(Nor yet, indeed, for copper!),
But place them on Museum shelves
As only right and proper.
“I sometimes dig up amulets
And figurines most lewd,
For in those prehistoric days
They were extremely rude!
And that’s the way we take our fun,
‘Tis not the way of wealth.
But archaeologists live long
And have the rudest health.”
I heard him then, for I had just
Completed a design
To keep a body free from dust
By boiling it in brine.
I thanked him much for telling me
With so much erudition,
And said that I would go with him
Upon an Expedition …
And now, if e’er by chance I dip
My fingers into acid,
Or smash some pottery (with slip!)
Because I am not placid,
Or see a river flow
And hear a far-off yell,
I sigh, for it reminds me so
Of that young man I learned to know –
Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow,
Whose thoughts were in the long ago,
Whose pockets sagged with potsherds so,
Who lectured learnedly and low,
Who used long words I didn’t know,
Whose eyes, with fervour all a-glow,
Upon the ground looked to and fro,
Who sought conclusively to show
That there were things I ought to know
and that with him I ought to go
And dig upon a Tell!
As Mr. Monde is an artist, and so often we are on such different planes, I loved her interpritation of that poem. I look forward to reading her memoir some day, if I can find it again.
More Democracy in Action: Christie Novels
Re: More Democracy in Action: Christie Novels
Linear Mode
