Tue 29 Jan 2013
AGATHA CHRISTIE – Remembered Death. Dodd Mead, hardcover, February 1945. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including Pocket 451, 1947 and Cardinal C-312, April 1958 (the copy at hand). First published in the UK as Sparkling Cyanide (Collins, hardcover, 1945).
So, how long’s it been since you read a Christie? For me, it’s been a while. A good long while, and much longer than it should have been. Several years at least. I read most of the Agatha Christie’s work when I was in my teens, along with all but one of the Ellery Queen’s – I was not going to go and spoil The French Powder Mystery by reading it. I was going to save it and read (and relish) it later. And later has come (but not gone, by golly) and I still haven’t read it. My oh my oh my.
But I read all of the Poirot’s and all of the Miss Marple’s, all of them that had been written while I was still in my teens, and if you were to give me one now, and ask me, Who did it? I couldn’t tell you, except for one, and it was one of Poirot’s.
But I never read this one. I don’t remember this one at all, and maybe it’s because M. Poirot is not in it, nor Miss Marple. It’s Colonel Race who’s in this one, the last of four of Christie’s mysteries he was in – the others being The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), Cards on the Table (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937), the latter two being primarily cases for Poirot. Race is only a friend of the family in this one, not the detective of record – that being Chief Inspector Kemp – but he is instrumental at least in part in bringing the culprit(s) to justice.
And quite a mystery it is that has to be solved. The young wife of an older man supposedly committed suicide one year before this story begins. By suicide, in a restaurant while celebrating her birthday. Depression caused by illness is the verdict, because there was no feasible way (apparently) that anyone could have gotten the cyanide into her champagne.
But the widower has been getting anonymous messages that hint that Rosemary was murdered, and indeed everyone who was at the table with her when she died could have had a motive. George Barton concocts a plan, the kind that exist only in mystery stories, one imagines, and that is to bring everyone back who attended the first party, and have another party at the same place, the same time, but a year later.
You have read Agatha Christie before yourself, haven’t you? Disaster happens. If this is a cozy, it’s a cozy with a sharp, wicked edge to it.
Nor is all what it seems, as I probably needn’t warn you, and as an “impossible crime,†which this very nearly is, it’s one that just might, maybe, work. And not too many readers are going to outwit Ms. Christie, and maybe that’s why, of all of the many, many practitioners of mysteries from the Golden Age, Christie is the only one whose books you will find on the shelves in Borders, Waldens or Barnes & Noble today.
And not only is Christie a master of deception, she has an exceeding observant eye when it comes to people, and she can take what she sees and convert it into words. (I notice that I’m using the present tense. I think that’s because I sense that as long as her books are alive, so is she.)
With just a bit of a dialogue of one of characters, she can match him perfectly to her description of him later. George Barton is talking to his wife’s younger sister on page 17, and a few lines later Iris thinks of him to herself as “kind, awkward, bumbling.†And he was. Exactly. A stereotype, perhaps, but even stereotypes are based on reality.
And what I understand now, at this late date in my mystery reading career, is that it’s Christie’s keen eye into character that makes her mysteries work, with all of the intricate machinations inherent thereto, and somehow I don’t think I realized that back when I was reading her books for the first time. Back then it was the cleverness of the plot, and that aspect only, not thinking, or caring, that it’s that way that people act and react that’s equally essential, if not – dare I say it? – more so.
[UPDATE] 01-29-13. A couple of things have happened since I wrote this review. You may choose which is the more significant. Both Borders and Waldens are out of business. And I have, at long last, read The French Powder Mystery. You may read my review here.
January 30th, 2013 at 12:19 am
Not only have Borders and Waldens closed all their stores but the Wall Street Journal just reported that Barnes & Noble will be closing a third of their stores over the next few years.
Fortunately, Steve and I have accumulated enough books so that we don’t have to worry about such closings. Of course I’ve always said that you never can have too many books.
January 30th, 2013 at 1:02 am
Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe “Fer-De-Lance” (at least) falls I believe into the Golden Age of mysteries, and continues to be in print and stocked at my remaining Barnes & Noble and its little brother Bookstar.
January 30th, 2013 at 1:39 am
Some interesting trivia and facts about Agatha Christie can be found at: http://www.poirot.us/facts.php
According the the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the World’s Best Selling Author. With 2 billion books sold in 44 languages.
Royalities are 4 million per year.
January 30th, 2013 at 2:08 am
Christie is an extraordinary writer. There is a tendency amongst some critics to sneer at her. There was a programme on TV last year concerning best-sellers. Even though the writer/presenter was a fan of Christie, there was still an undertone of “Isn’t she clever (although it isn’t really proper writing, of course…)” I recently read DEATH IN THE CLOUDS for the first time, and found myself unable to put it down. The book was around 80 years old, but read as though it were written yesterday.
January 30th, 2013 at 2:08 am
On the blog I was just reviewing the adaptation of the story on which this novel is based, Yellow Iris.
In another piece this month I was commenting on how I only had one Christie left to read, Destination Unknown, and I’ve had it for years. You do kind of hate not having any left to read for the first time.
Christie’s nice sense of character is unappreciated by the scoffers, of whom there are many; but there are also many fans!
January 30th, 2013 at 2:09 am
I was just watching the television adaptation of Death in the Clouds!
January 30th, 2013 at 8:33 am
It’s been a long time since I read Agatha Christie also. I read quite a few back in the 1970’s along with many other Golden Age mysteries. In fact when my daughter was born in 1976, I named her Christie Sayers Martin.
By the time of my son’s birth in 1980, I was into a more hardboiled and tough guy frame of mind and I named him Joseph Chandler Martin. The Joseph is in honor of Joseph Shaw, the editor of BLACK MASK. For awhile I was thinking of Chandler Hammett but that was too much even for my wife.
January 31st, 2013 at 4:27 pm
This has one of the most clever gimmicks in it. Something so simple (like what she did in MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES) yet borderline genius. I think only a woman would’ve been able to think it up. Incidentally, though not mentioned above by Steve, the is a recycled Christie. She first wrote the very same plot (including the gimmick) in her short story “The Yellow Iris.” A few years ago I went through a Christie re-reading marathon. I only chose Poirot novels in which I forgot who the murderer was. I enjoyed every single one of them. One of the things I had forgotten was how funny she could be. I’m thinking of doing another re-reading of about six or seven Christie books this year.
I love Walker’s tribute to his favorite writers in naming his children. Now that’s a FAN! But I think there should be more boys named Dashiell these days. It’s such a damn cool name.
January 31st, 2013 at 7:15 pm
John
You’re quite right about the “Yellow Iris” connection. According to Wikipedia:
“[Sparkling Cyanide] was an expansion of a Hercule Poirot short story entitled “Yellow Iris,” which had previously been published in issue 559 of the Strand Magazine in July 1937 and in book form in The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories in the US in 1939. […] The full-length novel omits the character of Poirot, substituting Colonel Race as the central investigative character instead.”
I’d love to be able to tackle all of the Christie novels again, but somehow I don’t think I’ll get around to them. There are too many other books by too many authors to read for the first time, most of them essentially unavailable until the Internet came along. Back in the day, all you could collect is what you were able to find by haunting every bookstore you came across and hoping for the best.
February 1st, 2013 at 5:42 am
In short, life is just that- too short !
The Doc
February 2nd, 2013 at 2:27 pm
I, too, read a lot of Christie as a youngster, and did so because of the plots — and was something of a Poirot snob, preferring his cases to all others. But, as the years have gone on, my appreciation for Christie’s accomplishments have grown. Novels like “Crooked House” and “Murder in Retrospect” and “Endless Night” are as dark in their view of human nature as any modern Scandinavian thriller — just presented in a more genteel manner that, to my thinking, brings an added chill.
Christie remains the “Queen of Crime” for very good reason.
February 2nd, 2013 at 5:21 pm
That’s a nice summing up of Christie’s approach to mystery fiction, James. No cozy writer, she!
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