Murder on the Orient Express (1934) by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934) is arguably one of the most famous whodunits ever written, set aboard the Orient Express traveling from Istanbul to Calais, populated with a cast of characters as memorable as the assembly of gargoyles from Death on the Nile (1937) – topped with a rich, elaborate plot and grant solution. A truly iconic detective novel and a classic of its kind, but, during the internet era, the book seems to have been downgraded a little. Apparently, the story with its exaggerated characters, world famous setting and surprise ending is too gimmicked that does not stand-up to rereading. 

So I marked the book for rereading and revisiting Murder on the Orient Express was like rereading John Dickson Carr's The Three Coffins (1934) all over again. Murder on the Orient Express is to the closed-circle whodunit what The Three Coffins is to the locked room mystery. The utterly bizarre and fantastically impossible done right! One of the characters remarked that "the whole thing is a fantasy." I agree. But it worked. There were few other mystery writers at the time, or even today, who could have pulled it off. Christie did it with flying colors! 

Murder on the Orient Express begins on a winter's morning in Aleppo, Syria, where Hercule Poirot has finished an unrecorded case that "saved the honour of the French Army" and is waiting to board the Taurus Express to Stamboul – intending to take a short holiday to see the city. A telegram is waiting for him at the hotel with an urgent plea to return to London and he books a sleeping car accommodation in the Stamboul-Calais coach of the Orient Express.

Normally, it's a slack period at that time of year and there are few people traveling with trains being almost empty, but it appears "all the world elects to travel tonight." Poirot finds an "extraordinary crowd" as his traveling companions as the Orient Express "on its three-days'' journey across Europe."

There's an unpleasant American businessman, Samuel Ratchett, who Poirot likened to a wild and savage animal in a respectable suit. Ratchett brought along his personal secretary and valet, Hector MacQueen and Edward Masterman. Mrs. Hubbard is an elderly, American lady and always complaining, raising an alarm or talking about her daughter and grandchildren. She has a presence, to put it kindly. Greta Ohlsson is a Swedish is a trained nurse and matron in a missionary school near Stamboul on holiday. Colonel Arbuthnot is the consummate soldier on leave and traveling from India to England, but he has own, secretive reason to come by overland route instead of the sea. Miss Mary Debenham is a British governess to two children in Baghdad and is returning to London on holiday. There are two American businessmen, Cyrus Hardman and Antonio Foscarelli, who are respectively a traveling salesman of typewriting ribbons and an agent for Ford motor cars. But there are also members of the old European aristocracy among the passengers. Count and Countess Andrenyi are a young diplomatic couple from Hungary. Princess Dragomiroff is remnant of a vanished world, "ugly as sin, but she makes herself felt," who's extremely rich with an iron-bound determination. She brought along her German lady's maid, Hildegarde Schmidt. Lastly there are M. Bouc, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, whose "acquaintance with the former star of the Belgian Police Force dated back many years." The attendant of the Istanbul Calais coach, Pierre Michel, who has been a loyal employee of the company for over fifteen years. Finally, a little Greek physician, Dr. Constantine, who provides Poirot with an important piece of medical evidence.

For three days these people, "of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages," are brought together under one roof only to go their separate ways at the end of the three-day journey – "never, perhaps, to see each other again." But this journey was never destined to go according to schedule.

Poirot overhears an intimate conversation between two apparent strangers and Ratchett tries to hire him to help protect his life, which has been threatened by an enemy. Poirot turns him down ("I do not like your face, M. Ratchett") and what follows is tumultuous night in the Istanbul-Callais coach. Sounds of cries and groans. Mrs. Hubbard making a big cry about a man in her compartment who couldn't have been there. A woman wrapped in a scarlet kimono stalking down the corridor and banging on doors. The conductor tending to the needs of the passenger as he moved from compartment to compartment to answer all the tingling bells.

On the following morning, everyone aboard awakes to the news that the train has run into a snowdrift and they're now stuck somewhere in Yugoslavia. What makes their position a particularly precarious is discovery that Ratchett was brutally stabbed to death in his berth. Evidence tells them nobody could have left since they ran into the snowdrift and the murderer is still with them on the train.

M. Bouc implores Poirot to solve the case before the Yugoslavian police can have their way with his highly esteemed customers and reminds Poirot he has often heard him say "to solve a case a man has only to lie back in his chair and think." So he wants him to "interview the passengers on the train, view the body, examine what clues there are" and then let "the little grey cells of the mind" do their work. Murder on the Orient Express certainly presents one of Poirot's most fascinating investigations on record as they have "none of the facilities afforded to the police" and "have to rely solely on deduction."

Firstly, Poirot takes a page from R. Austin Freeman's Dr. John Thorndyke by using an old-fashioned hatbox, spirit lamp and a pair of curling tongs to make words reappear on a charred fragment of paper – which he found on the victim's bedside table. The words Poirot briefly made legible told him who Ratchett really was and this knowledge places an entirely different complexion on the case and passengers. So the middle section of the story comprises of a series of interviews, but this portion can hardly be described as "Dragging the Marsh." On the contrary! It's an example how to write a series of interrogations without dragging the story to a snail's pace like a weighted rope was tied to it. Poirot acts as both a detective and armchair general as he varies how he approaches each potential suspect. Poirot's methods with one passenger could be a complete contrast to his handling of another passenger. Methodically, the little Belgian detective gathers all the crumbs his fellow passengers left on the table during these interviews and subsequent investigation, but that would understate just how brashly clued Murder on the Orient Express really is.

Christie recklessly alluded to the truth almost from the start and never stopped. If you already know the solution, you almost want to tell her to stop in giving the whole game away. But that's what separates the true masters from the second-stringer who too often guard a second-rate clue from the reader. However, Christie not only was overly generous with her clues and hints, but she openly casts aspersion on the red herrings she planted herself! Poirot notes that the victim's compartment is "full of clues," but wonders whether he can "be sure that those clues are really what they seem to be." Christie even had a physical manifestation of the red herring prancing around the train. All these clues and red herrings form a delightful and contradictory picture with the "affair advances in a very strange manner."

There's also the ghosts of the locked room mystery and impossible crime stalking the compartments and corridors of the Orients Express. The door of Ratchett's compartment was chain-locked on the inside and the communicating door bolted on the other side in addition to two people who were seen on the train, but they cannot be found anywhere. However, these are quasi-impossibilities instead of a full-blown locked room mysteries, which is why I didn't tag this review as a locked room mystery. But it was a nice touch to the story. 

Murder on the Orient Express cements its status as a classic with a beautifully handled ending as Poirot gathers everyone in the dining car to propound two solutions to the murder. One of them is simple and full of holes, while the second solution is complicated, grotesquely fantastic, highly original and strangely convincing. A resolution that will have some readers check their moral compass to see if its broken. Sure, the passage of time has dulled the surprise and originality of the solution a little, but shouldn't detract from an overall first-class performance demonstrating why she rivaled the Bible and William Shakespeare. Deservedly so! 

Notes for the curious: the character of Dr. Constantine was very likely a nod to Molly Thynne's series-detective, Dr. Constantine, who's a Greek doctor and amateur detective. Why a nod or acknowledgment to that obscure detective? The second of Thynne's Dr. Constantine detective novels, Death in the Dentist's Chair (1933), shares a rather unique, language-based clue with Murder on the Orient Express. I wonder if Christie intended her Dr. Constantine to be same as Thynne's Dr. Constantine considering his role in the story. There's another possible crossover, one of the characters seems to have had a previous appearance in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), which is never acknowledged, but it would make sense if they were one and the same person – since (ROT13) gur Oyhr Genva pnfr pbhyq unir tvira gur pbafcvengbef gur vqrn gb hfr gur Bevrag Rkcerff. Finally, I reviewed Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed, vol. 78 back in August and the headline story, “Mystery Express,” is an ingenious and warm homage to Murder on the Orient Express.

The Devil is Everywhere: "Triangle at Rhodes" (1936) by Agatha Christie

Last time, I revisited Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1941), a classic of the simon-pure jigsaw puzzle detective story, which served as a reminder why Christie towered above so many of her contemporaries and made me want to take another look at an earlier, shorter version of the novel – generally considered to be one of her better short stories. So did it stand up to rereading? Let's find out! 

Christie's "Triangle at Rhodes" was originally published in the February 2, 1936, issue of This Week, reprinted in the May, 1936, publication of The Strand Magazine and finally collected in Murder in the Mew and Other Stories (1937). 

"Triangle at Rhodes" takes place on the titular, sun-soaked island where the celebrated Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, had come to for a much deserved rest and holiday. A hopefully non-criminal, corpse-free holiday and he had booked his holiday during a period when Rhodes would be nearly empty. So the island resembled "a peaceful, secluded spot" outside of the tourist season with only a small group of guests staying at the hotel, but, even within that "restricted circle," Poirot noticed "the inevitable shaping of events to come." The internal triangle!

This small circle of holidaymakers comprises of Miss Pamela Lyall, a student of human nature, who's "capable of speaking to strangers on sight" instead of "allowing four days to a week to elapse before making the first cautious advance" as "is the customary British habit" – acting, more or less, as the female counterpart of Arthur Hastings. Pamela is there on holiday with a friend, Miss Sarah Blake. Old General Barnes is "a veteran who was usually in the company of the young" or boring other guests with anecdotes military career in India, but the foreboding, triangle-shaped patterns take shape among two married couples, the Chantrys and the Golds.

Valentine Chantry is a "man-eating tiger" who widowed one husband, lost three in the divorce courts and recently married a navy officer, Commander Tony Chantry. Douglas Gold is a good looking, golden-headed man who there with his mousy-looking wife, Marjorie, but becomes infatuated with Valentine. So the familiar, age-old pattern of murder begins to take shape and ends with Valentine drinking poisoned gin and an arrest.

Poirot and Pamela were the only ones who observes the eternal triangle take shape, but Pamela saw it "the wrong way round" and here the story turned out to be weaker than I remembered. There's no meaningful clueing or misdirection with its only strong points being its geometrical plot-structure and how beautifully the ending reversed the whole situation, but the conclusion played out off-page with Poirot being an eyewitness to the murderer's handiwork – telling the reader about it afterwards. So plenty of good ideas here, but not very satisfying as a detective story nor anywhere near as good as its novel-length treatment. That's a shame as I used think "Triangle at Rhodes" would easily make my top 10 of best short detective stories. Don't worry. Christie will still be represented on such a hypothetical, future list with the massively under appreciated "Wireless" (1926).

Evil Under the Sun (1941) by Agatha Christie

Previously, I reviewed three originally non-English or untranslated detective novels, namely Mika Waltari's Kuka murhasi rouva Skrofin? (Who Murdered Mrs. Kroll?, 1939), Ton Vervoort's Moord onder maagden (Murder Among Virgins, 1965) and Seimaru Amagi's Ikazuchi matsuri satsujin jiken (Deadly Thunder, 1998), but promised to end my little world tour to return to the civilized, English-speaking world – which gave me an idea. Why not revisit another timeless classic that I have only read before in a Dutch translation? Something I did last month with John Dickson Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939). 

So my pick was between Ellery Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932) and Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1941), but the latter seemed more appropriate for the time of year. 

Evil Under the Sun takes place on a small, fictitious island off Leathercombe Beach, Devon, where an 18th century sea captain had made his home and left his descendants with a cumbersome inheritance, but the 1920s birthed "the great cult of the Seaside for Holidays" – property was sold and developed into a tourist destination. The Jolly Roger Hotel, Smugglers' Island, is "usually packed to the attics" during the holiday season. A quiet, peaceful place where the sun shines, the sea is blue and the beaches packed with sunbathers. Not exactly "the sort of place you'd get a body," but Hercule Poirot knows all to well that "there is evil everywhere under the sun." And evil comes to the island to cut the detective's holiday short!

Arlena Stuart is a retired stage actress who's as famous as she's notorious, "fatally attractive," who has the habit of making "men go crazy about her" everywhere she goes. She was cited in the Codrington divorce case, but Lord Codrington turned her down flat when the divorce was finalized. Only for the gallant Kenneth Marshell to come to the rescue and married the scandal plagued actress. Arlena and Kenneth Marshell are spending their holiday on Smugglers' Island with Kenneth's adolescent daughter, Linda, but trouble begins as soon as Arlena sets foot on the island.

There's another, much younger, married couple staying on the island, the Redferns. Christine is a quiet, nice looking woman in "her fair washed-out way," but her husband, Patrick, is a handsome and athletic man with "a kind of infectious enjoyment and gaiety" about him. Patrick becomes quite infatuated with Arlena and they're very open about it, which naturally puts a strain on the situation. But there are more people who a problem with that devil of woman.

Rosamund Darnley is a well-known, successful dressmaker and a childhood love-interest of Kenneth, but she's worried what kind of influence she has on her stepdaughter, Linda, who's not particular fond of her stepmother – which is why she asks him to divorce her. Kenneth is determined to stick to the 'till-death-do-us-part bit of his marriage vows. Reverend Stephen Lane is another hotel guest and a religious fanatic who believes evil walks the earth and its name is Arlena Stuart Marshell. In addition to a few less suspicious-looking hotel guests who get to witness this prelude to murder. Such as the retired Major Barry ("a teller of long and boring stories"), Miss Emily Brewster ("a tough athletic woman" who disliked women "smashing up homes"), Horace Blatt (who tries "to be the life and soul of any place he happened to be in") and the Gardeners ("those yapping Americans"). But then again, is anyone ever really above suspicion in a detective novel?

Hercule Poirot can feel there's murder in the air, but, as he said once before in Egypt, that "if a
person is determined to commit murder it is not easy to prevent them." So everyone's holiday comes to an abrupt end when Arlena is found strangled to death on the beach of Pixy Cove. Inspector Colgate is only too happy to accept Poirot's help and give him a free hand.

So now he has to gather and arrange "every strange-shaped little piece" of the puzzle, physical and psychological, as he tries to see where every piece fits to get a clear and comprehensible picture of the murder. Clues such as an overheard conversation and an empty bottle thrown from a window. A bath that no one would admit to having taken. A new pair of scissors and a smashed pipe found at the crime scene. A green calendar and skein of magenta wool with several pesky, somewhat unusual alibis hinging on typewriters, wristwatches and physical impossibilities complicating the case even further – while blackmail, dope smuggling and witchcraft discreetly hover in the background. This all sounds like an incredibly tricky, labyrinthine-plotted detective story, but it actually might be one of Christie's simplest and most uncomplicated novels. She just knew how to play the reader like a fiddle.

I largely remembered the who-and how with only the why having become muddled in my memory, but, as the story began to fill in the blanks, I was reminded why Christie is the Queen of Crime. Carr and Christie are the only readers who consistently gave their readers two different experiences with the same book with the second read showing you how everything was logically and fairly laid out in front of you. So you couldn't have missed the obvious, but, more often than not, you did and a second read probably wants to make you kick yourself. That has been my experience with Carr's The Problem of the Green Capsule and Christie's Evil Under the Sun.

Remembering most of the solution, I could sit back to simultaneously admire and be astonished at how brazenly obvious everything was while she made it appear like a maze without an exit! The old bag lied through her teeth without uttering a single untrue word and I say that with the upmost affection. She even hinted at the solution before the murder was committed. What a woman!

So, technically, Evil Under the Sun is a small masterpiece and a shining example of the Golden Age detective story, but there are two tiny, almost minuscule, specks that need to be mentioned along with the praise. Poirot's observation that Arlena's murder is "a very slick crime" and the information he requests was a lucky guess, or an inspired piece of guesswork, as opposed to logical reasoning. Secondly, Christie indulged in some of her favorite themes and tropes, which is fine, but she has used them even better and in a much grander fashion in some of her better-known mystery novels. But having writing that down, I feel like I took a magnifying glass to Rembrandt's Night Watch to haunt for small imperfection.

As long-time readers of this blog know, or something you probably guessed from this review's opening, I like to explore the obscure, little-known nooks and crannies of the detective story, but, if you spend too much time there, you can forget why Carr and Christie towered above their contemporaries. The Problem of the Green Capsule and Evil Under the Sun were a much needed reminder that they earned their reputation as the absolute bests ever on merit and not merely for being popular fan favorites or selling copies like a money printer.

Talking to the Dead

"The ingenuity of the criminal upon whose track we find ourselves is really out of the ordinary."

- Dr. Lancelot Priestley (John Rhode's The House at Tollard Ridge, 1929)

Since the dawn of modern technology and electric communication, the technological innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth century were looked upon in spiritualist circles as potential conduits to the world beyond and experiments were made in an attempt to establish a line of communications with the dearly departed – beginning with the spirit photography craze of the late 1800s. An interest in real-time communication with the dead, using technology, began to emerge in the early 1900s.

Thomas Edison was reportedly asked by Scientific American, in 1920, whether the telephone could be used to talk to the dead and the inventor did not dismiss the possibility. 

However, it would not be until the 1950s and the introduction of the first generation of portable audio recorders that people began to record, what they believed and interpreted to be, the voices of the dead. These recordings are known as Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and these sound recordings, as I learned, are still very popular today as the countless "Spirit Box Sessions" on YouTube can attest. And these innovations were eagerly adopted by fraudsters and con-artists as tools to prey on grief-stricken people.

However, our beloved, but duplicitous, detective story was perhaps the first medium to explore the criminal possibilities of EVP long before it became a popular tool of ghost-hunters and spiritual mediums. Some of these stories date as far back as the mid-and late 1920s. John Rhode's The House on Tollard Ridge (1929) has an elderly murder victim who lived alone in a desolate house, reputedly haunted, where he spent long evenings listening to voices from the spirit world on the wireless, but the best examples were penned by two of the genre's most celebrated mystery writers – namely John Dickson Carr and Agatha Christie.

The first of these two is a short story by Christie, titled "Where There's a Will," which was originally published as "Wireless" in the Sunday Chronicle Annual in December 1926 and collected in The Hound of Death and Other Stories (1933). The second tale is a dark, eerie radio-play, "The Dead Sleep Lightly," of which Carr wrote two versions. One of these versions is the well-known episode from the CBS radio-drama, Suspense, but Carr "lengthened the script by a third to include Dr. Fell and Superintendent Hadley" for the British broadcast of the story. And the script of this second version was collected in The Dead Sleep Lightly and Other Mysteries from Radio's Golden Age (1983).

These two stories work with very similar, almost identical, plot-material and ideas, which makes them interesting reads when taken back-to-back, because they beautifully mirror and even compliment one another. But the treatment of the ideas and resolution to both stories also demonstrate the differences, as mystery writers, between Carr and Christie. I think they are, aptly enough, soul revealing reads that showed that the respective writers had (slender) ties to respectively the horror and romance genre.

You can find three of Carr's short horror stories in The Door to Doom and Other Detections (1980) and Christie wrote six "bitter-sweet stories about love" under the penname of "Mary Westmacotts." I think these flirtations with the horror and romance genre are reflected in "Wireless" and "The Dead Sleep Lightly." So let's take a closer look at these stories.

Agatha Christie

The primary character in Christie's "Wireless" is an elderly lady, Mrs. Mary Hatter, who has a weak heart and her doctor pressed her to "avoid all undue exertion." As well as prescribing "plenty of distraction for the mind." An elevator was installed to prevent undue exertion and her beloved nephew, Charles, suggested the installation of a radio-set to provide the mental distraction. Initially, Mrs. Hatter was skeptical and convinced that these "newfangled notions were neither more nor less than unmitigated nuisances," but slowly she began to warm to the "repellent object" and enjoyed listening to a symphony concert or lectures – until, one evening, an unearthly, faraway voice spoke to her over the radio.

A voice that identified himself as Mrs. Hatter's late husband, Patrick, who announced that he would be coming for her soon and asked her to be ready for that moment.

Mrs. Hatter took this message from beyond the grave better than expected and muttered about all that money she wasted on putting in an elevator, but she became convinced when the voice spoke to her a second time. Once again, the voice identified himself as Patrick and announced that he would be coming "very soon now." On top of these ghostly radio-messages, Charles claims to have seen a figure in Victorian garb standing by the window of her late husband's dressing-room!

So Mrs. Hatter begins to put the final touches to the earthly matters she'll be presently be leaving behind. And then the voice comes through a third and final time. The ghostly voice of Patrick tells her to expect him on "Friday at half past nine." And the voice tells her not to be afraid and assures that "there will be no pain." However, when the time arrives her bravery and resolve deserts her as she suddenly realizes that Patrick had been died for twenty-five years and is practically a stranger to her now. But this realization came too late.

This story is a not who-dun-it, because the mind behind these supernatural phenomena is apparent from the beginning. And the why-and-how-dun-it aspects will hardly pose a challenge to the modern armchair detective. What this story does have to offer is a front-row seat to a perfect crime with a twist in the tail. The murderer was clever and devious enough to use the given circumstances as tools to commit an undetectable murder, but the final pages shows an unexpected hitch that undid all of the meticulous scheming – making the death of a Mrs. Hatter a perfect crime without a payoff. And this piece of cosmic justice made for a most delightful ending.

I always loved "Wireless." It's a criminally underrated and grossly overlooked story from Christie's legendary oeuvre that deserves to be better known.

The second story is the British version of Carr's most well-known radio-play, "The Dead Speak Slightly," which begins when Dr. Fell's manservant, Hoskins, wakes his dozing employer with the announcement that there's "a lunatic downstairs." The madman in question turns out to be a publisher, George Pendleton, who's considered to be "a very celebrated and successful man." However, the man seems to be badly shaken and deadly afraid of clay, or soil, of "the sort you often find in graveyards."

John Dickson Carr

On the previous day, Pendleton had attended a funeral of "a fellow club-member" with his secretary, Miss Pamela Bennett, but on their way out of the cemetery they passed a neglected grave with a little stone grave and the publisher recognized it as the final resting place of a person from his own past – a woman by the name of Mary Ellen Kimball. Pendleton briefly reflects on his past and it becomes evident that he had not treated the woman, who rested there, very well when she had been alive.

So his secretary suggested to have the grave tidied up and writes down the identifying number that is cut on the side of the gravestone, which is "Kensal Green 1-9-3-3." They remark how the number sounds like a telephone number and that will come back to haunt the publisher later that evening.

Pendleton returned to his home in St. John's Wood, but he was in process of moving to flat closer to the West End and everything was practically packed up. The house was all but empty. So he decided to give a friend a telephone call and ask him if he wanted to go out for a dinner, but when the switchboard operated asked for a number he blurted out the gravestone number, Kensal Green 1-9-3-3, without thinking and the voice of a woman answered – a woman who identified herself as Mary Ellen!

And when Pendleton screams that she's dead, the voice answers with one of my favorite lines in all of detective-fiction: "Yes, dear," but "the dead sleep lightly" and "they can be lonely too." I don't know why these lines have such an appeal to me, but they never fail to make my soul shiver in absolute delight. Anyway, the voice of Mary Ellen promises to leave her grave and visit him when at his home when "the clock strikes seven." Interestingly, this ghostly phone-call poses somewhat of an impossible problem, because the phone had been disconnected that morning. A man from the telephone company had disconnected all the wires and had taken "the metal box off the baseboard of the wall." It simply was not possible to have made that telephone call.

So the publisher left cartoon smoke, as he bolted out of there, but Dr. Fell refuses to help him as he was not told him the full story. Regardless, Dr. Fell decided to venture outside and follow Pendleton back home, which is where he bumps into Superintendent Hadley. And what they discover is the man lying on the floor of the library with the telephone besides him. His face has an awful color, as if he had a stroke, but even more disturbing is "the clay track across the floor." There's even wet clay on Pendleton "as though somebody covered with clay had tried to hold him."

A fantastic story with a shuddery atmosphere, but, once again, the technical aspect of this seemingly impossible and apparently supernatural problem won't pose too much of a problem to readers in the twenty-first century. But the effects created with the telephone gadget and the simple power of suggestion is absolutely superb! Typically, Dr. Fell sympathizes with the perpetrators of this ghostly plot and covers up the whole business right under Hadley's nose!

I simply can't recommend this radio-play enough, but, if you don't have copy of the previously mentioned The Dead Sleep Lightly knocking about, you can just as easily listen to the equally fantastic Suspense version. It lacks the presence of Dr. Fell and Hadley, but the play can be found all over the internet (like here) and the plot is exactly the same as the British version. And the upside is that you can listen to those marvelous, haunting lines being spoken and get an extra pound of goose-flesh out of it.

So, there you have it, two short detective stories that are, in some regards, mirror-images of one another. Stories with plots that were built and constructed with the same plot-ideas and material, but their respective authors each delivered a very different kind of yarn of haunted murder.

For example, the victim of Christie's "Wireless" is an elderly lady who, initially, faces the possibility of being reunited with her dead husband bravely. Only to crumble when realizing at the last moment she had lived a quarter of a century without him and had become estranged from the dead man who she expected to see any moment. This is the bitter that comes after the sweet that apparently can be found in her romance novels. On a whole, this is a domestic crime story. Carr, on the other hand, showed he sometimes could be very closely related to the ghost story and picked a harsh, cold-hearted businessman as his victim who immediately lost his cool when a skeleton from his past appeared to stir from her grave – with a promise to pay him a visit. And he gave a detective story spin the horror genre's avenger-from-the-grave motif.

There are also the similarities in tricks for the ghostly voices and the fact that the perpetrators are, legally, untouchable, but only Carr lets his perpetrators off the hook.

So these stories show that Christie and Carr, while known for their intricately plotted and fair-play detective stories, were very different mystery writers at heart. And yet, they beautifully compliment one another when read back-to-back. These stories ought to be reissued as a single booklet or anthologized together in some kind of themed anthology with other detective stories involving fraudulant mediums, reputedly haunted crime-scenes and supernormal creatures who belong on the pages of a horror story. Such an anthology would make a for a great read and these two would definitely be the main event of such a collection of short stories! 

Fatal Flaws: A Short Overview of Ruined Detective Stories

"These little things a very significant."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's Sleeping Murder, 1976)

Earlier this month, I reviewed Family Matters (1933) by Anthony Rolls, which took an unconventional approach to telling an inverted detective story and the narrative had all the elements of a genre-classic, but was unable to sustain itself and ended with a whimper – an open-ending that managed to be simultaneously lazy and pretentious. So hardly a satisfying and rewarding read. However, the book made me reflect back on similar detective novels that were on their way of becoming (minor) classics, but slipped with the finish-line in sight.

It has been a while since I slapped together a filler-post and thought doing a quick rundown of a handful of them would make for a nice fluff piece. You may abandon this post, if you want, and come back for one of my regular review, which should be up within the next day or so. Or stick around. It's entirely up to you.

I'll be running through this short list in non-specific order and will begin with Agatha Christie. Or rather with an observation about one of her series-characters, Miss Jane Marple, who's one of Christie's two iconic detective figures, but there's remarkable difference between the Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot series – namely a severe lack of classic titles in the former. Miss Marple never handled a case of the same caliber as Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The A.B.C. Murders (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937). However, there's one Miss Marple novel that came close to matching the brilliance of her Belgian counterpart.

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962) has an American starlet of the silver screen, Marina Gregg, descending upon the sleepy village of St. Mary Mead, but soon learns that an English village can be as dangerous as a dark, grimy back alley in the States. One of her house-guests dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail and the explanation for this specific murder was one of Christie's last triumphs.

The relationship between the victim and murderer, combined with the powerful and well-hidden motive, stuck together with simplistic brilliance, but the equally powerful effect the explanation could've achieved was ruined when Christie allowed the murderer to become completely unhinged – committing several additional murders along the way. It cheapened and lessened the impact of the reason behind the first murder, which robbed the series of a book that could've stood toe-to-toe with such Poirot titles as Peril at End House (1932), Sad Cypress (1940) and Five Little Pigs (1943).

Logically, the murderer should've been stone cold sane, completely unrepentant and never went pass that first murder, which had a solid, original and very human reason behind it. I've always wondered if a much younger Christie would've made the same mistake. A textbook example that sometimes less can be more.

You can also ruin a potential series-classic by punctuating the plot of the story with sheer stupidity. Case in point: The American Gun Mystery (1933) by Ellery Queen.

The American Gun Mystery had all the potential to be one of the best entries from Ellery Queen's plot-orientated nationality series, which has a great premise and a memorable backdrop: a sports arena, the Colosseum, where a horseback rider is gunned down during a rodeo show with twenty thousand potential suspects and eyewitnesses in attendance – topped off with the impossible disappearance of the murder weapon. I distinctly remember how much I had been enjoying this slice of old-fashioned Americana, presented as an original puzzle detective, but all of that enthusiasm dissipated upon learning how the gun was made to vanish. It was one of those rare instances I actually wanted to fling a book across the room in frustration and the hiding place of the gun seems to be a stumbling block for most readers.

And that's why The American Gun Mystery is never mentioned in the same breath as The French Powder Mystery (1930), The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931) and The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932).

Sometimes you can be on the right track, but simply bite off more than you could chew and a good example of this is Herbert Brean's still beloved Wilders Walk Away (1948).

Curt Evans described the plot of the book as "a fusion of Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr," which is an apt description, because the story is basically one of Queen's Wrightsville novels as perceived by Carr. The protagonist is a freelance photographer, Reynold Frame, who travels to Wilders Lane, Vermon, which is named after the founding family of the place. A family with a peculiar tradition dating back to eighteenth century: members of the Wilders clan have the tendency to escape the yawning grave by simply vanishing into thin air.

So what's not to like, you might ask? Well, the solutions to all of the impossibilities have some of the most routine, common-place explanations you could imagine. It stands in stark contrast with everything that came previous in the book. Barry Ergang hit the nail on the head, in his review, when observing that Wilders Walk Away appeared as "a companion to The Three Coffins (1935) and Rim of the Pit (1944) for ultimate greatness," but that "degree of feeling didn't sustain itself" and that's how I felt when reading the book. A very likable and readable detective story, but the wasted potential is painful to behold. Everything about the book screamed classic... until you reached the ending.

Brean would go on to redeem himself with the superb Hardly a Man is Now Alive (1952), the equally good The Clock Strikes Thirteen (1954) and the very amusing The Traces of Brillhart (1961), but they (sadly) never garnered the same attention as Wilders Walks Away.

Finally, I have a prize-winning book, Kay Cleaver Strahan's Footprints (1929), which could have become a personal favorite of mine, but shot itself in the foot in a way that's very similar to Rolls' Family Matters.

Footprints garnered some attention upon its publication for toying with conventions and plot-devices that were not very well established or popular at the time. One of them is that the book qualifies as a semi-historical mystery novel and this past story is entirely told through a series of old, crumbling letters. A story that took place on an Oregon farm in the early 1900s, which has, rather originally, a murder that could one of two types of impossible crimes: either the murderer escaped from a locked room to get to the victim or passed over a field of snow without leaving any footprints.

So you can imagine I was completely hooked by the halfway mark. I loved the depiction of family life on an American farm in the early twentieth century with an apparently innovative impossible crime plot at its core, but the vaguely written ending only hinted at the murderer's identity. And not a single letter was wasted on attempting to explain the impossible situation. A postmodernist would no doubt love such an ending in a structured genre like us, but I wanted, as Carr would say, strangle the author and lynch the publisher. They were really lucky they had already kicked the bucket when I finished the book.

Cleaver did redeem herself with her second locked room novel, Death Traps (1930), which was a competent, if rather conversational, piece of work with an actual ending!

So far my lamentations on several detective novels I really wanted to like, but proved to be a let down, in one way or another, when the final chapter rolled around. I hope this will be, for now, the last blog-post with my whining about bad or disappointing detective stories. My next review looks to be that of a good mystery novel and have something interesting (and untranslated) for the one after that. And both of them fall in the locked room category. Please try to act a little bit surprise about that!

A Thing of the Past

"Outside the window, so close to the pane that it seemed to be pressing against it, was a white face—a chalk-white face, whether man or woman none could tell."

- Annie Haynes (The House in Charlton Crescent, 1926)

In my previous blog-post, I reviewed an archaeologically-themed mystery novel, Arthur Rees' The Shrieking Pit (1919), which left me in the mood for a similar sort of detective story, but there were only two such titles on my shelves that had not been previously discussed on this blog – namely R. Austin Freeman's The Penrose Mystery (1936) and Agatha Christie's Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). Logically, I should've gone with the former, because it has been wasting away on my TBR-pile for ages, but settled for the latter. So, yes, this is the second re-read this month.

Murder in Mesopotamia is fourteenth novel about Christie's most popular and enduring creation, Hercule Poirot, which also happened to be part of a sub-category, called "Poirot Abroad," that includes some of the Belgian detective's most celebrated cases – such as Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937) and Evil Under the Sun (1941). The books and short stories from this sub-category take place between the countries of continental Europe (e.g. Murder on the Links, 1923) and the sun-drenched Middle East (e.g. Appointment with Death, 1938).

Christie's second husband, Max Mallowan, was a prominent British archaeologist and she spend many years helping her husband with pulling the remnants of past civilizations from the earth of the Middle East. So you can easily see how this region became the backdrop for so many of her stories, but there are only two that used an excavation site as the scene of a crime: an early short story, entitled "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb," collected in Poirot Investigates (1924) and Murder in Mesopotamia. A pity, really, because archaeological settings are criminally underutilized in detective stories. Anyhow...

Murder in Mesopotamia takes place during an archaeological dig near Hassanieh, "a day and a half's journey from Baghdad," situated in present-day Iraq and was at the time of the story a young, independent kingdom – having been granted full independence from British rule in 1932. However, the presence of a British policeman, Captain Maitland, suggests the story took place when the region was still a protectorate of the British Empire.

The story at hand is narrated by a nurse, named Amy Leatheran, who has been engaged by a well-known archaeologist, Dr. Erich Leidner, to keep a weary eye on his wife. Louise Leidner is a beautiful, charming and intelligent woman, but Leatheran quickly comes to the conclusion that she's also "the sort of woman who could easily make enemies." Lately, she seems to be genuinely afraid of someone.

Dutch edition (pastel series)

During the Great War of 1914-18, Louise was married to a German, Frederick Bosner, who she discovered to be "a spy in German pay." She had a hand in the arrest and he was to be a shot as a spy, but escaped and was, reportedly, later killed in a train wreck. However, she started to receive threatening signed by her late husband. So did her husband escape death a second time? Or is his younger sibling, who idolized his older brother, plotting revenge? In any case, two days after her marriage to Dr. Leidner she received a death threat ("You have got to die"). Several additional letters arrived, recently they even had an Iraqi stamp, but the most disturbing ones announce "death is coming very soon" and "I have arrived." She even saw "a dead face," grinning against a window pane, which only she saw.

So not everyone takes her completely serious and Leatheran even suspects Louise might have been sending those threatening letters herself, but the situations becomes as serious as the grave when Dr. Leidner stumbles across Louise's body in her bedroom – struck down by "a terrific blow on the front of the head."

Coincidentally, the world-renowned private-detective, Hercule Poirot, is passing through the region after "disentangling some military scandal in Syria" and is basically given full control of the investigation by Captain Maitland. Something for the curious-minded: Poirot's experience in this case is what inspired the famous quote from Death on the Nile that compared detective work with an archaeological dig. Poirot does something like that here: removing all of the dirt and extraneous matter surrounding the problem, and small cast of characters, until the truth clearly emerges from all of the facts, questions and personality of the victim. As one of the characters observed at the end, Poirot has "the gift of recreating the past" and would have made a great archaeologist.

Interestingly, Poirot's explanation reveals that the book, all along, was an impossible crime story.

Scene of the Crime

One of the two reasons for re-reading Murder in Mesopotamia is the archaeological angle, but also for the fact that Robert Adey listed it in Locked Room Murders (1991). However, the claim of the book being a locked room mystery seems shaky at first, because the bedroom was neither locked from the inside nor under constant observation from the outside. It's established that nobody from outside of the large house could have committed the murder, but there was a window of ten minutes when nobody was in the courtyard to observe anyone entering, or leaving, the only door that opened into Louise's bedroom – which would make this a closed circle of suspects situation. There is, however, a very good reason why it would still qualify as an impossible crime novel.

I recently posted a comment on a blog-post on The Reader is Warned, titled "The Case of the Impossible Alibi," in which I gave my (poorly typed) opinion under what strenuous conditions an apparent cast-iron alibi can be considered an impossibility. I think Murder in Mesopotamia meets those qualifications and the explanation as to how the murderer pulled of the killing could've been used to create a full-fledged locked room scenario. So I filed this review under "locked room mysteries" and "impossible crimes."

However, I would recommend not to read my comment on that blog-post unless you've read the book.

I should point out something that's often overlooked or ignored: a second, gruesome murder occurs towards the end when a colleague of Dr. Leidner, one Anne Johnson, swallows "a quantity of corrosive acid" and burns to dead from the inside, but when she lies dying she gives, what's known as, a dying message – one that gives away a huge clue about the method of the first murder. And that gives a huge hint about the identity of the killer.

So, all in all, Murder in Mesopotamia has all the ingredients for a top-tier Agatha Christie novel, but the plot has one very black mark against it. You can only accept the solution, if you accept that Louise Leidner was a very dense, unobservant and low-conscience person. And there was an attempt to foreshadow the fact that she could have missed the keypoint of the plot. However, it's was confirmed that she was actually an intelligent woman. So this single point makes the solution, as a whole, hard to digest and condemns the book to the rank of mid-tier Christie.

I was actually reminded of Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (1933), which came inches from being a first-class detective story and a classic title from the early EQ period, but then came the mind-numbing explanation for the vanishing gun – which was impossible to swallow. The American Gun Mystery and Murder in Mesopotamia are actually the same in that regard, because that single point makes the whole explanation a tad-bit implausible.

Regardless, it was still a well written and interesting mystery novel, but simply not in the same league as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun.

Well, that ended on a less than enthusiastic note. Anyway, not sure what I'll dig up next, but I'll continue my futile attempt to reduce the mass of my semi-sentient TBR-pile.