This is not the best mystery of Agatha Christie’s that I’ve read, but it might be the best novel of hers. It’s the first one where I felt like we were dealing some interesting questions and themes that surround the narrative and that these overpower and outweigh the mystery itself. It’s a lot like how Kate Atkinson and Tana French novels provide a good enough mystery to support a compelling narrative voice that I am more interested in.
This one is from 1967 and our narrator is Mike, a lower class ne’er-do-well who falls in love with first a piece of land, which perhaps has a Gypsy’s curse on it (I know, I know) and moreover falls in love with a young woman he meets on the road. He can already tell he’s not of her station, but they become enraptured with one another. They get together, they plan on marrying, and when they do decide to marry, Mike finds out that not only is she well-off–“Poor Little Rich Girl” he calls her–but she’s extremely wealthy, and now he’s in it. They buy the land, they build a gorgeous modern house, and then the auspices of that Gypsy curse starts to haunt their relationship.
This reminds me a lot of The Witch Elm, the most recent Tana French novel. I found this one really interesting and it clearly involves Agatha Christie trying to make sense of a changing modern world long having left the war behind. It deals with how capitalism and Americanism flatten the world in a lot of ways, how the welfare state has helped to topple elements of the class system, and how sexuality is more present and public in this new world. It reminds me a lot of the Hitchcock movies of the 1970s where the director who started his career in the 1920s is trying to make sense of a much changed world 50 years later.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Endless-Night-Agatha-Christie/dp/0007395701/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=endless+night&qid=1550331754&s=gateway&sr=8-1)