agatha christie – Page 14 – Cannonball Read 17

Motley and Mysteries

The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie

January 30, 2021 by esmemoria Leave a Comment

“The trouble is that we are not content just to see things—we will tack the wrong interpretation onto the things we see.” – The Mysterious Mr. Quin Another Cannonballer recently reviewed this book, and it prompted me to read it again. The Mysterious Mr. Quin by Agatha Christie is a bit of an anomaly in her oeuvre. Mr. Quin is a mysterious character with almost supernatural abilities to come and go. Mr. Satterthwaite, the book’s third person narrator and an inveterate scholar of the human […]

Maiden Voyage with Hercule Poirot

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

January 27, 2021 by msvreadsbooks Leave a Comment

Agatha Christie’s first Hercule Poirot book is also my first sojourn into Christie’s oeuvre. I was initially underwhelmed by the novel at first, but in all my reading throughout the years, I’ve come to realize that the “first” or earliest notable version of any genre can seem mediocre because of the people who came after and perfected the form. The novel as a form is a great example of this – try reading Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson. It’s one of the […]

Halloween Party – Agatha Christie (1969)

Halloween Party by Agatha Christie

January 19, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

A late, almost very late Hercule Poirot novel (the 39th! according to Goodreads) and while I don’t think the material is wearing down just yet, in that way that Agatha Christie’s last novels did, it raises some interesting questions. For one, while Halloween, like the other holidays are a part of our lives, they have this way of feeling in literature, and especially in movies, and ESPECIALLY in television of being part of a gimmicky holiday special kind of thing. So the fact that we […]

The Mysterious Mr Quin – Agatha Christie (1930)

The Mysterious Mr Quin by Agatha Christie

January 14, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

I don’t even know what to do with this one. It’s not bad in most ways, and in fact there’s some interesting and curious things that stand out about this collection of short stories. They’re almost structured the ways that the Sherlock Holmes collections are, where while the stories don’t always feed into one another, they are certainly of a time and of a place. So there’s a kind of cohesiveness in this collection that you get with a Holmes or with a Father Brown. […]

N or M? – Agatha Christie (1941)

N or M? by Agatha Christie

January 5, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

The first Tommy and Tuppence mystery finds the charming pair meeting up after the first world war, having an adventure, falling in love, and starting their life together. It’s a jaunty novel in a lot of ways that springs from the kind of hope that peppered the 1920s for a lot of people. This novel takes place in 1940 (and was published in 1941) and the shadow of a Nazi-occupied Europe and the very possible fall of Great Britain to the Nazis has added a […]

Ordeal by Innocence – Agatha Christie (1958)

Ordeal by Innocence by Agatha Christie

January 5, 2021 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

A late 1950s Agatha Christie and one not populated by any of her recurring characters (unless I missed something). Sometimes these books unconnected to a series can feel wayward, and sometimes they’re tighter because there’s not a need to follow the patterns established by earlier books. Here, we meet an exceedingly rich and dysfunctional family, who we learn are in some later aftermath of the murder of their matriarch, and the subsequent conviction of that murder by one of the sons. He also died in […]

Zirza on A Gothic Classic for a ReasonIt's one of those wish-you-could-read-it-again-for-the-first-time books. I loved it.
Emmalita on “It came to something when you found yourself hoping that the footsteps you heard were ghosts.”I loved the ending! I don’t think it’s been out long enough to talk about why though.
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Roland of Gilead on How can you give us the gift of a crazy character named Rando Thoughtful and then just as suddenly take that gift away? We need to talk, Uncle Stevie.I came across this randomly years after it was written because I was searching "Random Thoughtful. But I have the...
Emmalita on “Only you, Em, would refer to heartbreak as a distraction. I think I would have a more sympathetic response if I asked to marry a bookcase.”Oh my goodness, Gallifrey was beautiful. I’m sure her mittens were gloriously murdery.

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