Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“One does see so much evil in a village,” murmured Miss Marple in an explanatory voice

The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie

The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie

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The Body in the Library – In essence, this is the second of the Miss Marple mysteries. In fact, it’s the third, if you count a collection of short stories. I like the Miss Marple books so far because they are an argument in how to use a character in a mystery novel without over-exhausting or over-bearing the reader with repetition. This sometimes leads tv show versions of her to shoehorn in the character in places she doesn’t really belong, but in the novels, a […]

Revisiting a favourite from my early teens

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie

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When out golfing one afternoon, young Mr Bobby Derwent finds a handsome stranger at the bottom of a cliff, near death. While his golfing companion goes to get help, Bobby sits with the stranger, who soon expires, but not before uttering: “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” While looking for signs of identification, Bobby finds the photograph of a very beautiful woman in the dead man’s pockets, but nothing else to give him a sign of the man’s identity. The local inquest rules the man’s death […]

Oh, my pie!

The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie

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I wonder about the role this play plays in the tropes of mystery theater. A little more research would obviously give me the answer, but I am staying in the dark on this one. Whether this is the play that created the tropes of the locked mansion mystery — ala Clue, Gosford Park, etc — or merely the one the best capitalized on it, I am uncertain. The play itself is about a newly opened “Guest House” — basically Air BnB in an older English […]

Murder Mysteries: Hercule Poirot > Miss Marple

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

Nemesis by Agatha Christie

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The ingenious website I Write Like has informed me on six separate occasions that my writing most resembles that of Agatha Christie, the best-selling author of all time, aside from Shakespeare and the Bible. Praise be! However, I have never read the First Lady of Mystery, as murders solved by someone other than Sherlock Holmes rarely appeal to me. Fortunately, on last week’s trip to the coast I came across Coalesce Bookstore, a shop packed to the rafters with volumes old and new. I left […]

Faces are tricky unless you can connect up when and where you’d seen them.

Endless Night by Agatha Christie

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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 […]

It was artificial conversation, but it tided us over the first awkwardness

Crooked House by Agatha Christie

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In this standalone novel, we meet a young British spy who falls in love with an heiress in a British/Greek family, whose grandfather is a restaurant magnate who might also be some kind of power player in Greek politics. They meet, they fall in love, and then are separated by the various fates of war. When Charles see a notice that the grandfather has died, he sends a note to his former love, who contacts him and suggests that she thinks he was actually murdered. […]



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