Armageddon Outta Here! - the Skulduggery Pleasant short stories

Open up this improbably titled book - after staring at the gorgeous wraparound cover with all the characters brought to life - and you'll see a contents page, or rather, a timeline. Unlike the main (nine or ten) novels, this are the stories inbetween those blockbusting adventures. Short stories!

That's not to say these are small stories. Some of the most memorable deal with the 'gaps' in the series: an unseen first meeting in Friday Night Fights; a story that has fun with the Western genre set back in the Dead Men's heyday; a longer novella in a very different - but no less Derek Landy - style; another very enjoyable (and slightly self-referential) appearance from horror writer Gordon Edgely

These are billed as the 'new' stories, although only the most adventurous fans will have tracked down and read all of the others (I'd only read one before). A lot of the existing stories introduce brand new characters created by readers as part of competitions - not as gimmicky as you'd think, and these stories have more significance after the author crammed in practically every character in the penultimate book last year, Last Stand of Dead Men. And it's also introduced me to The Lost Art of World Domination, a very impressive, hilarious exchange of dialogue, which is set in that odd continuity-sparse hinterland, the 'early days'.

Is the book accessible for new readers then, or ones that haven't read all of the books in the series? I'd say probably yes, as the stories are self contained and introduce people themselves, although you'd miss out a lot of injokes (more than references) back to characters, plots and later twists. It's great for fans then - really enriching the wider edges of the world of the books, or as extra stories on par with the great set-pieces of the bigger novels, or just containing more action with their favourite characters - Skulduggery or Valkrie feature in almost all of them.

Then you get to the last section, the advertised 'exclusive chapter from the final book'. I'm not normally swayed by these things - especially as they're normally a tiny peek compared with sitting down with the full tome when it's published. But I did enjoy this one - action, scares, fun, just like the previous short stories in fact.

Only this one has a shadow over it, as it's set after the really very game-changing events of the penultimate book. Some of the fun might be over, which makes this book - containing references to all the books, thanks to the final chapter - a last chance before we say goodbye. It's extra special.

Hangman's Holiday by Dorothy L Sayers

I seem unable to find the attention span to read a full length novel at the moment (even on holiday!) - so handily I've got this collection of short stories by Dorothy L Sayers (not to be confused with the very similar sounding Busman's Honeymoon!). There's twelve stories, quite short, some with Lord Peter Wimsey, some with Montague Egg, a travelling salesman, and some without a detective.

Alas, this book is a bit unsatisfying. Short story collections are inevitably a mixed bag, and this is no exception.

 

Let's start with the Peter Wimsey stories - Sayers's most familiar creation, and these stories are longer than the others in this collection. What went wrong here then?
The Image in the Mirror, the first tale, is admittedly well told - most of it a monologue from a stricken man telling Wimsey how he thinks he's going mad and committing murders in his sleep. It's full of detail and is entertaining, but it's spoilt by the ending - almost as preposterous as the man's own explanation of being 'sent into the fourth dimension', but also incredibly guessable from the opening pages - even Wimsey says so, acting thoroughly bored of his own story by the explanation.
The Elopement of Peter Wimsey is very odd - Wimsey doesn't feature at the start, which is more like an MR James pastiche. The second half, as Wimsey changes tack suddenly, not just jarring but very silly. Whatever humour is might have had has been lost by time, and it feels like a waste of pages with too much scene setting.
These first two detective stories are very different to usual, so perhaps it's noble of Sayers to be exploring the possibilities of the genre. The rest of the book is more straightforward. Sadly The Queen's Square, which consists of about twenty pages of the movements of guests leading up to a murder, is infuriating. It's all just names rather than any fleshing out of the characters of the suspects (even though there must be over twenty of them!), and is impossible to follow, let alone guess the very scientific explanation. The Necklace of Pearls fares much better: although characters are still mere sketches on a page, at least it's enjoyable (set at Christmas, a time Sayers apparently hated, and you can tell!).

Onto the Montague Egg stories, then. I approached them with a heavy heart, especially seeing these stories were shorter than the rest. But as a whole, they remind me of the Poirot short stories (or similarly Christie's Parker Pyne or Harley Quinn tales) - nicely uniform in style even if they deal with exotic locations, and the perfect story for this length. There's enough variety to keep you interested too - you've got courtoom drama, identifying a murderer, murder in Oxford, and a missing person - and also a very odd story about cats that has a rather sadistic and sour end. None of them are anything special, but most are satisfying and good to read.
Montague Egg himself is defined almost solely by his profession - he's a travelling wine salesman, eager to please, impossibly sharp eyed, who just happens to come into contact with mysteries and crime! It's a very sketchy character, but it means he's very suited to short stories rather than novels.

The final two stories are thankfully the best. The first, The Man Who Knew How, has a man chasing up suspicious deaths after a chance encounter, with a twist in the tale.
And then there's the enjoyable The Fountain Plays, which dispenses of a detective and instead focuses on the actions of a murderer trying to second guess the police. They're the sort of clever stories that Hitchcock would adapt into films, or would feature as an episode of The Twilight Zone. In particular, neither of them feature acres of detail and suspects, and are all the better for it.

In summary - these stories feel different to what's typically referred to as Dorothy L Sayers's style. Her novels are full of details, in both character and atmosphere, and often eccentric. In the confines of a short story, most of that is stripped back to reveal clever solutions (almost more tricksy and involved than the explanations in her novels!) I get a sense of the writer trying to work out what stories she can tell in this format, the level in quality explained by the stories being collected over, presumably, a number of years. As a collected work, it's not the best book ever, nor is it very memorable, but you should find things in it to enjoy.

'Murder Must Advertise' by Dorothy L Sayers

A short review of this classic 30s mystery - and the first Sir Peter Wimsey book I've read. Dorothy L Sayers's books regularly show up on lists of the best detective fiction (the Crime Writers Association put her up with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dame Agatha Christie, or Raymond Chandler). But like the rest, there's no clear consensus on her best novel. The Nine Tailors (on my reading list) and Gaudy Night and Strong Poison (two with Harriet Vane assisting Wimsey) are often cited, along with this one.

Set in an advertising agency, Peter Wimsey goes undercover in order to investigate a suspicious death and a drugs plot. Dorothy L Sayers has had considerable knowledge working as a copywriter - and it shows. The atmosphere in the opening chapters (and all the way through the book actually) conjures up a lively workplace of people - most of them thinking up the advertising slogans and campaigns in order to flog unnecessary stuff to the public. She captures the madness of the job with a satirical eye, and it gives the book an edge. The characters are reasonable, and there's lots and lots of them. A pleasing range in female characters, and of men too, but often the workers are interchangeable, and it's hard to pick out somebody in particular as a suspect - nor, do I suspect, does the author want to either.

I've heard that, like this one, Sayers's books focus more on the background and characters than constructing a clever, potentially dry murder mystery. Actually, the crime is quite well thought out, but there's not enough of it to cover 100 thousand words. That's not to say it's boring or that it drags along: there's plenty of ingenious chapters and set-pieces (workplace arguments, some skulking around town, some slight but colourful party scenes, a lengthy cricket match near the end that might confuse people who didn't know the rules).

It might be the first book of hers I've read, but I'm not a stranger to Wimsey - there was a short section with him written by another author in an anthology (to which she also contributed), and I've listened to one of the (3 hour odd) radio adaptations, of her first book 'Whose Body?'. That one was mad - a rambling mystery with little twist in the murderer's identity. The blurb on my edition of Murder Must Advertise says that 'five people will die' - and bar the first murder before the book begins, all of these happen in the last third of the book, and most are forgettable. By the climax, the whole thing is downplayed, with most of Wimsey's conclusions explained beforehand. I was surprised by the 'drug plot' - it sounds a lazy enemy to be up against (police unable to catch them, members potentially everywhere), but it's handled with enough detail to be plausible.

I found the book a great read, with a great setting and plenty of interesting diversions too. So it surprised me to read that the author herself didn't think much of it, that it was apparently written in haste to satisfy her publishers, before she could work on her next book with her preferred setting, the chuch bell-ringing of The Nine Tailors. Will that book hold up against the hype?

Detection Club: The Floating Admiral / Ask a Policeman

A couple of years ago, in my quest reading all of Agatha Christie's work, I stumbled upon a recent reprint of an old collaborative book. Written in 1931, The Floating Admiral was devised by the members of The Detection Club, a 'fun' society whose members included the likes of Agatha, Dorothy L Sayers, GK Chesterton and many many others since. Presumably the reprint was a success as now a second Detection Club novel has been reprinted by HarperCollins, and I've just finished it.

The Floating Admiral was one of the first published collaborations between a group of professional, published authors, and even today it's quite star studded. There's fourteen writers involved, writing a chapter of a detective story each. Naturally, the story suffers - you can't compare it to a typical crime tale, even if the plot has all the hallmarks of one. A body is found murdered, floating on a boat on a river mouth between two towns! Not only is there suspects and alibis and tracing his movements, but also remarks about the tide and how to moor boats!
The style jumps around with each author, especially with the addition of more clues and twists, but it's kept from getting too contrived by an ingenious instruction: each writer, as well as acknowledging everything that came up before, had to come up with a solution to their chapter (printed at the end of the story), their own explanation of the evidence. Agatha Christie, whose short chapter thankfully has a lot of typically good dialogue between characters, came up with a famously great explanation, which I won't spoil here.

It's a very interesting book, and a fun experiment for the Club (they had worked together on a couple of short serialisations before this, but not a full length novel). Many of the writers have faded into obscurity (especially the most florid named such as Canon Victor Whitechurch and Edgar Jepson), so the introduction putting them into context is much needed. The book itself, though, is an odd read. What starts off as atmospheric and scene setting, quickly descends into a mess of overly complex evidence, deduction and counter deduction. The task of the final writer to tie everything up must have been enormous - but I'd prefer something less technical, playing on the fact each chapter has a different author by having a change in style, rather than juggling the plot all of the time. It's skilfully written though, definitely grabbing your attention, and definitely living up to the concept.

Ask a Policeman, the following collaboration, seems to tackle the inherent problems of the first book head on. For starters, it has only half the number of authors than the first book, making it a smoother, slightly more coherent affair. And secondly, this time they bring along their detectives!

The four detectives were probably well known to readers of detective fiction in 1934, but less so now. Whilst I'm familiar with the enthusiastic (and often infuriating) Lord Peter Wimsey from Dorothy L Sayers, and I've heard of Gladys Mitchell's Mrs Bradley (played by Diana Rigg later on TV, and I've got one on my reading pile), the other two I hadn't heard of before. The trouble is that these books are barely in print at the moment, especially Helen Simpson's stage manager Sir John Samaurez and Anthony Berkeley's Roger Sheringham, who, whilst having books adapted into films by Hitchcock (!), remain obscure. Not to mention the other two authors involved in this (and the previous book too), John Rhode and Milward Kennedy. This means it's sometimes hard to see the humour and parody involved when they appear, but they're good characters and very good writers.
In fact, the book itself is marketed under Agatha Christie - and unlike The Floating Admiral, she hasn't even contributed to this one! Rather, they've lumped in a Preface that was published elsewhere, an essay by her about other Detective Fiction writers. However it's a great piece - insightful and critical - and fits this book very well.

It's rather a shame that some of the writers aren't better known, because it's a good read! This book has an odd gimmick - one writer, Rhode, writes the set-up this time, putting in an impossible amount of clues into his relatively short opening. That it stands up to the later repeated scrutiny, and doesn't get too dull when it's explained again and again, shows his merits. (The plot itself is possibly stereotypical, and definitely contrived, with three important pillars of society being involved and suspected in a country house shooting!). Whilst it's all about alibis and timings, the initial chapter is so open, the following chapters are all quite different.
The next four writers each have detectives 'solve' the case - but in a gimmick designed to invoke parody, they swap detectives and are writing in somebody else's style. This doesn't entirely work without knowledge of the originals, but it's put to the background. More important are the deductions, and there's a lot of them. Whilst some of these are long winded or with overly flowery prose, they're different enough to keep holding your attention, especially in small doses. By the end of it though, you know the movements of everybody at Hursley Lodge like the back of your hand, it's been reiterated and debated so many times.
And then, tying up everything in a very fun and ingenious final chapter is Milward Kennedy. The clever conceit is that all of these detectives, whilst their chapters were written independently, worked around each other, and every clue they found was correct - even if they picked different suspects as the murderer. So who really did it? A fifth solution is found, that's meant to be the 'correct' one that fits almost all of the evidence. It sounds horrendous to write, making sense of every clue (and sneakily discounting a couple of murderer's confessions!) but thankfully it's painless to read.

Both of the books are less coherent and less readable than usual detective novels, but then they don't claim to be. Rather, through parody and wit, they enthusiastically push some of the conventions of the genre, in an era where detective fiction was all the rage. These books are better than the concept sounds, and well worth discovering now they've been reprinted once more (in very smart new editions!), and the talent involved means they shouldn't be overlooked in a hurry. Whether any more of the few Detection Club collaborations will be republished, without Agatha Christie's name attached, remains to be seen, but I hope so, if they match this standard.

Skulduggery Pleasant: Last Stand of Dead Men - spoiler-free review

It's a challenge in a review not to just recount the plot. Especially in this review - this book's got a heck of a lot of plot - and it's book eight of nine in a bestselling fantasy series, chances are you haven't read all of them. So I'm trying be as spoiler free as I can (as author Derek Landy would wish) for this, the latest, heaviest, and perhaps best book in the series. Here goes...

For those who aren't clued up, these books are a lively mixture of strong characters, misguided villians, cool magic, and dry wit. The main characters are the titular Skulduggery, who's a skeleton and a detective. His associate Stephanie starts off as a normal teenage girl before discovering a crazy world and becoming Valkryie Cain, sorcerer. And if you really haven't read it before - stop reading this and pick up the first book!

14 Forgotten Books from my Childhood

I see lots of books talked about online - but they're mainly classics, or by new or famous authors. From an age before the internet (well, social networking), most of the books I used to read never get publicised any more. And nobody ever recommends children's books anyway.

So here's a few that I remember enjoying - with no Harry Potter, Roald Dahl, Lemony Snicket, Narnia, Anne Fine, Artemis Fowl...

Revenge of the Killer Vegetables -Damon Burnard
I used to say this was one of my favourite books. One of the reasons was probably it's a comic! I don't think I realised that books could be this cool before - the title probably tells you the whole plot! And it's very funny, too. (Captain Underpants is another - sillier - comicky book I remember!)

Seriously - a talking potato!

Beaver Towers - Nigel Hinton
A bedtime story from when I was young - simple, Narnia-esque, about talking animals and magic and old places. And I must have read it lots of times, a rare event now.

Bobby Brewster series - H.E. Todd / Jeremy James books - David Henry Wilson
Two completely unrelated series I've lumped together, as I was about the same age reading both. The first, an old series of short stories from the 60s about a boy who ended up having magical adventures - well, slightly bargain basement adventures, with everyday items like a snowman or a potato coming to life. And the second, much more recent, about the highly comical adventures of an inquisitive four year old boy - I remember one of my teachers being a fan of them too.

Hiding Out - Elizabeth Laird
This used to scare me when I was little. It's about a boy on holiday in France, who then gets left behind and has to fend for himself. It's not creepy as such, just very realistic - although foraging for food and living in a cage isn't really comparable to getting lost in Marks and Spencer.

The Pokemon series - various
It seems a bit odd today. You had the videos games - the important, amazing thing - but also the Pokemon cards, the comics, the toys, the anime series... and you still got excited about the novelisations. Must have been a bit like what Doctor Who was - with Tracey Jump being Terrance Dicks's analogue. Even more excitingly - a few of them were original! I've got about twenty of them.

I don't think I got the Zelda books - but I do have Sonic !

Choose-your-own-adventure books 
Loved these. For those unfamiliar, you start at page 1, and then whichever pages you choose to read next determines the story. Nothing fancy with dice or paper - my favourites were some rare Super Mario books, which had a load of puzzles and mazes that you had to get right in order to get the best ending. I even made my own once in the back of a notebook on holiday.

Murderous Maths - Kjartan Poskitt
Horrible Histories, Horrible Science, The Knowledge, and all that lot... But my favourite series was Murderous Maths. Perhaps because - shock! - I actually quite liked the subject. And this series was great - actually dealing with pretty complex concepts (A-level standard, even) in amongst the jokes. There's a nifty website too.

Deadly, Wicked etc - Paul Jennings and Morris Gleitzmann
I'm not sure how popular these two authors were - maybe it's a 90s thing, or an Australian thing - but they're highly recommended. I opted more for the oddity and daringness of Jenning's short stories, rather than Gleitzmann's real-life surrealism (though I did like Toad Rage). When they collaborated (on a few series), the results were very insane - giant worms and murderous sheep, that kinda thing.

The Wish List - Eoin Colfer
Everyone knows about Artemis Fowl (hopefully), and there's some great other Eoin Colfer books (Airman, The Supernaturalist, Half Moon Investigations, etc), but this one's a favourite of mine, and very underrated. It's witty and down to earth, about a girl who comes back as an angel in order to help an old man complete his 'wish list' - and sort out her own problems.
 
The Fire Within - Chris D'Lacey
I loved the first book - a brilliantly told story about an introduction into the ancient, hidden world of dragons. And also a story-within-a-story about squirrels. More sequels followed (like, five or six of them now) but by the time I got round to reading them I'd forgotten what happened in the first one. Oops.

Muddle Earth - Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell
Incredibly funny. Even for people who don't know Lord of the Rings - it's a spoof of fantasy novels, basically, from the writers of the acclaimed, extraordinary epic The Edge Chronicles (definitely worth reading, those!). They've tried to adapt it a few times, but it doesn't quite work as well as on the page. There was eventually a sequel, but I haven't read it yet.

Magyk, et al by Angie Sage
Okay, I was a bit old with this one (though apparently - 2005, so not that old), but it's still bewitching - literally, a book about an apprentice wizard in a very believable fantasy world. It's got a wide range of characters - so it's sometimes hard to keep track of them between books, but it has warmth and humour in spades. And there's a blog here.

TimeRiders - Alex Scarrow
 Okay, this is a cheat, as I was about 18 when it came out. But it's still an underrated new YA series. The first book in the series is still my favourite - time travel, Nazis, robots, nuclear war... it's a real action packed blockbuster! Website here.


There's probably lots more - children's fantasy series like The Divide (a boy discovering a mixed up fantasy world), Troll Fell (Vikings discovering trolls!), Otto and the Flying Twins (another fantasy wizarding world), and countless one-offs...

The Great Gatsby

At the moment, I'm reading another of F Scott Fitzgerald's books - in fact his first, This Side of Paradise. (It's rather dragging I'm afraid - well written, just not too engaging - but that's another story entirely) Undoubtedly the most famous of the things he wrote was The Great Gatsby - a novel which has just come out as a Hollywood blockbuster movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan, directed by showman extraordinaire Baz Luhrmann.

A few months ago I read the book itself. It had been on my reading list for a while, given its popularity - but I went into it knowing very little, especially about the plot. So I didn't quite know what to expect - it wasn't as if I'd read any other of Fitzgerald's work, or was familiar with his distinctive, effortlessly poetic writing style. (I haven't seen any other film adaptations either!) But I did enjoy it.

I was caught up in the characters, the plot, the words, the atmosphere. In my mind, though the prose was pleasant (and the cynic in me thought it was almost written to be analysed for countless GCSE literature courses), the atmosphere seemed pretty harsh and brutal. This was a shady world of corruption and capitalism and, in the end, murder and death. Strangely enough I hadn't got the full impact of it - it's a book trying to define its time, but read ninety years later, you take the motor cars and the alcoholic parties for granted. When in actual fact this was the era of Prohibition (hey - I'm not American, perhaps that's why some of it was lost on me). But I could see why it was successful, even if I didn't quite get everything on my first (and only, thus far) reading.

But then you read that it wasn't initially successful at all. When it was first published in 1926, though the author had realised he was creating a novel's novel, a fine piece of literature which would, in part, define and also transcend its decade... it received mixed reviews. It didn't sell very well. People, apparently, didn't quite get it. So bear that in mind when reading the book - or indeed, seeing the new film that's just been released (you know, that one that's been getting mixed reviews...).

So what about the film?

The first thing that strikes you is the visuals - it's a blockbuster in every sense of the word, and it looks absolutely lavish. The parties are wild, and brilliantly staged. There's great sweeping shots from one bay to the next, and cars whizzing by over huge landscapes - created, of course, by the latest computer effects. In fact, for me watching it in 2D, there's a bit too much of it, and at times it's almost too well done. Almost all the exteriors of the film are done in greenscreen, which gives it an odd look to my somewhat trained eyes, almost like a comic-book. Given that it isn't, and the subject matter isn't sci-fi or fantasy, it's jarring. Whether or not it looks better in 3D (even if you have to wear the glasses and focus a lot), I don't know.

Where the film shined the most for me, apart from it being gorgeous to look at, was the actors. The quieter moments, where the characters are sitting in a room and talking. And they are good characters, and very good actors - after all, one of the reasons the book is adapted is because of the plot and the characters. Even though at first it doesn't really feel like they're centre stage, amongst all the visual trappings. And the music too - it's a great soundtrack, the dazzling jewel in the film being Lana Del Rey's sumptuous Young and Beautiful, and there's also Florence + the Machine's amazing, directly-inspired Only the Love. Sure, it's odd seeing people in the 1920s dancing along to modern club music, to rap, and a jazzy rendition of Beyonce's Crazy in Love. But, it's of its time, and it works. Coupled with the CGI, the 3D, and the glitz and glamour, this film will date very very fast - ironic, given the source material. But hey - Hollywood does this sorts of blockbusters every year, so why not, in Gatsby's spirit, give people a huge showstopper to remember?

It's definitely a tough book to film. Being somebody else's adaptation of the novel, it's always going to be somebody else's view of what they think the novel is saying. It's one of those books where you often have to read into the poetry or things that are happening just out of the main picture - subtlety, in other words. That's kind of hard to capture - the film uses voiceover, but then that ruins the scenes where the characters are properly interacting.
Watching it on screen, with the film following the plot of the novel faithfully (overly so, perhaps), some scenes I thought were spoilt by showing it in detail, and would be better left to our imaginations - I didn't imagine Gatsby's love affair was quite so passionate when I read it, for instance. And then, some scenes I thought worked really well, where the film deliberately showed us its themes, and what the story was all about. And then spelt it out in voiceover. And underlined with a red pen, twice.

The book, I believe, has reached high acclaim, right up there as one of the best American novels. Similarly, the film absolutely adores the book. Take the last chapter, the last paragraph: reading it fresh, I thought it was an enigmatic, poetic, if downbeat end to the whole story, but I didn't realise that it was especially famous. The ending of the movie tries to capture the essence of those words on the page... well, it tries too hard. I'd have been happy with just a voiceover to be honest. When the film starts to quote parts of the book, literally writing the words up on the screen, you realise this is a very unusual adaptation. Whether it's a good thing or not is up to the viewer.

Agatha Christie's Autobiography - a review

After reading almost all of her canon of work, I've delved into one of Agatha Christie's most important tomes - her autobiography. Though published in the months after her death, it covered her life up to when she was in her seventies, about ten years before she died. Whilst I was reading and discovering her books, I'd built up a strong image of who she was - by what subjects she wrote about, or information regarding the publishing of her books, or that famous disappearance - and even some particularly autobiographical characters she created. So, how would I find reading this, her own, perhaps definitive, account of an eventful life?

The book is a long one - it weighs in at 250,000 words, and took her fifteen years to complete it. But the extra time was worth it, as it's packed full of interesting stories and happenings. And whilst there are digressions along the way, it has all the economy - and excitement - of one of her great books.

People who are expecting a complete guide of every process that goes into writing one of her novels are going to be disappointed - it's an autobiography after all, a personal account of the story of her life. The books rarely feature - and when they do, they're the ones that she considers important personally, or that she has strong memories of, or has picked out as a good book when reading back many years later. There's particularly a fair amount about how she came to write her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and also the publishing side of things.
It's interesting to read how at first Agatha Christie didn't consider herself as a novel writer, but as a wife who started to do that sort of thing on the side to make some extra money. Ten years on, and she found herself writing books even when she didn't want to - a sign, for her, that it was now a job, and she would write a book every year. There are recollections of crafting some of her early work - the light hearted adventure type thrillers "that are more fun, and quicker to write", yet few of the period in the 1930s in which some of her most acclaimed detective stories were published. However, she also delves into other parts of her work (such as poems, short stories, romantic novels and acclaimed plays) and interestingly, her thoughts on the process of writing, and how she came to do it in the first place. Written in the first person, she shares a lot of personal opinions, and it builds up a picture of her own character - and in one frank section, she simply gives us a list of things she likes and things she doesn't!

That's not to say the life she's lead isn't recognisable as something out of a Christie novel. Plenty of autobiographical detail seems to have been included in her work, sure to be picked up on by those who have read it. Things like travelling on the Orient Express, dig sites in Syria and Iraq, or an exotic business holiday to South Africa, which was then extensively used in the early thriller The Man in the Brown Suit. Much of her childhood seems very close to the Mary Westmacott romantic novels, in which she painted a picture of someone's life story - some things copied word for word - and later novels, like Postern of Fate. But these references are fewer than you'd think - she says she rarely based characters on anybody in real life, certainly not people she knew, and after all - in her eyes, they were purely escapism.
Rather, the avid Agatha Christie reader gets a sense of the time she was living in, and the wider world in which her books were written in - a time of country houses, servants, generations of men becoming soldiers, and unexpected foreign travels. It's easy to forget that some of the events she describes happened over a hundred years ago.

After a slow start, though with many detailed recollections of her early years - no less busy than her later ones, as her parents moved around France as she was growing up - she then covers the events of her reaching adulthood, with plenty of prospective husbands! Personally, I found the book picked up pace, despite the many amusing and heartfelt events of her childhood - and became even more interesting when it went on to cover the events of the First World War, and the interesting world of the VADs, and events that would strongly shape her future.

The book, and by extension her own life, covers a lot of ground - from schooling, to nursing, to travelling round the world - and is often a joy to read. Her books are often praised for their readability, and this one is just the same. Despite the length, it's accessible, enjoyable and moving - giving us an insight into the modest, retiring crime writer, whose audience - including me - previously only knew through her detective novels.

Akhnaton - a play by Agatha Christie

As you might expect from the striking front cover and title, this is something a bit different. In fact, I'd probably never read it if it wasn't for Agatha-Christie-devouring completeness.

It's a historical play (so not a murder mystery) set in Ancient Egypt. It's never been properly performed however (though she must have liked it to want it published), and has 'little commercial value', apparently. Which I read as code for being 'utterly boring'.

But whilst it's not boring, it is a bit dry. You don't need too much background knowledge when reading it - entry level Egyptology will suffice' - but the play concerns the reign of the pharoah Akhnaton (whose wife Neferiti was probably more famous, as was his successor Tutankhamun), and his subsequent downfall. The play wobbles between historical background and research (names of gods, practices, lineage and castes, especially apparent in long speeches) with typical human drama and emotion (idle talk between townsfolk, many of the characters' conversations). It's melodramatic, and more highbrow than your usual fare.

But altogether, it hangs together quite nicely. For its big scale and subject matter (there's many sets and costumes, and always talk of far off rebellion) it wrings every bit of human drama out of the royal court, with the mad king (which felt a bit Shakespearean, but it works), his right-hand-man, and plots against him by priests and saboteurs. He was the king who shook off using multiple religious gods, instead reverting to one, represented by the sun. Agatha paints him as young, artistic and peace loving, ambitious but weak and misguided, and ultimately very very mad. So that's fairly hard to warm to, when your main character goes off on one at the end of the scene.

Whilst it's nowhere near the usual Agatha Christie in subject matter (despite her referring to history and archaeology many times), somehow in places characters end up talking very much like Agatha Christie characters, circa 1937 when it was written (seriously, the discussions about the nature of art could come straight from Five Little Pigs or The Hollow).

Its main feat is creating an actual readable (or performable) play out of such a sparse, yet rich, strain of history. It's worth noting that, as it was written in 1937, much of the historical 'accuracy' has been disproved by now, or even by 1973 when the book was published. It was only written fifteen years after Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun's tomb. However, given the historically dry subject matter, to experts and non-experts alike, her later Ancient Egyptian murder mystery Death Comes As The End is probably a safer, more mainstream choice.

The Novels of Agatha Christie

About four years ago, I decided to read some Agatha Christie. I'm not entirely sure why - I'd not seen any on the telly, so it was probably because of Doctor Who. I started with the perennial 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd', and then 'Death on the Nile', and before I knew it I had made a pledge to consume the entire back catalogue, through the help of my local libraries. All eighty or so books!

So in this post, I'm going to guide you through the highlights and highpoints - mostly the classics you might have heard of, but they're classics for good reason. This is probably a list of some of the best things she's written - unlike Sherlock Holmes, say, her novels are far better than the short stories.

The novels broadly divide themselves into three categories - the ones starring Poirot, the Miss Marple mysteries - her two most prolific detectives - and the 'other' category, of which there are many. Not all of these are murder mysteries - there's also some brilliant thrillers, as well as delving into the romantic and supernatural,

A word of advice if you're picking books off the shelf - broadly speaking, 'vintage' Christie tends to be stories written around 1930 (her early twenties work take a while to hit their peak) to 1950 (in the novels of the late 60s and into the 70s, written in the last years of her life, the standard of writing and plotting has noticeably slipped). And if you remember the TV (or film) adaptations beforehand then, in most cases, don't bother reading! Honestly, you'll enjoy them far, far more if you don't know what's going to happen next.

The Hercule Poirot novels

In my opinion, the best of the bunch - I prefer Poirot stories to Marple, if only because they contain some of her most ingenious set-ups. Poirot was the first detective she came up with - and, together with friend and narrator Captain Hastings - is basically Sherlock Holmes... but Belgian! Whilst early stories deal with many Holmesian ideas - Inspector Japp takes on the beleagured police role, there's a wife for Hastings, even an Irene Adler figure - he soon grows out of his trappings into something much greater. So - which are my favourites?

The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Her first novel, written as a bet, and designed to be surprising and unsolvable, yet all the clues are before us. You could do a lot worse than this, a fine country house mystery. (Poirot returns to the house of Styles in his last (chronologically) story, 'Curtain'. But that's a whole other novel.)

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Controversial, ingenious, and probably not the best choice for a first dip into Christie - although it is one of her very best. I'll say no more!

Murder on the Orient Express
Infamous, especially the ending - but if, like me, you don't know who did it, it's a perfect chance to dip into Poirot's most famous adventure. There's lots of atmosphere created by the isolated setting of the train, and the investigation is methodical and ever intriguing...

The ABC Murders
Another downright classic, probably my absolute favourite Poirot - if only because it's such a different style to the others. A serial killer is working his way up and down the country, and through the alphabet, going from Andover to Bexhill, to Churston... thrilling and satisfying!

Cards on the Table
A slightly contrived, but enjoyable murder here - four criminals playing bridge, and any one of them could have killed the man in the corner whilst they played... With a very narrow list of suspects, and hardly any evidence, this takes a more psychological approach, but is handled very well indeed. And of course, I must mention one of Agatha's most delightful creations: Mrs Ariadne Oliver, a writer of murder mysteries who provides a comedic counterpoint to Poirot on many later occasions.

Death on the Nile
Solid - that's the word I'd use. Whilst most of the books on this list are utterly ingenious, this one ties everything up rather most succinctly than most, and provides clues and suspects galore, which is probably why it's so popular. On a gloriously exotic and expensive river cruise in Egypt, passions come to a head, and a wealthy heiress is murdered...

Hercule Poirot's Christmas
You might not expect anything from that title - but don't be fooled. This is a bloody and fiendish locked room mystery, involving - naturally, for the time of year - a family who hate each other! This theme of bickering relatives is done many a time, but never as good as this one.

The Hollow
A later one, this - but it's on the list because it's very well written. At a weekend in a country house, a doctor is found shot in the swimming pool... Poirot has to sort through tangled relationships and a wealth of baffling evidence to catch the murderer...

Taken at the Flood
Another late one, which took me by surprise - and I've tried to come up with a range here. Whilst many themes are common, this one is set in the shadow of the Blitz and the War (something rarely acknowledged in these books, especially during the War itself, rightfully), and it has a thrilling solution. A young girl has found herself a widow and, much to the anger of the rest of the family, inheritor of a large fortune. But when a man arrives claiming that her marriage was invalid, things come to a head...

Also of note - because I'm restricting myself to only a few! - Five Little Pigs, Lord Edgware Dies, Peril at End House, Three Act Tragedy, etc, etc...

The Miss Marple novels

There's less of these ones, but she's still very popular. Whereas Hercule Poirot is a bossy private detective, Miss Marple is the opposite: a village spinster, with an equal eye on human nature! Perhaps it's this charming side of her character, and the stories themselves, that have made these so popular.


Murder at the Vicarage
This one's the first Marple, and probably the most famous. What I love about it is the characters. Whilst the murder and solution itself isn't one of Christie's best, the story is a real treat, as is the humour and liveliness of St Mary Mead. (And also, like so many others, the TV movie has a fab cast!)

A Murder is Announced
Probably the most enjoyable Marple there is. Not only have you got the village life that made the above so wonderful (also the setting for quite a few of these - not enough of them, I say), but also a gripping whodunit. When an advert in the local newspaper says a murder will take place at a local house, everybody is puzzled... until the hour comes, and a body appears! Very well written.

A Pocket Full of Rye
With this one, I saw it on the telly first, which made the book rather a chore. Which was a shame - as it's rather fine. Christie bases a few stories around nursery rhymes, but this one's rather more blatant (and therefore, surreal!) as there's suspicious murders involving a businessman, his wife and the maid...

Also of note: The Body in the Library, The Moving Finger, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side.

The rest

It feels a bit wrong to sideline everything else into one category - here you have other returning characters, as well as stories with no detectives in them at all. Exotic thrillers, psychological dramas, crazy politics and spies...

And Then There Were None
The pinnacle. And her best selling novel, with good reason. The plot - ten people are invited to an abandoned island, but each of them has a secret past. When the island becomes cut off, and people start getting murdered, it is evident that one of them must be a homicidal maniac... A very suspenseful, utterly gripping story, the basis for which has been used many times since. And it's not as contrived as I've made it sound, honest.

The Secret Adversary
This book deserves a mention, as it's the best out of the five that star Tommy and Tuppence, a pair of young investigators who get imbroiled into a political mystery. Uniquely, they age the same rate as the books - unlike Miss Marple, who's a pensioner for about fifty years, they grow old together, whilst still having adventures naturally! In this one, they're up against an international spy ring in a pretty barmy, but well written and lively thriller.

Towards Zero
Probably the only 'proper' murder mystery on this last list. It could take pride of place in any Poirot or Marple collection, but instead features Superintendant Battle (who features in a few books, including Avengers style crossover Cards on the Table) - and he's not in it too much. A tennis player turns up to a seaside party, and where both his wife and ex-wife are staying. And then their host is murdered...
 

Death Comes as the End
Agatha wrote some odd books in her time (I particularly like the bonkers conspiracy thriller Destination Unknown, and there's also the baffling James Bond style The Big Four) but this one shows real flair. Whilst a few books are set around archeological sites, and in far eastern places, this goes one further... it's a murder mystery set in ancient Egypt! It works far better than you think, and contains all the usual charactering and intrigue.

Endless Night
A very late book, but very well written. It's told through the first person of a young man who falls in love, but dark events follow...

Also of note: Crooked House, Ordeal by Innocence.

So that's that - a quick guide to the best of the best of Agatha Christie. Of course, by this list I'm not saying the rest of the books are bad (well, not all of them, at least!). I'd advise any new readers to check them out, though. I know I've read eighty-odd, but I love her work to bits.

Coming soon: a (much briefer) guide to her short stories.

Pride and Prejudice

Slightly daunting, this article. What can I say about a book that's often quoted as the 'best loved', a book that's spawned hundreds of adaptations, and caught the hearts and minds of millions? Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy, they hate each other, and then gradually are drawn together through fate and events... yeah, I knew the basics, although not the ending. (And wasn't there a famous scene with Darcy coming out of a lake?) Well, I can say that I'd never read it, nor watched it, until now.

It's a good story, isn't it? I was rather overwhelmed by the length of the book - it's about 150,000 words, which is more than a 'light read', and probably took me about two or three weeks as I kept dipping in and out of it.

But the main thing that struck me was - it's written 200 years ago, and yet it's lovely to read. Out of the 19th Century books I've read (relatively few), I gave up on Frankenstein, and the others are much later, nearer 1900. So it was a surprise that a book which celebrates its bicentenary in a few months would be so readable. I have to admit, the cover being plastered with quotes extolling the humour, saying it's the 'funniest book ever written'... uh, no, it isn't. Not for today's audiences mind you, but I bet the Georgians were chuckling at the wry humour of Elizabeth's parents.

That's not to say the book is dated. Whilst the trappings of the story, the world in which the characters live, is firmly in the 1800s - things like daughters not being allowed to inherit, or the ettiquette of dancing at balls, or the scandals of class and marriage - the characters are utterly realistic, the scenario so timeless, that the book speaks for itself, and probably hits a chord in all of us. The reader is swept along by the inner feelings of Elizabeth Bennet, her passionate views and noble character. And that at the heart of the story, our heroine marries for love, despite her class and money, is a very modern angle, I think, and a very happy one. No wonder then that this is a much loved book, with a joyous ending, despite the drama of the journey.

Jane Austen has quite a few connections around the city of Bath, but I was still surprised to see it mentioned in the novel. On the second-to-last page, naturally. (And that lake scene? Never shows up, unfortunately, only on TV. And that looks like a fine adaptation to watch)

Agatha Christie's "Absent in the Spring"

Another Mary Westmacott - so I thought I'd blog about it. (I could make a habit of this!)

As ever, it's an emotionally engaging book - the contemporary review on the back compared it to Brief Encounter! - and, surprisingly considering the last one I read, fairly short.

Absent in the Spring was written in 1944 - ten years since her last book published under the name Mary Westmacott. It's a sizeable gap in a long career - inbetween she's done stage plays and many novels, including classics like The ABC Murders, Death on the Nile and the sublime And Then There Were None.

And she's also worked on her writing style. The book is written in a third-person narrative, but centred around a single main character and her reminiscences. A 'thoughts-and-all' approach, you could say. It's uncommon, but not unique - it brings to mind similar passages of a woman in the dock in Sad Cypress (1940) and perhaps Endless Night (1967 - although that's in the first person).

But perhaps it links in nicely with a lot of her novels, particularly the later ones - it focuses on memory. When Joan, a fifty-ish year old woman, gets stranded when travelling back from Baghdad (a place Christie was fond of - having based at least three of her novels around Iraq, some with an archeological flavour), she finds herself all alone, with little to do but to think about her life and to find her character.

The book is, basically, a character study - something Christie's very good at when she gets it right. And she does here. It's easy to relate and to imagine the middle-class wife and mother Joan, blind to her selfishness and her overprotective nature with regards to her children and her husband, the lawyer Rodney. (Personally, I "cast" in my mind Penelope Keith, and Paul Eddington in The Good Life - the comparison is quite a good one, and shows how familiar the characters seem!)

The stranded-in-the-East setting is, for the most part, merely window dressing, the icing on a surprisingly moreish cake. It's quite a readable and engaging book - what could seem like a very meandering, random series of flashbacks builds up into a jigsaw puzzle of the woman's life. Each character has a lot of room to grow, despite many never truly appearing - her grown-up children, the placated husband, a schoolfriend who's lived a completely different life. And just when you get tired of the format, there's a change - and she starts to see the bigger picture. All the scenes we've seen, with half-heard or ambigious lines - some of the more obvious than others - she finally gets what people see in her. It's a character study, but one coming from the outside world, and one sketched from qualities that she lacks, more than those she has.

Agatha Christie may be good at characters, but she's also good at plotting, and giving clues. Despite no crime being involved here, there's a lot of clues - the whole thing is, considering what little we know when both we and Joan start this journey. But a coherent plot? Luckily, Christie rescues it in an all-too-brief coda, as she finally gets home to see her family. But given what she now knows about herself, will she change for the better? It's a satisfying ending for a novel that, yes, is actually quite emotionally affecting.

The author's said that this novel felt satisfying to write - in three days hurried typing apparently! - but also written sincerely. As a reader and a reviewer, I can only agree.

Agatha Christie - 'Giant's Bread'

As you may or may not know, over the past three or four years, I've been reading the works of Agatha Christie. What started with dipping my toe into detective fiction, by reading the likes of 'Roger Akroyd', 'Death of the Nile' and 'Murder on the Orient Express', became the voracious task of trying to read all 80 odd of her works.

So now, after finally completing that task (well, nearly - I've still got a book of short stories to track down), I'm tackling some of her wider work; namely, the books written under the name of 'Mary Westmacott'.

They're often clubbed together - despite her having written them over the course of about thirty years, and with no common characters. And they're often dubbed 'romantic fiction' - despite there being few happy endings, even without the grisly murders...

So - 'Giant's Bread'. This was her first non-Crime novel, published in 1930, and it's quite an epic, being about double the word length of your standard Christie.

Perhaps unfortunately, I've read her second book, 'Unfinished Portrait', before this one - so I'm picking up on the apparent similarities of the two. But both, bar framing devices at the start, deal with the life and loves of their central character - in this case, Vernon Deyre.

We first meet him as a child, but quickly he grows up into a young man. Too quickly, you could say - as it's this child's perspective that Christie does rather well, dealing with imaginary friends and childhood games, but also topics like adultery, class, and deaths in the family, through a child's eyes. Yet still keeping the characters in focus - this is the rather selfish, troubled Vernon Deyre, not an idealised childhood.
She rightly uses it much more in 'Unfinished Portrait' - in which we see the girl, Celia, go from a young child, having governesses, moving abroad, going to finishing school... Here, there's a sudden jump from between the ages of about ten and twenty - missing out Vernon's schooling in Eton and Cambridge. Similarly later in the book, little is said about fighting in the (albeit fairly recent in the memory) Great War - instead, we're given the full scoop on the everyday life of VAD work. Well, they say write about what you know...

It's easy to see Agatha Christie's mark on these stories - even this one. Anyone who's read her early short stories will know her love of the opera. Here, Vernon is a musical genius, and although he struggles with his art, the composer of avante garde operas. One might say this reflects her own struggles with coming up with new novels (despite this being the start of a particularly fruitful era for her). Despite one or two laboured points - being scared of pianos gets a little bit forced - the musical side of things is done with conviction.

Whilst there's a particularly open ended prologue which doesn't give too much away, sadly the blurb - and many write-ups, do. It's a flaw of the novel that the plot point oft mentioned (being killed in the war, and his wife remarrying) only turns up in the final third of the book. That's not to say it's not good to read - it's mostly a breeze, despite me taking a couple of weeks with it - and not that there's unexpected moments. You're kept guessing at who Vernon will choose to marry - and for what reasons. Will it be his meek cousin Enid? The charmingly pretty Nell? Or the temptress singer Jane? Even though, from Vernon's point of view, it's not about love (or sex - which hardly gets a mention, discreet or otherwise) but about the music.

In terms of characters, you've also got his arty, rebellious cousin (almost sister) Joe, and neighbour-turned-best-friend, the Jewish wealthy Sebastian (who's surely the best choice for Vernon, no?). It's with him that Christie treads a fine line, from a modern perspective. On the one hand, having a main character who's Jewish - one of the strongest and most forefront in her books - is perhaps mould-breaking and championing. But on the other, he's a stereotype, down to the descriptions of yellow faces and loving of money, and a host of anti-Semetic remarks from other characters. But in the end, he's a stereotype with a heart, and a proper character of his own, so maybe it is a success.

Overall, it's a long meandering book, but as readable as most Christies happily are. There's some memorable characters, and a quite pessimistic tone - and whilst the ending isn't quite as fulfilling given the rest of the book, it's a good 'first' novel from the enigmatic Ms Westmacott.