A little snag...

Even if I haven't been posting, I'm still reading but I'm a little behind. By the end of May I should have read at least 4 novels and 2 books of short stories. I'll be lucky if I complete 3 books period. This is a failure of my own making and there is really nothing and no one to blame but my procrastination, YoVille and my tendencies toward obsessive compulsion.

I began reading before I completed all my Agatha Christie research and settling on a reading order. I started reading Murder on the Links only to discover that I should have read several short stories that were published after The Secret Adversary but before the second Poirot novel. The genie was already out of the bottle, I couldn't unread the first 8 chapters, but I decided to finalize at least the first 10 stories in the list. Gathering the raw data alone has been difficult. There is no way for me to know which were written first but the publication order seems to be a little less murky, even if there is a general lack of decisive information on the internet.

This is my reading order until I hit the snag of not having sourced the next set of short stories:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Secret Adversary

"The Affair at the Victory Ball"

"The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan or The Curious Disappearance of the Opalsen Pearls"

"The King of Clubs"

"The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim"

"The Plymouth Express"

"The Adventure of the Western Star"

"The Tragedy of Marsdon Manor"

"The Kidnapped Prime Minister"

Murder on the Links

Next on the agenda, sourcing a copy of While the Lights Last and Other Stories and The Harlequin Teaset

(I eventually found both While the Light Lasts and The Harlequin Teaset, only to discover in Canada they appear to be identical. Grrr)

The Secret Adversary

The first thing that struck me about The Secret Adversary is how different it was from The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Hastings' narration is very straightforward and very English while the first Tommy and Tuppence story takes its cue from American pulp fiction and moves along at a clip. The writing is chatty and the dialogue humorous and full 1920s slang. This isn't a stayed who-dunnit, but a fast-paced spy thriller.

The plot centres around a vague set of documents that in the wrong hands could DESTROY ENGLAND, and two would be adventurers, who through chance and circumstance, are fated to find a missing girl that will SAVE ENGLAND FROM ANARCHY AND CHOAS. Not precisely original ideas, but Agatha Christie cleverly uses crime story conventions and American cinematic cliches to her advantage making The Secret Adversary an engaging yarn.

Our heroes, Tommy and Tuppence, have recently been relieved of their wartime duties and are looking for work. Pickings are slim, so on a lark they decide to advertise their services as "adventurers" in the 1920s mercenary-blackmailing-jewel-theif sense of the word. Their ad stating that they are "willing to do anything, go anywhere" would have landed them careers in porn in 2010, but instead they end up entangled in a nefarious ring of counter-establishment criminals with bolshevik tendencies led by the enigmatic and titular secret adversary Mr. Brown. No one is to be trusted in this interwar Red Scare tale. In other words, a whole lot of silly fun that should be taken at face value.

I really enjoyed how of its time The Secret Adversary is. The depiction of the general uncertainty in post-WWI England, the vague racism and lingering fears over Germany and Russia, and the "what now" feeling of a newly demilitarized population. The Americans are brash and the good guys are all from the upper classes. Tuppence is the new liberated woman who, because she is a woman, still manages to be incredibly naive and far too trusting. Tommy, a former soldier who seems to crave adventure as much as he wants to leave it behind in the trenches, still trusts that the British sense of decorum will prevail despite having a keener sense of the danger.

My favourite part of the writing is the subtle formality of the narrative voice: it is more often Mr. Beresford and Miss Cowley than Tommy and Tuppence. I look forward to the next story for these two detectives. It will interesting to see how time alters Tommy and Tuppence.

Story: The Secret Adversary

Detectives: Tommy and Tuppence

Observation: First cousins get married? Ew!

Verdict: Great fun! Five stars!

NEXT: The Murder on the Links

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Memory is a funny thing: when I began reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles I thought I would remember who the murderer was. I actually remembered who Agatha Christie wanted me to think was the murderer, and despite being able to recall a few significant plot points, I was genuinely please to have overestimated myself. This proved to me that despite having already read this book and watching the ITV David Suchet television adaptation, Christie still delivers a good read and a few surprises.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles gives you just enough information and character to keep the story going. Although there are a few twists on the way, Christie cleverly doesn't withhold much in terms of plot; instead it is reader's natural desire to outwit her that conceals the murderer's identity.

This book, aside from introducing Poirot and Hastings, also introduces (Chief) Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard. His character also appears in Christie's next book, The Secret Adversary. I wonder if she has an entire back story for Japp and how much she'll reveal over the course of her writings? I almost wish she had written a biography for him; I think there would some interesting information there.

I enjoyed the relative simplicity of Christie's depiction of Poirot in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. This is early on and she hasn't written herself into any corners yet. Hasting as the slightly hapless old boy allows readers to acknowledge and move past Poirot's quirky idiosyncrasies without dwelling on them. The writing style to me was clean and straight forward. It is easy to see why Agatha Christie became the "Queen of Crime".

Book: The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920)

Detectives: Poirot, Hasting, Japp

Observations: How do you lock a busted down door?

Verdict: Fantastic! Four Stars!

Next: The Secret Adversary

Let the Reading Begin!

Well technically the reading has already begun. I was tired researching a reading order and sourcing the books when all I really wanted to do was read. I was camping with my sister and it was bright and sunny and there was a bench by the lake and The Mysterious Affair at Styles was just lying there taunting me. I couldn't help it. I had to pick it up.

I began reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles May 5, 2010. By May 5, 2011 I will have read all of Agatha Christie's mystery novels, stories and plays in roughly the order they were written.*

*I will finish by reading the two books that Agatha Christie intended to be her last: Sleeping Murder and Curtain: Poirot's Last Case, both of which were written in the 1940's.

The NEW Facebook Sucks

So I went to Facebook to try and post a link to my new blog in the vain hope that at lease one of my friends might take pity on me and follow me only to discover you can't actually do that anymore.

Facebook has moved away from allowing users to add information in a conventional conversational way to something called Profile Connections. Now instead of typing "I like cheese and cheese related novelties. They fill my heart with joy and provide an outlet for my creative energies," under "interests", users can only link to other Facebook pages about cheese.

This is what is considered by Facebook as a "new and improved way to express yourself." I'm sorry, how is linking to a page created by someone else expressing me? Yes I like Agatha Christie but does her Facebook page actually reflect my interest in her? Linking to that page doesn't say anything about what I feel or think or qualify my interests in anyway.

The fact that I like a movie or a song or a personal activity doesn't really define who I am. By just linking to pages my interests have been reduced to data-base friendly quantifiable information. This improvement is just a marketing tool that will make it easier for Facebook advertisers to target me.

In the past on Facebook, the interests section was a way describing yourself. These new "Profile Connections" don't allow you to do that. Instead it allows you to describe your interest. You're simply saying "I like Agatha Christie, click here if you don't know who she is. Now buy a book."

I'd rather have a blank profile thank you very much.

The Horror of Lists

I thought I had ironed out all my problems with my reading itinerary: cross reference the "Marple Reading List" and "Poirot Reading List" with the "All Stories" list and I'd come up with the perfect balance between character story arcs and the chronology of Christie's published works. I was wrong.

I've already mentioned the Miss Marple Suggested Reading Order differed greatly from Reading Order for Christie's Novels and Short Story Collections listed at www.agathachristie.com, and tonight I discovered there are a few minor differences with the Poirot list as well. But there is also a far bigger problem: the short story collections.

The "All Stories" list lists most of the major short story collections published in America and the UK. Some collections that were published in the UK weren't in America and vice-versa. All stories were eventually published on both continents but sometimes decades apart. For example, a mystery first published in a UK collection in the 1930s might appeared in a US book published in the 1950s alongside stories not published in the UK until the 1970s. Because BOTH UK and US collections are listed according to order of publication not by content, and the collections often contain stories published in earlier anthologies, when am I actually supposed to read the read the Regatta Mystery? or the Adventure of the Clapham Cook? or...

Truly there is no "supposed to": Agatha Christie was a very prolific writer but she didn't publish a "How to Read My Books" guide. But, me being me, aka obsessive compulsive, I want to find the perfect order. I've just spent the last several hours creating an Excel spreadsheet will all three suggested order lists and each of the short story collections broken down by their contents. It is almost 1:30 am and I have to be up at 6 am, so finding the original publication date for each mystery will have to wait until tomorrow.

Every Trip Needs an Itinerary

Before I start actually reading all the mystery works of Agatha Christie I thought I should come up with a plan of action. Do I read the books in the order they were written, or in the order they were published? Or should I just dive in with the first novel I happen to pickup?

I am not new to Agatha Christie. In my teens I read several of her novels and books of short stories, I was Christopher Wren in a production of The Mouse Trap, I've listened to podcasts and radio dramas and I've watched nearly all of the television adaptations of her books. For a creative writing class I even wrote an Agatha Christie style play. So really I've already read some of the books at random, and that wasn't exactly sustainable.

My original intention was to simply read all the books in order of publication: beginning with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and ending with Curtain: Poirot's Last Case. After a bit of research I learned that several Poirot and Miss Marple short stories weren't published until after Curtain. Reading the Poirot stories according to the publishing dates would take me backwards into his storyline; after Curtain you can't just go back to Poirot and Hastings happily solving cases at the Whitehaven Mansions.

I visited www.agathachristie.com and discovered their recommended reading order lists. That resolved my Poirot issues, but created a few problems with Miss Marple. For some reason if you're reading just Miss Marple they suggest one reading order but, if you decide to read ALL of Christie's works they suggest a different reading the Miss Marple stories in another order entirely. And, while I understand their reasoning for putting Sleeping Murder as the fifth Marple story to read, Christie did intended it as Miss Marple's last case.

Ultimately I'll probably decide on a hybrid of the recommended lists and publication order, but for now I'm eager to get started. Tomorrow I'll get The Mysterious Affair at Styles and go from there.