The Debut of M. Hercule Poirot

The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie
William Morrow, 2020 Kindle Edition
Originally published 1920
269 pages

I read a classic Agatha Christie for the 1920 Club, presented by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings. Years ago I listened to the audiobook version of this, the first in the Hercule Poirot series, but I had no memory of the story.

Reading this book now, I took delight in the many details of M. Poirot's appearance, mannerisms, and quirks. Of course I was comparing them to the wonderful TV portrayal of Poirot by David Suchet, and I think the shows were faithful to the original character, always an important issue for me.

Not to give away the plot, but Poirot does solve the murder, which involves a poisoning in a locked room and lots of suspicious relatives. This was Christie's first mystery, and it was turned down by six publishers before being published in 1920. I was quite surprised that this was her first published novel. The characters seem well-defined and the plot logical without annoying loose ends. She had, however, written one earlier novel that was rejected and never published.

This Kindle version of the William Morrow paperback includes two short articles by Christie where she explains how Poirot came to be and her relationship to him over the years. Very interesting!

Now I think I will continue to read more of Poirot. There are 33 novels, 2 plays, and more than 50 short stories in the Poirot canon. Plenty to keep me busy.

The is my entry in the Classic Adaptation category for the 2020 Back to the Classics challenge. It was adapted as part of the long-running Poirot TV series.

Book Beginning: Last Victim of the Monsoon Express by Vaseem Khan

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

The death, when it came, happened late at night, a silent affair – certainly no one heard anything at the time – yet one that detonated so loudly in the cold light of day it almost brought two nations to the brink of war.

This is an e-novella from my favorite new cozy mystery series, the Baby Ganesh Agency crime novels set in today's Mumbai, India. Baby Ganesh is a baby elephant and the sidekick to Inspector Chopra, retd.

Book Beginning: The Other Side of Everything by Lauren Doyle Owens

Book Beginnings is a weekly meme hosted by Rose City Reader. Share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

Her shoes had come off during the struggle.

The next few sentences of this murder mystery have been a bit more gory than I like. But the reviews I've seen haven't used any of my NOT SAFE words, like "dark", "bleak", "raw", so I think I'll enjoy it.  Just not a fan of depressing books. I can read the news for that sort of mood.

#1965 Club: A Classic Police Procedural Novel

Roseanna: a Martin Beck Mystery
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
Pantheon Books, 1967 translation by Lois Roth
Swedish original "Roseanna: roman om ett brott", 1965
212 pp.


Mysteries have never been at the top of my reading list. I do like the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series by Canadian author Louise Penny, and when I'm not in the mood for more serious Literature, I have a few cozy mystery series on tap. (Hello, Amelia Peabody!) I think the common thread here is that I like mysteries without a lot of blood and gore, graphic violence, serial killers, or misogynistic violence.

But I needed books for the #1965Club and quickly. So I followed the hashtag and found a few blogs with lists of books published in 1965. One review that caught my eye was for a Swedish police procedural called "Roseanna". As it didn't seem too bloody or dark, I got the Kindle version and plunged into 1960s Sweden.

I really enjoyed this story. The main character is First Detective Inspector Martin Beck of the Swedish National Police, Homicide Bureau. He seems like a very ordinary person, although "There were people who thought that he was the country's most capable examining officer." As such he was called out to a small town where dredging of the navigation channel near the locks had scooped up a naked female body.

The emphasis is on the police procedures as they attempt to solve the murder of the unknown woman, which eventually takes them over six months, all in a rather short book. The language is quite plain, without long passages of description. Conversations between the policemen often consist of short phrases or single words, a very realistic depiction of co-workers communicating. The inevitable government bureaucracy gets in the way. The story is about determined, even obsessed policemen working a difficult case, no heroes in sight. This is most assuredly not an action novel!

Ten books - Ten letters in the character's name

"Roseanna" is the first of 10 Martin Beck mysteries by Sjöwall and Wahlöö, often considered the "godparents of Nordic Noir". The series has greatly influenced writers in Sweden and around the world, especially for police procedural mysteries. Check out the web sites below for more information about the authors and Nordic Noir.


Further Reading

"The couple who invented Nordic Noir"
Maj Sjöwall and her late partner paved the way for Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø. Jake Kerridge meets her
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/11741385/The-couple-who-invented-Nordic-Noir.html


"The queen of crime"
When Maj Sjöwall and her partner Per Wahlöö started writing the Martin Beck detective series in Sweden in the 60s, they little realised that it would change the way we think about policemen for ever
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/nov/22/crime-thriller-maj-sjowall-sweden


"Nordic Noir: Consider this home base for all things Scandinavian crime fiction."
http://crimebythebook.com/expert-witness-nordicnoir

Murder and Intrigue with Elephant

The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra
Vaseem Khan
Redhook Books, 2015
294 pages


The is the first book in a cozy mystery series set in modern India, "A Baby Ganesh Agency Investigation". As the book opens, Inspector Ashwin Chopra from the Mumbai (née Bombay) police is starting what will become a very memorable day: a body is discovered, he retires early for health reasons, and he inherits a baby elephant from an uncle.

The mystery felt very much imbedded in India, not one that was simply dropped into an exotic local for effect. Mumbai and its people and culture are very much a part of the story being told. Values of honesty and virtue are discussed and the family is paramount in the characters' lives. Khan gives vivid details of the residents' daily lives, middle class and poor alike.

Inspector Chopra is a complex man, much given to musing about his actions, his family, his values, and what retirement means for him. To me he seems akin to Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec in the Louise Penny mystery series, another complex, thoughtful police inspector. They are the Good Guys, the honest, upright, caring individuals who feel compelled to fight the world's evil, although Gamache's books are grittier and not cozy mysteries. I just think the two men would hit it off rather well.

Then there are the elephants. Inspector Chopra spends time learning about his new charge and we learn about the care and feeding and emotional lives of elephants. Since I have always been very fond of elephants and elephant images, I knew this series would be just the thing for a summer read, very charming, and who can resist a baby elephant named Ganesha as a sidekick to a detective? Bonus: there are now 4 more books in this series!


Further Reading

Vaseem Kahn's website
The author has a newsletter, a glossary of Indian words, some baby elephant pictures, and general information about himself. You can also join The Reading Elephant Book Club with a quarterly newsletter.

No Cuddly Bears Here

The Red House Mystery
A. A. Milne
E.P. Dutton, 1922
229 pages


I don't think of myself as a mystery reader, and yet for the last month I've been speeding right down the Mystery Lane, er, bookshelf - a couple of Agatha Christies, a Margaret Armstrong, and now a surprising entry from Alan Alexander Milne. Yes, that's A. A. Milne of Winnie-the-Pooh fame, writing for adults in his only mystery novel.

 

Before Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and the rest debuted in 1924, Milne had written stories for the British humor magazine, "Punch", several plays, and a few other novels. The title page of "The Red House Mystery" (1922) identifies him as the "Author of 'Mr. Pym Passes By,' 'The Dover Road,' etc.", which are both plays.

The book is dedicated to his father:

This is probably a cozy mystery, although the amateur detectives are men, and women dominate that genre these days. But it is set in a small English village, nothing very violent is described, and the amateur sleuths ferret out lots of gossip to help solve the crime and best the police at their game - all good cozy mystery attributes.

The plot is not overly complicated, but it is a devious and misleading one. Once again, I only half figured out who dunnit. Mostly I ruled out a lot of the suspects in my mind, but the ending was a surprise.

The main characters, Antony Gillingham, a gentleman of means, and his young friend, Bill Beverly, decide to play detectives and solve the murder of Bill's friend Mark Ablett. They approach this task in a rather light-hearted way at times, calling each other Holmes and Watson. The first Sherlock Holmes story was published by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887, so this is not surprising in a 1922 novel. It also turns out that Milne knew Doyle. According to a story on the BBC website:

Peter Pan author JM Barrie, a cricketing fanatic, gathered the most famous writers of his day to play on his amateur team - the oddly-named Allahakbarries - between 1887 and 1913. The team members included Arthur Conan Doyle, PG Wodehouse, AA Milne and Jerome K Jerome.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8662375.stm

The dawn of celebrity sports teams! I love finding out that famous authors were, in fact, friends long ago. And it makes me wonder if there are other references to each other's work to be found? Some sleuthing required...

Milne made his fame and fortune from the books of Pooh stories and poems. However, I wish he had penned a few more mysteries as I enjoyed this one. It's my pick for the Back to the Classics 2018 Challenge - A classic with a color in the title.

Miss Trumble, Spinster Sleuth

Murder in Stained Glass
Margaret Armstrong
Pepik Books, 2015 (originally published 1939)
184 pages


I came across this novel in the same way I think a lot of people do these days, in a list of free Kindle books on Amazon.com. As a lover of stained glass, the title caught my eye, and it had some decent reviews online, so I gave it a try. It's a nice cozy mystery with a bit of the Had I But Known school of writing.

Miss Trumble, a spinster in her late forties, leaves her comfortable Park Avenue apartment in New York City for Bassett's Bridge, a small New England town, to visit Charlotte, a woman she knew in boarding school. When a famous stained glass artist dies in the town, suspicion falls on several people, including the artist's son, Leo. Charlotte's niece, Phyllis, is in love with Leo, so Miss Trumble starts to investigate to clear his name. She ferrets out a lot of the town's gossip, learning many secrets that might or might not be important. There are various plot twists right up to the end, and I must admit I did not see the solution coming at all.

The setting for the story is early 20th century America, and the scenes in the Fashionable Society of New York City are quite interesting. Ms Armstrong would have been writing about a time in the recent past, maybe 10 years out, so we get a good glimpse of how people lived then, urban and rural.

I liked this story as it reminded me of the Agatha Christie books I've read, as well as some other cozies I like. Unfortunately Miss Trumble does not reappear to solve another crime. This was Margaret Armstrong's first novel, published when she was 72. Two more appeared in the following years, "The Man with No Face" (1940) and "The Blue Santo Murder Mystery" (1941). But, alas, no Miss Trumble.

Margaret Armstrong was a well-known book cover designer in the days when the image was imprinted directly onto the cover of a book, before dust jackets took over. Some examples are shown in the nice biography of her found on The Passing Tramp blog:

Herzoslovakian Feud Spills Blood

The Secret of Chimneys

Agatha Christie
Bantam Books, 1987 (first published 1925)
232 pages

I enjoyed Christie's "The Seven Dials Mystery" [my review is here] that I chanced upon at the library recently, and then realized it was listed as #2 in the Superintendent Battle series at Amazon.com. So back I went to retrieve book #1, "The Secret of Chimneys", and it's another nice mystery tale with many of the same lead characters.

The story takes place at Chimneys, the English country house setting of both books, but this time it's a weekend of political intrigue, with a house full of diplomats, aristocrats, and royalty, plus a few detective types, both professional and amateur. The plot involves the fictional Balkan country of Herzoslovakia, with its history of revolution, the murders of the King and Queen and of several recent Presidents. Prince Michael, the next in line, is maneuvering to get back the throne, financed by selling the rights to the newly discovered Herzoslovakian oil supplies. Several bodies are found in mysterious circumstances, a memoir by the late Herzoslovakian Prime Minister is threatening to start a European-wide war, a long-lost jewel is sought by a notorious jewel thief, and a bundle of blackmail letters are not what they seem. The requisite number of plot twists ensue and several characters are not who you were lead to believe they are. Quite satisfying and I never guessed the solution.

 

A lot seemed to happen in this book. People weren't just sitting around flirting or discussing the latest racing results to while away a weekend in the country. Important developments kept happening at a fast pace. There are quite a few characters, but most of them are talked about frequently and take part in the action, so it's not too hard to keep them straight, although now and then I did lose track of who Baron Lolopretjzyl was - and don't ask me how to pronounce that name!

Well, it's three down, two to go in the Inspector Battle 5-book series, although I'm not quite sure it really is a series. This 1987 copy of "The Secret of Chimneys" makes no mention of one, nor does the official Agatha Christie web site. Maybe the idea of calling them a series came from a publisher more recently. Both this book and "The Seven Dials Mystery" do feature a group of the same characters, so they are related in a way. Book #3 "Cards on the Table" is usually portrayed as a Hercule Poirot novel. It has four sleuths, including Poirot and Battle, trying to solve their dinner host's murder. I haven't yet read the other two, but for Book #4, "Murder Is Easy", Wikipedia says "Christie's recurring character, Superintendent Battle, has a cameo appearance at the end, but plays no part in either the solution of the mystery or the apprehension of the criminal." Battle does seem to be back in charge for Book #5, "Towards Zero".

Series or not, "The Secret of Chimneys" is fast-paced and entertaining!

A Geeky Family's Drama

The Last Equation of Isaac Severy: A Novel in Clues
Nova Jacobs
Touchstone, 2018
352 pages


Isaac Severy, venerable patriarch of the brainy and eccentric Severy clan, has just died and the bereft family members are struggling to cope. His granddaughter Hazel receives a posthumous note from Isaac, who was a famous mathematician, setting her off on a search for an equation. Given only a few mysterious clues, she is asked to find the equation and deliver it to Isaac's friend for safe keeping. During the search she discovers that there are lots of secrets spread throughout the family.

 

This is an inventive mystery with surprising plot twists, and I liked it very much. However I do feel it is a bit too ambitious in some respects. There are so many characters that I had to stop and create a family tree on paper to keep all the relatives straight. Many of them appear multiple times and take up space, but are not part of the main plot. One or two sub-plots could be dispensed with, too. I just think it needed some editing, to give the main characters some breathing space and develop them more. I wanted to know Hazel better, as she seemed quite interesting.

This is an impressive debut novel and I really did enjoy it, so I feel bad criticizing it. It just took a lot for me to work through it. I'll be watching for Jacobs' next book, to see what sort of interesting new story she constructs!

Zany Christie or Mysterious Wodehouse?

The Seven Dials Mystery
Agatha Christie
William Morrow, 2012 (first published 1929)
284 pages

Agatha Christie, you ask? Sure, we all know Agatha from her stories about Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. Yes, we say, "The Seven Dials Mystery" should be an entertaining book. We begin to read... and then confusion ensues. Imagine a nice British country house party of the 20s or 30s, full of titled upper class folk, the idle rich, and their stalwart servants. Present are all the usual slightly nutty types a la P. G. Wodehouse, a stuffy Lord, a ditzy Lady, fun-loving, carefree young folk with money to burn, a supercilious gardener. Sir Oswald and Lady Coote surely must know Bertie Wooster!

 

It's Wodehouse in a lower key; no one is quite as smart as Jeeves, nor quite as fatuous as Wooster, and for silly names we have only a girl named Socks, the male secretary, Pongo, and the amateur detective, Lady Eileen Brent, known as Bundle. But then drop in a serious mystery complete with several bodies, a Russian countess, a furtive society, German agents, and a secret industrial process. The events happening at various grand estates verge right on the edge of being zany, but are held in check by the ever-present threat of more deaths occurring.

The mystery itself is perplexing and kept me guessing until the very end. All my suspects were innocent - of the crimes, if not of deceptions. Later I found out it is number two of five in the Superintendent Battle series. Oddly enough number three in that series, "Cards on the Table", is also number 13 in the Hercule Poirot series, which I have already read. I guess I need to hunt up numbers one, four, and five now to complete the set.

Don't get me wrong, I liked this book a lot, it just wasn't what I had expected from Agatha Christie! A quick, enjoyable read. And it's a classic crime story for the Back to the Classics 2018 challenge.

Stone Quarry by S. J. Rozan

Stone Quarry
S. J. Rozan
St. Martin's Minotaur, 1999

"Stone Quarry" is book six in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series of mysteries about two New York City private eyes. They have separate practices but often work together. The unusual twist to the series is that the odd-numbered books are about Lydia Chin's cases and told from her point of view, while the evens are Bill Smith's from his point of view. Lydia's cases often involve her Chinatown neighborhood and offer glimpses of local customs; Bill's are more noir and violent. She's twentysomething and lives with her mother, who only speaks Chinese and wants Lydia to be a good Chinese girl with a (Chinese) husband. He's much older, very cynical, has been around, and knows lots of low-lifes and cops. He's also a bit of a tortured soul and sweet on Lydia.

This time Bill has gone to his cabin in the woods of upstate New York, not for relaxation but to take on a job finding some lost art work for a local woman. Then a young man Bill is very fond of goes missing and both the good guys and the bad guys are out to find him. There's a body or two; secrets get uncovered; Bill gets beat up and shot; and Lydia joins him to help out. All par for the course in a Bill Smith/Lydia Chin novel!

I like this series, even though it's a bit more violent than my usual cozy-mystery fare. Lydia and Bill are just friends, though Bill wants something more. Their repartee isn't Tracy and Hepburn, but it's fun. I've enjoyed all six and I look forward to reading the next five. Fingers crossed that Rozan continues the series, although the last one was published in 2011. She has won many mystery writing awards for her novels and short stories.