“By the pricking of my thumb”, Agatha Christie’s birthday this way comes! If you have read any of my blogs, you know that I can’t go one paragraph without mentioning the Queen of Mystery. Well, this time I’m justified since I am going to give my recommendations for my favorite Christie novels.
Happy Birthday, Agatha Christie!
September 15th will be her 128th birthday, so on that day, don’t have a “destination unknown“; come to Lemuria where we will be celebrating with $1 beer! An “endless night” wouldn’t be enough time for me to express how much I love reading Christie’s books, but I will keep this short and simple. Now to lay all my “cards on the table“, here are “the big four” Agatha Christie novels you should read.
The A.B.C. Murders is a mystery in which Christie’s famous detective Hercule Poirot gets a letter describing a crime that is about to be committed. The interesting thing about these crimes is that the victims are murdered in alphabetical order. The first victim is named Alice Ascher, then Betty Barnard, et cetera, et cetera. There are red herrings all over the place, which Christie is famous for. Poirot bandies together the victims’ relations to gather more information, and I enjoyed how they worked together.
The Murder of Roger Ackyroyd is the first mystery novel I read where the plot twist truly took me by surprise. A man is murdered in his study with a house full of suspects. Fake alibis are thrown around, innocent people act suspiciously, and Hercule Poirot is in fine form. As in most Christie novels, there is a wide cast of characters and all of them are interviewed by Poirot, whose line of questioning usually doesn’t make sense at first. The climactic ending will have you on the edge of your seat!
After the Funeral of Richard Abernathie, his relatives come together in their childhood home. The man’s eccentric sister makes a passing remark that he may have been murdered, and then the day after the funeral, she is found dead. Of course, this solidifies her statement that her brother was murdered. Every member of the family has a motive for killing Abernathie, as he was a very wealthy man. The family’s lawyer does most of the grunt work, and Poirot takes a back seat in this one.
A Murder is Announced in the local newspaper of an English village, with directions to meet at a certain time and date at the house of Little Paddocks. The owner of the house takes it in stride and offers finger foods when her curious neighbors stop by to see what happens. And something does happen! Mistaken identities, fuzzy memories, and questionable motives abound in this story. Miss Marple, an amateur old lady sleuth, is the main detective in this one.
“And then there were none“! I hope you’ve enjoyed this list, and that you weren’t thinking “death comes as the end” of this. This is an “unfinished portrait” of all the possible Agatha Christie novels I could possibly recommend; in fact everything here written in quotes is a great title you should read! Now I’ll finish this up and draw the “curtain” on this blog.
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