![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Media round-up: Agatha Christie edition
Feb. 26th, 2019 08:58 amRecently read
Tried to Agatha Christie myself out of my reading slump with Cards on the Table and Crooked House— she's my go-to author for when I want to read something and I’m not terribly picky about what it is, or if I’m being too picky and need a kind of mental reboot. Her books may be predictable – in form, if not in the actual ‘whodunit?’ sense; I am completely terrible at figuring out who the murderer is, mostly because I’m cheerfully gullible about all the red herrings – but at least that means they’re predictably enjoyable! Plus, there are so many that I can always find one I haven’t read yet, while, again, always being reasonably certain about what I’m going to find inside.
I particularly liked Cards on the Table because of the added twist to its locked-room murder plot – every person in the room was there because they'd previously committed murder, so everyone had not just a motive but the guts to do the crime – and because of Christie’s self-caricature in the form of Ariadne Oliver, a detective novelist who helps Poirot solve the murder. I can really only think of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Harriet Vane as another example, but I love when mystery novels have a character that is a mystery author in order to make jokes about mystery novels as a genre and how hard it is to write them.
Crooked House did break with form a little. Although it had all the prerequisite plot points – and, coincidentally, a red herring recycled from Cards on the Table (or visa-versa?) – it didn’t feature any of Christie's usual detectives, and instead was handed over to Scotland Yard and the earnest amateur sleuthing of the narrator, a semi-objective observer of a fatal family drama. I actually did guess the murderer, mostly because I recognized the twist from another, modern mystery thriller recently turned into a TV show (which I haven’t actually read or seen but like, I spend time on the internet, so cultural osmosis happened) and then I un-guessed it precisely for that same reason. :P
Recently watched
Keeping to the apparent theme of the week, I watched Agatha and the Truth of Murder, which is loosely - very, very loosely - inspired by two real-life unsolved mysteries: the 10-day disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1926, and the 1920 murder of Florence Nightingale Shore.
Christie, while struggling with her writing and marriage, is approached by Shore’s partner, Mabel, who has spent the last six years trying to solve her girlfriend's murder. They concoct an elaborate plan to find the killer by luring the suspects to a secluded country estate under the guise of receiving an inheritance from a long-lost relative, with Christie going undercover as a solicitor’s secretary to interrogate them all. The rest of the movie is spent by various characters in discussing how Real Crimes Aren’t Like Detective Stories, while around them, the plot ticks the boxes of, like, every classic murder mystery trope.
This was a fun movie! Super cheesy, but I wasn’t expecting an Oscar-worthy performance in the first place. I got to see Arthur Conan Doyle give Agatha Christie snarky writing advice; everything else was just frosting.
Tried to Agatha Christie myself out of my reading slump with Cards on the Table and Crooked House— she's my go-to author for when I want to read something and I’m not terribly picky about what it is, or if I’m being too picky and need a kind of mental reboot. Her books may be predictable – in form, if not in the actual ‘whodunit?’ sense; I am completely terrible at figuring out who the murderer is, mostly because I’m cheerfully gullible about all the red herrings – but at least that means they’re predictably enjoyable! Plus, there are so many that I can always find one I haven’t read yet, while, again, always being reasonably certain about what I’m going to find inside.
I particularly liked Cards on the Table because of the added twist to its locked-room murder plot – every person in the room was there because they'd previously committed murder, so everyone had not just a motive but the guts to do the crime – and because of Christie’s self-caricature in the form of Ariadne Oliver, a detective novelist who helps Poirot solve the murder. I can really only think of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Harriet Vane as another example, but I love when mystery novels have a character that is a mystery author in order to make jokes about mystery novels as a genre and how hard it is to write them.
Crooked House did break with form a little. Although it had all the prerequisite plot points – and, coincidentally, a red herring recycled from Cards on the Table (or visa-versa?) – it didn’t feature any of Christie's usual detectives, and instead was handed over to Scotland Yard and the earnest amateur sleuthing of the narrator, a semi-objective observer of a fatal family drama. I actually did guess the murderer, mostly because I recognized the twist from another, modern mystery thriller recently turned into a TV show (which I haven’t actually read or seen but like, I spend time on the internet, so cultural osmosis happened) and then I un-guessed it precisely for that same reason. :P
Recently watched
Keeping to the apparent theme of the week, I watched Agatha and the Truth of Murder, which is loosely - very, very loosely - inspired by two real-life unsolved mysteries: the 10-day disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1926, and the 1920 murder of Florence Nightingale Shore.
Christie, while struggling with her writing and marriage, is approached by Shore’s partner, Mabel, who has spent the last six years trying to solve her girlfriend's murder. They concoct an elaborate plan to find the killer by luring the suspects to a secluded country estate under the guise of receiving an inheritance from a long-lost relative, with Christie going undercover as a solicitor’s secretary to interrogate them all. The rest of the movie is spent by various characters in discussing how Real Crimes Aren’t Like Detective Stories, while around them, the plot ticks the boxes of, like, every classic murder mystery trope.
This was a fun movie! Super cheesy, but I wasn’t expecting an Oscar-worthy performance in the first place. I got to see Arthur Conan Doyle give Agatha Christie snarky writing advice; everything else was just frosting.
