Book #110 of 2021: Three Act Tragedy by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #11) This mystery almost feels like a Poirot story by happenstance; although the Belgian detective unveils his solution in the usual drawing-room denouement, he’s present for less than half of the proceedings beforehand. But the amateur investigators carry on fine in his absence, …
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Book #87 of 2021: Parker Pyne Investigates by Agatha Christie Honestly, a better name for this 1934 collection might be “Parker Pyne Instigates.” In less than half of these stories does that fellow do any real investigative work; the majority of the time he instead constructs elaborate confidence schemes to make his patrons feel happy …
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Book #73 of 2021: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie At this novel’s start, a dying man rouses for just long enough to utter the five words of the title (except in the US, where it was published as the blander-sounding The Boomerang Clue), thoroughly confusing the stranger who has found him lying …
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Book #51 of 2021: The Listerdale Mystery by Agatha Christie A fine collection of short stories, although perhaps a bit too similar to one another overall. Despite the title, these are not mysteries in author Agatha Christie’s usual sense; there are no investigations or clues that a clever reader can race to put together before …
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Book #28 of 2021: Unfinished Portrait by Mary Westmacott This pseudonymous Agatha Christie novel is reportedly quite autobiographical, but I’ve personally found it to be a fairly aimless bildungsroman, tracing its protagonist’s life from childhood to early marriage without much of an overarching plot. It’s also full of the writer’s less endearing quirks, like people …
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Book #185 of 2017: The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett This was a fun hardboiled detective story, and one that I ultimately liked better than the author’s more famous work, The Maltese Falcon. That’s largely due to Nick and Nora Charles, a retired Pinkerton and his wife who are reluctantly dragged into the unfolding investigation …
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Book #117 of 2016: Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins #1) I haven’t seen the Disney movie of Mary Poppins since I was a very small child, so I can’t say how the film version compares to this novel. But I’m not exaggerating when I say that the Mary Poppins of the original …
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