Book #11 of 2023: The Burden by Mary Westmacott The sixth and final novel that author Agatha Christie published under her Mary Westmacott pseudonym is unfortunately also the weakest. It starts off alright, tracing the childhood of a girl whose mother and father both resent her for living when her older brother dies of polio, …
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Book #143 of 2022: A Daughter’s a Daughter by Mary Westmacott This 1952 title is a decent character study, but a thoroughly unpleasant and exasperating read about a toxically codependent parental relationship. The fifth of six novels that author Agatha Christie published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott — at this point merely an affectation, after …
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Book #48 of 2022: The Rose and the Yew Tree by Mary Westmacott In this pseudonymous Agatha Christie novel, the author takes careful aim at classism and upward mobility, each of which was in a state of flux following the upheaval of the second World War. Writing in 1948, she paints a tragedy of a …
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Book #374 of 2021: Absent in the Spring by Mary Westmacott This pseudonymous (and therefore non-mystery) Agatha Christie novel from 1944 is my favorite thing I’ve read from her yet, under either byline. It’s a deceptively simple tale on its face: a middle-aged Englishwoman, delayed as the only passenger at a desert waystation whilst returning …
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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 #98 of 2019: Giant’s Bread by Mary Westmacott This 1930 novel is the first of six that Agatha Christie published under a pseudonym due to their divergence from her typical whodunnit fare and her desire to have this other work ‘judged on its own merits and not in the light of previous success,’ per …
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