Category: Agatha Christie
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Louise Hegarty’s Fair Play and Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Suite 11
Crime fiction has strict-ish genre conventions, with distinctive expectations for police procedurals, noir-type thrillers, and domestic cozies. In one new novel, a debut author from Ireland has fun–with a serious intent–exploring how mystery conventions can offer reassuring certainty, in the wake of a sudden and unexpected death. And in another, an internationally acclaimed crime writer…
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Ariadne Oliver and Harriet Vane on the Work of Writing
I’ve come around to appreciating Agatha Christie’s fictional crime novelist, Ariadne Oliver. She’s written broadly, as a caricature of Christie herself–a substantial woman in midlife, trailing apple cores. Like Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane, a writer of detective novels, Ariadne is a well-regarded author of mysteries who can’t resist dabbling in a few herself. Also…
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Agatha Christie in Canada
I didn’t recall that Agatha Christie had visited Canada, including Victoria, in 1922. She was travelling in the company of her faithless first husband, Archie. The second spouse, Max Mallowan, sounds much nicer though his archaeological expeditions were expensive to finance. At the time of her Canadian tour, Christie had produced only two novels: The…
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Iceland and International Women’s Day 2025
In the new documentary The Day Iceland Stood Still, director Pamela Hogan revisits October 24, 1975, when 90% of Iceland’s women walked off the job–at work and at home. For one day, they insisted, men could pay attention to how much they did, and how little their contributions were appreciated and rewarded. On International Women’s…
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Independent Women in Golden Age Mysteries: From Evil Under the Sun to Gaudy Night
Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun (1941) has a wonderful series of final revelations. Poirot untangles the various threads that have complicated his investigation of Arlena Stuart’s mystery, for a rapt audience of suspects and bystanders. While the crime was rather convoluted in its execution, the motives were straightforward. Then there are the last several…
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Agatha Christie and the Character of the Victim
I’ve been on a Christie binge, and yet once more. I’m re-reading Evil Under the Sun while alternating 4.50 to Paddington and Dead Man’s Folly as evening viewing. Interspersed with The Magpie Murders, which is terrific, but moves along at a very stately pace. There’s a Japanese adaptation of 4.50 to Paddington that I’d love…
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Gail Bowen’s The Last Good Day and Agatha Christie’s Dead Man’s Folly
I’ve just come across a fun allusion. Insomnia has me on a pre-bedtime reading diet of innocuous mystery fiction, ancient Greek novels, and Greek vocabulary. The latter, in particular, is very handy. Working on contract verbs produces slumber surprisingly quickly, but then I wake up, over and over. This is an Addison’s Disease/steroids issue, temporarily…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 