Suggestions for an Agatha Christie novel for my book group please!

[BaconAndAvocado]

I’ve never read any AC but always meant to!

I need to choose a book for book group and thought I would suggest something completely different to our usual fare.

Any suggestions for a good one please?

Ooh, DLS fans (sorry OP for taking over your Christie thread!).
I love Gaudy Night but it isn’t quite so satisfying if you haven’t read the earlier two Harriet books first. Murder Must Advertise because of all the detail she puts in from her own experience in an advert office. And I also have a soft spot for Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club because of the setting immediately after the First World War and dealing with shell shock.

Busman’s Honeymoon though… I’d recommend reading up to the wedding and then putting down the book. Some awful snobbery in it IIRC.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow No no I think there’s great chemistry! Especially with the chess pieces.

I adore Peter and Harriet. No one will ever shake my love for an overbred aristocratic sleuth who falls utterly in love with a doctor's daughter who has been tried for murder.

I love the bedroom scenes. And Peter musing on love. And Bunter.

'He who had the hardest and coldest couch enjoyed the quietest slumbers.' Everything we need to know and nothing we don't.

Although Gaudy Night is my favourite, I do enjoy Murder Must Advertise, and Unnatural Death as well.

I love that DLS was unashamedly an intellectual snob who wrote (elevated) pulp fiction. Apparently her publishers had to insist on providing a English translation of the letter in French in The Nine Tailors because she couldn't see why anyone would need one.

@LadyPeterWimsey Great fact, I can totally believe it!

I think I've read "Whose Body?" the most of the Wimsey ones.

I hate to correct you, but it was actually the letter in Clouds of Witness that Cathcart writes passionately (je suis fou de douleur) to Simone Vonderaa that Gollancz insisted be translated. The one in Nine Tailors does not appear in French. But the factoid is still a good one, and very believable.

I loved The Mirror Cracked. I think the twist in it has since been used a lot in TV dramas but at the time I read it I didn't see it coming.

@clary You are absolutely right.

Clouds of Witness is one of my least favourites. I have a soft spot for Have His Carcase because I remembering gasping out loud at the denouement, and because Harriet is so stroppy and ungrateful.

I think the problem is that I believe totally in Harriet, but Peter - as fun though he is, as a literary character- could never be real.

And it’s interesting that so many of us like Gaudy Night best - one of the two novels which centre on Harriet more than Peter.

Yep Clouds of Witness a bit unsatisfactory tho it does include the excellent bit about how Wimsey's guests (Parker and LPW's mum) are "bloating and distending themselves on mixed grill and a perfectly good vintage claret" at breakfast time!

Also the brilliant speech from the Dowager "I call it mother wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that when he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes" 😃

Just watched the first episode of Lucy Worsley on Agatha. Fascinating.

Lucy Worsley has a book published in Sept on Agatha Christie
www.amazon.co.uk/Agatha-Christie-Very-Elusive-Woman/dp/B09PNRM2PM/ref=sr_1_1?adgrpid=1179776897805271&hvadid=73736260561151&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=41689&hvnetw=s&hvqmt=e&hvtargid=kwd-73736213323257%3Aloc-188&hydadcr=18715_2211947&keywords=lucy+worsley+agatha+christie&qid=1669442342&sr=8-1
Her series is BBC 2

I would say that Agatha Christie books are more different from each other than you'd expect. Some are very 1930s country house/wealthy family, (4.50 From Paddington, Hercule Poirot Christmas) some are tiny English village (A Murder is Announced, Murder at the Vicarage) some are travel in exotic places (Death on the Nile) etc etc.

I don't know the non Poirot or Marple detectives really. But I always liked The Man in the Brown Suit. Maybe a bit young for a book group?

The short stories are fun and underrated but maybe short stories are too tricky for a book group?

Maybe Murder at the Vicarage would work because of the microcosm of the social history of the era?

I think Murder at the Vicarage and The Moving Finger' are the most humorous, followed by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. For a book club, T M F..the best as compact. For admiring her work at leisure: 'Death on the Nile' is a tour de force of characterisation. I prefer it's representation of love to Shakespeare's ' Romeo and Juliet' - although, arguably, his tale wasn't meant to be a focus on love - more a rebuke to spoilt youth. She refers to R and J too, when writing about a character - it might have been the young woman in 'Five Little Pigs'.

I am such a fan. I think that Christie sees deep into human nature and recognises psychological patterns. I mostly like the fact that she is right a lot: SPOILER alert - the character of Pat on Pocket Full of Rye, for instance who the villain falls in love with, is you feel the type a sociopath would fall in love with. She also saw that a lot of these sociopaths did have 'good war' as did the baddy in 'Taken at the Flood' ( an indifferent work.)

I believe she must be inspired by one incident, one occasion, and that sets her of on her writing spree. There's the sense that she understands that incident and that person entirely. It must have been tough for her, as she understands evil thoroughly, as well as good. I see her as a moralist, too.

Hers is an unusual viewpoint, in todays's era, where it's just about true to say that the social model of crime is still the one which underpins society's reactions to morality. AC believed in the sociopath, I think; the evil, schemer and charmer, and she sometimes seems to be warning that we should be aware that that dangerous kind of criminal does exist.

It's interesting to study her life and see how often something that happened or some experience she had sparked an idea, sometimes years later.

Destination Unknown, one of the standalone thrillers, is interesting; the central character, Hilary, is a woman trying to ecape from desperate personal unhappiness. One can't help relating it to Agatha's own unhappiness, nearly thirty years earlier.

(Though I think she was well shot of Archie and had a much richer and more intellectually stimulating life with Max. A lot of the books she wrote wouuldn't have been written if she'd stayed married to Archie.)

Which suitor did Lucy choose, at the end, do you think? (4.15 from Paddington)

@Diverseopinions I always think the sweet airman with the little boy

Miss Marple thought she knew, didn't she? I wanted Lucy to choose the airman. The brother of the family, who would inherit, seemed like he could clean up his act, but I wasn't sure if Agatha Christie would have approved of him, even with a shave. The little boy, on the other hand, is so sweet!

I thought Inspector Craddock! Otherwise why did Miss Marple say "Don't you know?" And then "twinkle" at him!

That's an idea.

Oh yes forgot about insp craddock. Unusual Christie example of a returning police officer.

Inspector Japp appears in several Poirot novels, albeit as a minor character.

Craddock was in 'A Murder is Announced', I think.
That is probably one of the least guessable killers, in 'A Murder is Announced'.

I find the family trope, with goody two shoes ( boss) 'After the Funeral'/'A Pocket Full of Rye' / 'Hercule Poirot's Christmas ' and wrong 'un and sensitive one a bit hard for imagining thoroughly the characters of the suspects.

Actually, reminded me that 'Hercule Poirot's Christmas ' is also a difficult one for guessing the culprit.