Agatha Christie
Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was a British writer who wrote mysteries, psychological fiction, plays, and poetry. That is an almost laughably cryptic basic description of one of the bestselling writers in publishing. Currently, it is estimated that her books have sold approximately two billion copies. Her estate estimates that she is the most widely published author or text after the Bible and Shakespeare. She has been translated into 103 languages. Not shabby for a upper middle-class girl who liked lab work in chemistry and pharmaceuticals — and who liked to write.
She bestrides the world of mysteries like a colossus. She is often considered formulaic in her approach, “cookie-cutter,” but any respectful reading quickly dispels that envious evaluation. She wrote sixty-seven detective novels and fourteen short-story collections, intimidating enough, and influential beyond all measure for a century now. She also wrote a series of novels under the name of Mary Westmacott which astonish anyone who reads them not as gothic romance, as they were marketed, but as psychological surgeries, merciless analytical examinations of women at the sharp end of reality. She often wrote with humor, with a sharp and sassy satirical eye, and she was capable of a sensitive pathos with the people who were collateral damage in her so-called “whodunits.” Remarkably, she had a cool and ambivalent attitude toward her heroes and heroines, including Miss Marple and the great Hercule Poirot.
Agatha Christie is a complex and complicated writer. I invite you to read her as comfort fare, which she is, and I invite you to read her as a twentieth-century novelist, which she is in a circumspect and mysterious way. Enjoy!
Murder on the Links
Murder on the Links
"Here is a remarkably good detective story." — The New York Times Book Review
"For God's sake, come!" implores the letter to Hercule Poirot from Paul Renauld. A wealthy English financier living in France, Renauld hints at being in possession of a deadly secret. The Belgian sleuth — accompanied by Captain Hastings, his friend from The Mysterious Affair at Styles — rushes to answer the call but arrives too late. Stabbed in the back, Poirot's would-be client lies in a shallow grave on the golf course alongside his estate.
Renauld's wife, found bound and gagged in her bedroom, identifies a pair of masked intruders as the likeliest culprits. But the thugs prove untraceable even as the roster of suspects expands. The instant dislike formed between Poirot and Monsieur Giraud of the Paris Sûreté further intensifies the investigation, which becomes a competition between their radically different approaches to crime detection. Both are incapable of solving the murder until the discovery of a second corpse, slain in the same manner as the first, provides fresh clues. Agatha Christie's lively and stylish whodunit offers mystery lovers an abundance of twists and turns as well as a dash of romance.
Reprint of the HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2011 edition.