I can’t remember my exact reading history. (I didn’t know at the time that some of the Dells had been edited for content! Another black mark against them.) I favored Pocketbooks over Dells because they contained character lists at the start. I was guided not by publication date but by the blurbs on the inside front and back covers. Between 19, when my aunt gifted me with a hardcover copy of Passenger to Frankfurt, I grabbed Christie paperbacks by the handful wherever I could find them. My initial reading of the canon was as random as it was constant. (I warn you: JJ’s response was, “I look forward to reading your post and then responding with a post of my own.” And then I’ll post a response to his post, and then. And so, rather than dive bomb The Invisible Event with my own thoughts, I decided to put them down here. I realized after reading JJ’s review that I have not posted much about the book myself. And then there’s the issue of approaching this book retrospectively, after many reads and much life lived. There’s a purely critical response to the literature. There’s the context of personal history: I was there when Curtain and Sleeping Murder came out, and that colors my reaction. Our relationship is – well, it’s complicated. You know me and Christie: we’ve hung together for many years. On December 16, my 21 st birthday, my Aunt Rosalie gave me my last “Christie for Christmas.” The last Marple, Sleeping Murder, came out in October.
Poirot’s Curtain call had been published the previous September. Why not a swan song for Tommy and Tuppence, too? Her notebooks also provide ample evidence that, for the longest time, the author was undecided over who would do the detecting here, Miss Marple, Poirot or even the Beresfords!ġ976: Agatha Christie died in January.
Indeed, one has to ask why Christie would pen a “final” case for a sleuth who, by 1940, had appeared in exactly one novel and a collection of stories and who hadn’t been heard from in a decade. On the other hand, in Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, John Curran makes a powerful case for the book having been written much later, possibly as late as the early 1950’s. In addition to N or M?, (more of a powerhouse thriller in its day due to its controversial anti-Nazi statement) and the delightful Evil Under the Sun, Christie wrote two books as insurance against her untimely demise – final cases for both Poirot and Miss Marple – bequeathed the sales of one to her husband and the other to her daughter, and put them both in a vault for safekeeping. His review came out yesterday.ġ940: According to biographer Laura Thompson, Christie began a staggering period of production, probably egged on by the bombs of war flying all around her. Mazel tov, JJ! Because he tackled the books in order of publication, his last read was Sleeping Murder. 2020: My pal JJ finishes his first run of reading Agatha Christie.
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