It’s not easy to find an Agatha Christie book to re-read — even though it’s been a couple decades since I read most of them, the plots of many of them are still pretty clear in my head. But then again, the most famous of them have been made into TV series, movies and radio plays, and so I’ve already experienced them many times.
But this one didn’t ring a bell, and it’s from 1939, so I went with it.
And it’s very entertaining. It’s got a satisfyingly large number of suspects, and we really get into the investigation — but without going over the same plot points again and again. It does get a bit bogged down in the third quarter, but then the ending’s totally mad, so that’s fun. (I did guess the murderer, but I’m guessing that’s because I’ve read this before, even if I didn’t remember anything else about it.)
Archetypal Mayhem Parva story, with all the best ingredients: Cranford-style village with ‘about six women to every man’; doctors, lawyers, retired colonels and antique dealers; suspicions of black magic; and, as optional extra ingredient, a memorably awful press lord. And of course a generous allowance of sharp old spinsters. Shorter than most on detection, perhaps because the detection is, until the end, basically amateur. One of the classics.
Murder Is Easy (1939) by Agatha Christie (buy used, 3.77 on Goodreads)