The Old Paperback Carousel

The second Poirot novel and third Agatha Christie overall, The Murder on the Links takes place in France, showing some knowledge of the culture and society of that country in the '20s. (Although Christie's novels tend to take place in a similar series of upper-middle-class rooms, be they French or Ancient Egyptian.) A millionaire with interests in South America is found stabbed to death, in an open grave on the golf course at his villa. Suspects include his wife, son, private secretary, and a mother and daughter who live in the neighbouring villa. Poirot becomes involved when he receives too late a letter from the dead man, pleading for his assistance to protect him from an assailant. The plot of this one, as critics tend to note, is extremely convoluted. A contemporary review accused it of making the brain reel, and Christie connoisseur Robert Barnard called it an instantly forgettable instance of ingenuity triumphing over common sense. Although the narrative is expertly struc

Given the 2021 centenary of Christie's first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I decided I'd start a read of all the Poirot books she wrote. Styles was Poirot's debut, an unfortunate one as it happened since Christie made him an elderly retiree. She didn't expect to still be writing about the character 50 years later, by which time he'd be around 120 if you estimate his age in Styles to be 70 or so. (She'd go on to make the same mistake ten years later with the debut of Miss Marple, an elderly spinster.)                                                                                    This makes Styles a slight anomaly among her works in one way, as unlike later novels it's attached to a specific era: post-World War I. The two world wars are present in the Poirot novels written during them, as presumably they couldn't be avoided, even if logically this would suggest that Poirot was in his early 90s by the time Germany invaded Poland. Obl

I wanted to read one of the giants of the "cosy" subgenre of mystery fiction and happened across Charlotte MacLeod, a Canadian-American author active from the '60s through to the '90s. Honestly, I wasn't expecting much other than a half-decent detective plot and some light humour that your gran would appreciate. (The cosy is a trope-driven subgenre that mixes puzzle-based plots with comedy-of-manners, downplaying sex and violence in favour of escapism.) To my pleasant surprise, MacLeod is a much more cockeyed and self-aware writer than I'd anticipated. The first in her series for which the amateur sleuth is an agricultural professor, Peter Shandy, Rest You Merry takes place during the festive season and begins with a rather mean-spirited prank. Bullied each year by the local harridans to join in with the Grand Illumination, a moneymaking exercise whereby Balaclava College's academic neighbourhood is festooned with fairy lights, Shandy pays to have his hom