Seattle Mystery Bookshop

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Hotels and Unsubstantiated Claims

Evil Under The Sun

First Published: Serialized in Collier’s Weekly in December 1940.

Series: Poirot

Summary:Once again Poirot tries to escape London for a short holiday at the Jolly Roger Hotel on the small island in Leathercombe Bay. The problem? Arlena Stuart is churning the normally placid waters of the hotel’s other patrons. How? While she has her own husband, other women’s husbands don’t seem to be off limits to her predatory nature. So when she is found dead on the beach, the majority of hotel’s guests are under suspicion. Like Arelna, Poirot to is unafraid of churning thing up, only in  his case it in pursuit of a murderer.

Review: This is an interesting mystery with the old switcheroo at the end of the book motive-wise. The alteration does not startle you the way Endless Night or Crooked House does - but the shift in the motivation for murder makes the crime far more sensible, believable you might say. Which is all I can say about that without spoiling the entire book for you! I can say I enjoyed reading it; the complicated personalities of each of the characters made it a fun read. Even Poirot wasn’t overly fussy, even when he had to take a boat! So if you need a good beach read (you know when you go to the Caribbean over Christmas) I would suggest this installment.

I have to say the unsung work horse in this installment is the hotel Christie decided to place her murder in. It is the uniqueness of the Jolly Roger Hotel which helps cement the small number of suspects together until Poirot could sort them out. How? The Jolly Roger is a sort of island (by sort of I mean you can drive to it on a sort of road which is only available at low tides). This geographical individuality gives the hotel a distinctive feel to its patrons, helping to earning a fine reputation, “Awfully jolly hotel there, on a sort of island. Very comfortable and no trippers or charabancs. Good cooking and all that.” (pg. 2). By its very nature, it only allows access for a small portion of the day, while hemming it in at other times (if you are not keen on sailing). With a fiercely protected private beach on the island, it limits the number of outsiders access (while you could have tea on the island, strictly speaking it didn’t seem like someplace which would let you wander about) neatly creating the recipe Christie uses in her mysteries.

What I find fascinating is the fact the fictional Jolly Roger Hotel is based on an actual place - the Burgh Island Hotel in Devon. Just like its fictional counterpart, it is only accessible at low tide on foot and by sea tractor or boat at high tide (there isn’t any road. I think that may have been wishful thinking on Christie’s part). Burgh Island not only inspired Evil Under The Sun but her masterpiece And Then There Were None. Once again she altered the geography slightly for And Then There Were None, but the remoteness and the hotel itself helped provide the spark of inspiration. Burgh Island and Christie’s history doesn’t end there --  the 2001 Poirot adaptation (played by David Suchet) of Evil Under The Sun was filmed at the hotel (Can’t get much more authentic than that can you? And if you're interested, the 1982 film adaptation with Maggie Smith was filmed in Spain & London). Even Miss Marple wasn’t left out! The 2007 adaptation of Nemesis filmed several scenes in the Hotel as well.

The Bergh Island Hotel isn’t the only hotel to use a geographical or man-made features to provide something to set themselves apart from all the rest. A bank, brothel, bullfighting ring, brewery and a train station all have been converted into some seriously posh looking hotels. There are hotel rooms located under water, in old wine casks, on an airplane, in drain pipes and some epic tree houses. Then there are the themed rooms featuring archeology, Barbie, David Beckham (I am not kidding), in a trojan horse, and a Morris Minor suite. I know these places sound a bit over the top and up until last month I might have felt that way as well. But as they say there is something out there for everyone if you just look hard enough...

In my case I wasn’t looking for a vacation destination, I was inadvertently scrolling on my Tumblr feed that I found it. A literary themed hotel!  While a Mercedes themed room seems over the top, books seemed brilliant. I only hesitated for a moment before starting to plan our vacation there, since I needed to make sure it was in fact a real place, not a front for train robbers or hemmed in by high tide (I mean this is the internet and it is not always noted for its credibility and honesty). With rooms dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien, Dr. Seuss, Jules Verne, Jane Austen, Herman Melville and many others - how could I resist? So we set out a few weeks later to the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon. 

(this was our spectacular view - as it turns out I didn't take as many pictures as I thought of the rooms!)

I cannot say how loud my inner fangirl squeed when we got there (once again I tried to keep it together and I think once again I utterly failed) and we were able to check into the room that I really wanted....the J.K. Rowling room and you guessed it! All Harry Potter! Hedwig, Moaning Myrtle, a flying broom stick, potion ingredients and your own four poster maroon curtained bed were all there and it was fantastic! I know the Agatha Christie room would have been more appropriate for the blog but, and this is a large "but", it never opened up the entire time we were staying there! And I thought it might just be frowned upon if I “accidentally” happened to futz with the lock and wander my way into the room to take some pictures. My husband agreed with this and pointed out if we couldn’t see it this time then it gave us a perfectly valid reason to come back down again! There is no wifi, televisions or phones in any of the rooms but there are books, books and more books to be found. I cannot tell you how much fun we had while staying there, all because of the book theme. It made it special, memorable just as I suspect the owners intended.

I can say this fun theme (plus a sensational view of the Oregon coast, seriously we were just steps off the beach and it had excellent food) is exactly why we stayed there and will return again. Just like the quote above, “Awfully jolly hotel there... Very comfortable and no trippers or charabancs. Good cooking and all that.” (pg. 2). Unlike the Burgh Island Hotel which inspired books, Sylvia Beach hotel is inspired by books and both are very special for very similar reasons.

Favorite Quote: 

“--so difficult to know which pieces are part of the fur rug and which are the cat’s tail.” (pg. 214)

“Ah! Madame, I reserve the explanations for the last chapter.” (pg. 194)

Random Fact: On the back of each of the new William Morrow/Harper reprints is the statement that Christie is only outsold by the Bible and Shakespeare, which seems a bit fitting as Christie peppered her books with quotes from both of these two other sources. Evil Under The Sun in fact has a rather fervent if not fanatical, Bible-quoting clergyman who Christie offers up as suspect, whose motivation is one of removing evil in the name of God. With The Pale Horse, Christie snatches the title from Revelations 6:8 and uses this idea of death to help create a malevolent atmosphere. 

But while Christie uses these two sources to accent her own, it is something else which has me curious: how - exactly - did they determine Christie was only outsold by these two other canons of work?

Since asking this question, I discovered that perhaps the publishers were hedging their bets. Why? There isn’t any way to really accurately determine how many copies of each of these canons have been printed. For Shakespeare and the Bible, it is largely due to their age; they have been around for centuries and generally publishers' records don’t survive quite as long as the texts they print. Just for Shakespeare, if we calculate just the modern editions that have been printed, you come up with a staggering 2-4 billion books (no one wanted really to guess at the Bible, but the Gideons have passed out 1.4 billion Bibles alone over the last 106 years).

Second, both are in the public domain, meaning anyone can print their own version based on the source text - and believe me they do. One suggestive figure published by UNESCO estimates Shakespeare has been translated 4,281 times since they’ve been keeping count and other records place the Bible at around the same number. Now with Christie, you’d think we wouldn’t have these problems. Her works haven’t even hit the century mark yet (six more years). However she has been reprinted many times by several different publishers both in the UK and US, and there is a similar problem to the other two texts. Plus in the UK, accurate numbers are particularly difficult to determine because some of the early publisher’s records were destroyed during The Blitz.

There is one other problem I have with the dust jacket claim - while Shakespeare and the Bible in all probability beat Christie in the sheer number of books sold - the comparison isn’t really accurate. The Bible and Shakespeare are required reading for large portions of the world. The Bible is a religious text, required reading for the faithful and for them owning at least one is generally a good idea. Similarly, Shakespeare is required reading in classes all around the world. I can say I conservatively own twenty different editions of with single plays or complete works. Unlike these other two texts, Christie by and large is read for pleasure; you have to want to read it. So while both texts beat Christie in the physical number of copies produced - why people are reading them, buying them are not the same. So it’s a bit like comparing apples, oranges and grapes; all of them are part of the same kingdom but not the same order, family or genus. 

Perhaps leaving the claim at, ”Christie’s the most widely published fiction writer of all time.”, would be more accurate - but too grandiose for a woman who was renowned for her shyness, even though she’s been translated over 7,233 times, sold between 2-4 billion books and holds fifth place for the best selling single volume book of all time for And Then There Were None. And while I could not definitively determine if Shakespeare and the Bible have outsold Christie, at least I have some good empirical data which suggests the statement is true! Not that I actually doubt it, mind you, I was just curious if it could be definitively proven...

(For those of you who wondered what books have outsold And The There Were None: A Tale of Two Cities, The Lord of the Rings, The Little Prince and Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone place before it) 

Cheating: We are getting passport photos this weekend! So excited! So no cheating yet!

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2014

My 52 Weeks With Christie: John Connolly Interview

Thank you John for answering these questions for the blog!

If you'd like to know more about John Connolly and his books click here to go to his website or come in and meet him in the shop on November 10th!

1. How did the character of Charlie Parker form for you? Did you write some unpublished stories about him first, create extensive notes about him, or was the process more organic and he has slowly come into focus for you throughout the series?     

I'm not much for planning in advance.  I started the series - and my fictional writing, after years of writing only journalism - with what became the prologue to Every Dead Thing.  I just knew that it would concern a man who loses everything, and both the grief and the terrible liberation that might come with that.  After all, if the worst happens to you, then what have you got left to fear?  

2. Christie is said to have loathed Poirot from very early on in his career. Do you like Charlie Parker as well now as you did in the beginning? 

I understood him from the beginning, which is the important thing.  I knew why he was the way that he was.  There are two responses to great trauma.  One is to want others to suffer like you have done, or at least not to be unduly troubled if they do suffer, because you want others to feel the way that you do, and understand your pain, and suffer a little too.  Then there are those who, because of their own suffering, will do anything in their power to prevent others from suffering as they have, and the name we give to that is empathy, I think.  Parker starts out in Every Dead Thing as the first kind of individual, but ends the book as the second.

3. Christie wrote in a series of notebooks where she honed ideas for her mysteries, and a number of unpublished short stories were found within them. When you pass on at the ripe old age of 147 do you think scholars are going to find a trunk full of unpublished works - a western, poetry, cozy or perhaps the Great American novel (hehehe since you know you're Irish)? Since you are known for writing short stories and such (or at least among us)... 

No, I tend to be very disciplined about my work, and I leave nothing unfinished.  Everything I've written has been published.  No, hang on: there was one story for Nocturnes which I set aside because it didn't quite work, but that's it.  My cupboard will provide poor food for scholars when I pass on.

4. What do you find it easier to work on, short stories, novellas or full length novels? 

They're all very different disciplines.  Realistically, the novel is most difficult because of its length, and the discipline and commitment required to finish it, especially in the face of the doubts about its value that a writer will always have while working on it.  As for short stories, the more of them I write, the easier they become, but I tend to go through phases with them.  I've been fortunate to have had a few ideas for them over the past year or so, but until then I really had written very few of them since Nocturnes.

5. You have written non-fiction, young adult, kids and adult fiction - which would say is the most difficult to write? And Why? 

I tend to approach them all in the same way.  Whatever I write tends to be the thing that is nagging at me most profoundly at the time, and I view it simply as the book that has to be written.  The issue with books for younger readers is that they are adults in the process of formation (we're all adults in the process of formation, though, or should be), and they're not as far along that path as the rest of us.  On the other hand, they haven't given in to the moral grey areas that adults occupy, and their concepts of justice and injustice are less equivocal and compromised than ours.  The difficulty comes AFTER the books have been written.  Younger readers don't read reviews, don't look at book posters on subways, and when you go to a school to talk to them, you're just about better than math, at least until you start talking, and then math may start to look more appealing.  I think you have to work harder to bring young readers in, but it's very fulfilling if and when you do.

6. How did you tackle putting together all the pieces for Books To Die For? For Bonus Points: How did the idea for this great book on books come about? And is there a sequel in the works?         

It was the hardest thing I've ever done, and I think Declan and Clair would say the same.  The real difficulty lay in having to fact-check all of the essays, and put together bios of the authors in question.  That was hugely time-consuming.  As for the idea, I think we just wanted to give readers a basic guide to the genre, and writers seemed like the best people to ask.  I don't think a sequel is a runner, really, although I do wish that we'd managed to pull in more writers for whom English wasn't a first language.  Books To Die For was aimed at a very niche market, and will never make any money for the publishers.  Everyone involved did it as a labor of love, which is great.  These things are good for the soul.    

7. Agatha Christie is called the queen of poisons since she used them often. Do you have preferred method of murder in your books? And why?  

Gosh, I've never really thought about that - which is probably a good thing.  Because my novels have a hint of the metaphysical or supernatural to them, I think I can get away with doing some things that a more traditional mystery would tend to shun.  The Wolf in Winter has a pretty unusual death about three-quarters of the way in.  I don't think I've ever encountered one similar to it in another mystery, for good or bad...

8. While not an extensive reader of Christie's mysteries, is there any book or solution of hers you wish you'd thought of first? 

I think we all look at The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and consider it a marvel of narration.  Okay, there is some sleight of hand involved, but still...

9. How do you think Christie influenced the modern mystery novel? 

Surprise.  We all want to wrong-foot the reader to some degree, and have him or her finish the novel with the sense that, well, they hadn't seen coming whatever the end was...

10. Any Final Words?

Don't trust anyone who dismisses Christie.  She was far more subversive than she's often given credit for, but in many ways the least interesting thing about her books is the solution.

Monday November 10^th at Noon - John Connolly signs The Wolf in Winter

Prosperous, ME, is as wealthy as it sounds and guards itself carefully. It doesn’t accept strangers, only begrudgingly allowing tourists to come to look at the ancient church, moved there and reconstructed stone by stone, from England. But there is something ugly and morbid going on – a dead hobo and a missing girl – and PI Charlie Parker is heading their way. The results ripple far and wide. 12th in the series by the Irishman, a series highly recommeded by JB, Fran, and Adele.

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Dental Appointments and Spies

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

First Published: Serialized in Collier’s Weekly in 1940.

Series: Poirot

Summary: There are somethings in life that not even Poirot can escape his, “...twice yearly overhaul that his sense of order and neatness demanded.” (pg. 9). Even though Dr. Morley is a very good dentist Poirot still does not enjoy his visits in the least. However Poirot’s teeth are in good shape and he is able to escape the chair and office fairly quickly. However just a few hours later Poirot is summoned back to Dr. Morley’s office by the police. They believe Dr. Morley committed suicide because he accidentally killed a man in the chair. The police are ready to shut the case on the whole affair, but Poirot is not so sure suicide is the correct verdict.

Review: While the beginning & the end of Buckle made me giggle, the portion in the middle felt convoluted and stretched. With secret agents, doubles, assassination plots, political extremists, and blackmail there was a whole lot going on. Overall it did add a bit of understand to who Poirot is and the essentials of his character which in itself makes this book worth reading. While I am not sure it quite reached pot roast level, it is not so low as squash - it’s in limbo - not great but not bad. Perhaps beige?

In any event I am glad that Christie wrote this particular Poirot novel. His squirming fear of the dentist made him a bit more human in my eyes. Since I have spent an inordinate amount of time in the dentist’s chair myself, it allowed me to find a small piece of common ground with the Belgian detective. Nothing like the poking and prodding of sharp metal instruments to bring fictional character and human closer together!

Poirot’s dental appointment went splendidly, only a slightly worn filling was found (which, in all fairness, had been troubling Poirot). His visit to Dr. Morley went far better than a number of mine have over the years, with one in particular standing out in my memory. A few years back I needed to get a filling done, easy, I have plenty in my time, they’re not fun but what dental procedure is? Now the relevant detail, the dental hygienist working with the dentist that day had only been on the job for two weeks and out of school for three. I, however, did not know this at the time.  

So she and my dentist bopped along and got the major work done on the tooth and then the dentist turned the cleanup part of the procedure over to her, no big deal. However this was a big deal to the hygienist; she’d never finished up by herself before.... And I then discovered that whenever something didn’t go precisely right or according to plan she said, “Oops” in a highly stressed voice. With my mouth propped open, I could neither inquire what the issue was, reassure her that she hadn’t caused me any pain (hoping she hadn’t slit me open as my mouth was numb and I wouldn’t know the difference) or request the dentist come back. Seriously, “oops” is not the thing you want to hear when someone is working on you! The only things worse would be “Damn, I didn’t think a tooth could pop out like that!” or “Did that hurt? Lets try that again and see if something different happens, shall we?” So I sat through the next hour and 22 oopses (I counted) fervently wishing the dentist would wonder why the hygienist was taking so long! Eventually she did, heard an oops, looked horrified and did a thorough check of the hygienist’s work. I didn’t go back for a year (which was really stupid because then I had two more cavities which needed to be worked on!)

Since reading Buckle, I have discovered the appointments Poirot and I kept with our dentists were a cake walk compared to Babe Levy’s experience in the 1976 movie the Marathon Man, where Dr. Christian Szell (Lawrence Olivier) used skills he’d honed as a Nazi concentration camp dentist to interrogate Babe (Dustin Hoffman), first while repeating a single question, “Is it safe?”, he uses dental probes to exploit (read stick a sharp metal hook into it a wiggle) a cavity in one of Babe’s teeth. When that doesn’t produce the answers the doctor is looking for he moves on to step two, “Oh please, don't worry. I'm not going into that cavity. That nerve's already dying. A live, freshly-cut nerve is infinitely more sensitive. So I'll just drill into a healthy tooth until I reach the pulp...unless of course you can tell me that it's safe.” All the while the high whine of a dental drill underlines these words as he moves towards Babe. I am not sure how Poirot would have fared, since thank goodness Christie wasn’t big on writing torture scenes, but I probably would have buckled and told him anything he wanted to know...

Perhaps Poirot’s trepidation of the dentist stemmed from the irrational fear that his competent and non-threatening Dr. Morley would morph into a Dr. Szell. Or perhaps it is just because pain always seems to accompany any visit to the dentist. But on the bright side, thanks once again to this blog, I definitely won’t be wondering if the dental hygienist will say oops again...

(Seriously this was one of the absolutely most disturbing pieces of film I have ever seen! The first few minutes of the “Is it safe?” scene I was okay-ish until he started using the drill... Then my hands were plastered against my ears and I was singing as loud as I could, “Why am I such a misfit, I am not such a nit wit...” a song Hermy the elf sang in Rudolph and the Island of Misfit Toys (not sure those are the exact lyrics, but that’s what I sang) because he was the only fictional dentist I could think of I didn’t find threatening! The silver lining here is that it wasn’t as disturbing as watching snake videos before going to bed, so I am able to create a short hierarchical list of irrational fears now. Oh joy.)

Seriously Lawrence Olivier nailed sadistic creepiness in this role!

Favorite Quote: 

“Presently, like some fantastic moon, a round object rose gently over the top of the kitchen garden wall. It was the egg-shaped head of Hercule Poirot...” (pg. 149) 

“By experience, he knew to a nicety the moment when his smart patent leather shoes began to press painfully on his feet.” (pg. 171) And yet we still wear shoes which look great but are akin to small torture chambers affixed to our feet...

Random Fact: Another interesting parallel between The Marathon Man and One, Two Buckle My Shoe - spies. In both there are main characters who are posing as corporate men who in fact are really working as government agents. In fact one the agents in Buckle fooled Poirot right up until the end! This theme is one which I have read repeatedly in the Christie canon, N or M, They Came To Baghdad, The Man In The Brown Suit or Death on the Nile all had characters posing as innocuous career men, while actual being an arms dealer, spy or political agitator. 

And this is where the rubber meets the road as they say, people who used their real lives as cover for covert activity. It is well known that Julia Child (chef), Josephine Baker (dancer & singer), Moe Berg (baseball player), Alice Marble (pro tennis player), Sterling Hayden (actor), Noel Coward (playwright), Lucky Luciano (head of the Genovese crime family) and Harry Houdini (magician) were all one way or another responsible for gathering and/or passing along information about enemy war efforts. 

One name which I found in these lists surprised me since I’d never heard him associated with spying, Roald Dahl. Yes, the same man who penned the "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" series, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox. He was a flying ace who was grounded due to injuries sustained during a crash. After he recovered he went to work a desk job in Washington D.C. and slowly climbed his way into elite social circles. His speciality? Seducing high society women to help rally support for the war effort (this was while America was in its’ isolationist stance, before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor) and steal important documents on occasion. It was during this period he discovered his love of writing as he penned war propaganda for US newspapers. 

Christie, unfortunately as far as I can tell, was never called on to use her status as a leading mystery author to help spy for her country. Perhaps her chosen subject matter made her far too obvious for that type of assignment (by the end of WWII she’d written 36 full length mysteries). Instead her participation war effort involved volunteering as a nurse and pharmacist’s aid in hospitals. However in 1941, Christie was investigated by MI5 for an odd coincidence. Unknown to Christie she was good friends with one of the head cryptographers at Bletchley Park, Dilly Knox (who personally came up with the method of breaking a number of important navel codes). When Christie published her book N or M (one of her only books which uses the war in the plot), Christie caused quite a kerfluffle when she named one of her characters Major Bletchley,  an odious man who claimed to be “in” on all the secrets of England’s war machine. While Knox assured Bletchley Park that he’d never clued Christie in on what he did - they had to find out what she knew. So over tea and scones, Knox carefully asked her why she’d chosen Bletchley for the major’s surname. Simply, she’d gotten stuck in the city while on a train and took revenge on the place by naming her least favorite character after it! Her answer relieved much of the anxiety which she’d unwittingly created. 

Cheating: Only eight weeks left! I would be a fool to blow it now! On a related note can you believe I stuck with this New Years resolution for 44 weeks? That’s longer than some celebrity marriages have lasted!

AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Alice, Arsenic and Alliteration

They Came To Baghdad

First Published: Serialized in John Bull Magazine in the UK in 1951.

I Read: New York, Harper, 2011.

Series: Stand Alone

Summary: Victoria Jones lost her job, again. But on the upside, she was given references and a week's pay - so with money in her pocket, Victoria treats herself to lunch in the park. While there, she meets Edward, a rather dashing young man on his way to Baghdad for work. Before Victoria can learn much more about him, he blends into the crowd and is gone. In an instant Victoria decides she must get to Baghdad to see Edward again.

Shortly upon arriving in Baghdad a man, who turns out to be a British agent, dies in her hotel room. His death and last words plunge Victoria into a whole new adventure in the covert world of secrets and spies. A world which, if she doesn’t play her cards right, might just claim her life as well!

Review: This volume is an interesting entry in the Christie canon, as it is not a whodunit or thriller per se. It follows in the footsteps of The Man In The Brown Suit, as it is an adventure novel at its core with political intrigue and mystery thrown in for flavor. I enjoyed reading about Victoria and her over-the-top antics which ultimately save the Western world from tearing itself apart (it was set at the beginning of the Cold War). The book I think just reaches the level of pot roast, adding flavor to the canon and is well worth reading. However it is not quite as brilliant as The Man In The Brown Suit, whose spunky narrator followed a similar adventurous path. I think it just reached the pot roast level due mainly to the fact I don’t see this particular book as being very plausible, entertaining yes, plausible no. But don’t go on just my opinion check out both of them yourself and tell me what you think! 

The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things....

Do you remember the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Not the Johnny Depp version, but the classic Gene Wilder edition? (If you don’t you should watch the classic version tout suite!) Right now I am hoping you remember the bit where Wonka is expounding on his great idea for nursery room walls, lick-able wallpaper! Where all the fruits, including snozzberries, taste like the real deal. Since then the practical side of my brain has been trying to figure out how to engineer similar wallpaper which wouldn’t turn into a slobbery, disgusting mess over repeated lickings. However I can congratulate Christie in making me rethink this scene in a sinister light since my reading of They Came To Baghdad.

To understand why this movie scene might contain more menacing connotations, and why I can thank Agatha Christie for altering my perception of an innocent film, we need a bit of background. "Scheele’s Green" - ever heard of the stuff? Well neither had I until I read a passage in They Came To Baghdad which mentioned it, “That reminds me, what’s Scheele’s Green?..It’s something in the chemical line.” (pg. 85). Curious about what they were speaking of I looked it up.

Evidently, back in 1775 people were fed up with the green pigments available at the time; they faded and turned awful colors over time (plus they weren’t very bright). Enter a man called Carl Wilhelm Scheele who solved the inherent problems with the color and produced a nice vibrant green. It was called Scheele’s Green (Obviously. Later this pigment was refined & altered slightly and named Paris Green but they were essentially the same animal). The thing is the main ingredient is rather dodgy: arsenic.

This particular pigment had a wide range of uses - dyes, paints, intestinal antiseptic, insecticide and rat poison. I mean what could possible go wrong with using the same compound to dye your dress and kill bugs? Plenty. Over time, people begun gathering empirical data, such as those who wore green clothing seemed to get sick more often. Or when the green paint started getting damp and moldy the people living in those rooms seemed to get sick (and sometimes die) far more readily than people who lived in non-green rooms. We now know that the mold is what caused the issue here; it altered the chemical structure of the green compound and emitted a poisonous fume which slowly weakened (and killed) people. Which is the basis of one theory on Napoleon’s death, since no leader bent on world domination can die without generating at least one conspiracy theory. This one states that while in exile on St. Helena, Napoleon had a favorite room in his home, The Green Room. The Green Room of course was pained Paris Green, and when Napoleon became ill, he spent more and more time indoors and breathing in these poisonous vapors. While his death is official listed as being caused by cancer, some scientists point out that arsenic is also a carcinogen and again could have hastened his death.

However the most common way Sheele’s or Paris Green ended up in a home was through wallpaper. It was all the rage in the UK to have its vibrant color adorn your walls. And you guessed it, the wallpaper had the same problem as the paint when it became damp and started to mold; it emitted a poisonous gas which harmed all those who used the room. Even if you kept the wall paper from molding, if you fancied papering your sitting room with green flocked wallpaper, the dust generated from the flocking was just as deadly when inhaled (since you were breathing arsenic powder). 

So now think back to Willy Wonka’s wallpaper with the knowledge that the greens used for the leaves, grapes and apples may have contained a toxic agent to produce its bright colors. The pigment’s use in paint was only banned in the 1960’s (not sure when the dye was banned). So if Wonka had stockpiled dye which used Scheele’s or Paris green and didn’t pay attention to the outside world very much, he may have inadvertently been poisoning his guests... So this is how Christie bent my perception of a childhood classic through a passing comment made in They Came To Baghdad! And I can’t decide if that’s good or bad.

Favorite Quote: 

“Strangely enough, your capacity to think up a convincing lie quickly is one of your qualifications for the job.” (pg. 131) I suppose each job has its own unique standards! 

Random Fact: 

“Ages ago Ales, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African Amusement...anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled...” (pg.1), 

I am sure you see what Walter Abish was doing in this quote from his experimental book, Alphabetical Africa. He’s not trying to drive his readers batty (or at least I don’t think so), he was demonstrating the literary device of alliteration in a rather extreme way. Each chapter (well the first 26) used  a singular letter of the alphabet to begin each word in the chapter, so every word in chapter one started with an A, 2 was B and so on, following the rigid structure of the English alphabetical order.

What does a crazy book written in 1974 have in common with They Came To Baghdad? One idle conversation in a park, 

"Victoria Jones,” said Edward, trying it over on his tongue. He shook his head. “They don’t go together.” 

“You’re quite right,” said Victoria with feeling. “If I were Jenny it would be rather nice -- Jenny Jones...” (pg. 17)

Victoria wished for her name to be alliterative, to roll off the tongue in a pleasing manner. While Victoria was doomed to disappointment, a few of Christie other character’s were awarded with this distinctive pattern; Miss Marple, Parker Pyne and Tommy & Tuppence. 

When I started looking into alliteration I found myself in a similar situation to Victoria when she was thinking of Edward and Baghdad, “...when one has had one’s attention suddenly focused on a particular name or subject, everything seemed to have suddenly conspired to force the thought...onto her attention.” (pg. 34). Just like Victoria and Baghdad, my mind began recognizing the sheer number of repeated rhythms (I got tired of typing alliteration) which I read/hear everyday.

While I was reading this book The Agents of Shield came out on dvd and my husband I started catching up on the show. While watching it, I started to remember just how many names used alliteration in the Marvel universe (or comic books in general) Melinda May, Pepper Potts, Bruce Banner, Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four or Guardians of the Galaxy; I could go on but we don’t have the time. The reason? Legend states Stan Lee, the creator many of the characters for Marvel has a poor memory and used alliteration to remember the names of the heroes/villains he was writing about.

I shrugged this off this coincidence and moved on, a simple memory device no big deal at one point or another I have used a similar method of remembering stuff for work or school. No worries. So while I was waiting for Monday Night Football to start a few days later, I started watching the news and once again was bombarded with alliterative terms, Baby Boomers, mysterious murder, or sagging stocks. Flipping the channel to ESPN wasn’t much better with Seattle Seahawks, Jacksonville Jaguars, Buffalo Bills, San Antonio Spurs, and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Fortunately the football game came on and my cheering commenced and alliteration was shoved out of my mind.

Then I was talking with Fran the other day and I completely misquoted Alice In Wonderland, and Fran rattled off an entire passage in seconds which was impressive. So I decided to dust off my copy and read a bit, to refresh my poor memory. However before I could read Alice and her adventures I decided to read The Jabberwocky and was stunned at how Lewis Carroll used alliteration to enhance the menace of his Jabberwocky, “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/ The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!/ Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun / The frumious Bandersnatch!”. If you read the entire poem Carroll does a great job of using alliteration to create an atmosphere of malevolence around this creature.

So what started as a passing fancy of Christie’s character, wishing her name had a dash more panache turned into several weeks of fascination and distraction for me. Wondering just where alliteration was going to creep up next! (Yeah I don’t get obsessive over books at all...)

Cheating: My husband is getting a bit nervous that I might win. And recently he’s started asking me to fill out these pesky passport forms...SO I can’t buckle now!

AmberMiner©2014 

 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: The Bard

Sad Cypress

First Published: Sad Cypress. Collins Crime Club, London, 1940.

I Read: Sad Cypress. William Morrow, New York, 2011.

Series: Poirot 

Summary: How Will Poirot go about proving the innocence of a woman on trial for her life? By using his little grey cells of course! While Elinor Carlisle seems to be the only one with the means, motive and opportunity to commit the murder, Poirot is convinced there is something more going on than meets the eye. 

Review: Sad Cypress, I think, is a serviceable mystery novel - good but not outstanding. But let's face it  = Christie's not-so-good ones are often better than some others' best efforts! For me, the book just seemed a bit cluttered with unnecessary red herrings which slowed the story down. Plus, in order to follow The Rules Of Fair Play, the audience needs to know a small but crucial botanical fact to solve the mystery before Poirot, which I thought a bit unlikely. In any case, it was a solid effort.

One other issue I had with the mystery involved was how our victim, Mary Gerrard, was poisoned (I am not spoiling anything, I promise). There was no way the murderer could guarantee Mary Gerrard would be the only one to ingest the poison. This seems like a small detail to worry over, but it is uncommon to find such an incongruity in the plotting of a Christie mystery (and to be honest, it needs to be pretty big for me to spot!). 

Due to her background and experience, it feels a bit odd for a mistake like this to occur in one of her books, but I suppose anyone with a lengthy series is bound to make a mistake every once in a while. During WWI, Christie volunteered as a nurse in hospitals for thousands of hours and even qualified as an Apothecaries’ Assistant and mixed medicines in a dispensary. A rather famous incident occurred during this time to Christie; she evidently worked under a pharmacist who carried a lump of curare around in his pocket. He explained to her how it was used and why he carried it around...because it made him feel powerful (not sure I’d want him mixing my medicines). This work gave her a formal background in drugs/toxins and their delivery methods. In addition, by the time she’d written Sad Cypress, Christie was twenty years into her writing career, where she’d devised all kinds of clever means of administering poisons to her victims. So I guess that’s why Sad Cypress feels so lack luster - the use of the toxic agent was genius but its dispersal method was highly disappointing and questionable.

In this vein, I realized I’ve been writing this blog for thirty-eight weeks now (so close to completing a New Years resolution!) which got me thinking about how often I have read a Christie which featured a poison somewhere within it’s pages. I did some math and came up with completely jaw-dropping numbers! I didn’t realize how pervasive her use of poisons/drugs/toxins was...Forty-three out of her sixty-eight mysteries contain someone murdered by poison, almost killed by poison and people we suspect might have been poisoned (not counting her short stories, plays & Westmacott novels). Seriously! This translates into sixty-three percent of her books featuring poison! Which is rather staggering, since to me at least, their use hasn’t felt repetitive or monotonous, perhaps due to the vast number of poisons used and motives behind why the person was killed.

Another interesting feature of Sad Cypress is the fact that Christie borrowed the title from a line in a Shakespearian play, Twelfth Night to be specific, which opens up an interesting question about Christie, which I can’t seem to find a definitive answer for, so go with me for a second. 

Whenever I talk to authors, they are forever saying: write what you know, write what you love, write about things you enjoy. And if you’ve read this blog for a while then I think you may have deduced that I am a fan of Harry Potter, Star Wars & Trek, Lord Of The Rings and the Marvel franchise (oops, that’s next week's blog). In Christie’s writing, you can understand how the prevalent use of poisons links up to her background in nursing and pharmacological work - writing what she knows. Even more pervasive in her canon, what she loves, literature (and a keenness on nursery rhymes), one author stands out of the crowd. I’ll give you a hint: he’s the only author to have outsold Christie! Give up? William Shakespeare. 

She snatched four book titles from lines in his plays - Sad Cypress (Twelfth Night), The Mousetrap (Hamlet), There Is A Tide (Julius Caesar) and By The Pricking Of My Thumbs (MacBeth) - technically there is a fifth ,Absent Spring (Sonnet 98), but it was not a mystery and published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Beyond the titles, Christie often referenced Shakespeare to help enhance the atmosphere she was trying to create in a particular book. In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, when the murder victim was discovered, one of his relatives quoted Lady MacBeth, “Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?”. Which helped intensify the horror of a slit throat and the bloody scene of the crime (and this quote was a key to solving the mystery). In The Pale Horse (which, by the way, is a Biblical reference to Revelation 6:8; and the only single book to have outsold Christie’s canon) she uses Macbeth again, only this time she invokes the three witches to help foster an eerie and malevolent atmosphere around the three woman at the heart of this mystery. All told, I have read references to Macbeth (obviously), Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet and Othello so far (funnily enough I haven’t run across any references to a comedy yet...). 

While she did quote other authors from time to time, pillars such as Longfellow (Hercule Poirot’s Christmas), Blake (Endless Night), Flecker (Postern Of Fate) or Fitzgerald (The Moving Finger), Shakespeare quotations by far outstrip all the others, thus fueling my idea that Christie may have been a bit of a fan of The Bard!

On a complete side note....Interestingly enough Shakespeare himself was no slouch in the poison department either! Twenty-one percent of his plays feature someone being poisoned (this number doesn’t include the histories since well, they are based loosely on fact) Anthony & Cleopatra, Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Cymbeline (again no comedies contained any sort of poisonings, just as Christie doesn’t reference the comedies in her works - or hasn’t as far as I have read. But I suppose if the Bard couldn’t make poisoning funny I don’t think anyone could). The percentage goes up to twenty-five if you include A Midsummers Night Dream for the sheer number of main players who were drugged (which granted is a bit of a stretch, but then we at least put one comedy on the board). All two hundred-thirty-nine years-ish before the mystery genre was founded!

Favorite Quote: 

“Fine feathers make fine birds.” (pg. 14)

“If a doctor had told her to go and get the skin of an alligator she would have murmured automatically, “Yes, Doctor,” and glided obediently from the room to tackle the problem.” (pg. 55)

Random Fact: While the mystery of Christie’s life revolved around her missing ten days in 1926, no one disputed her death in 1976 fifty years later. Similarly the largest controversy surrounding Shakespeare centers on the authorship question, whether or not he was the actual author of his plays (personally it doesn’t matter to me who wrote them, it just matters that they exist! I doubt this mystery will ever be solved since all of the main players have been dead for centuries). But did you know there might be a bit of mystery around his death? 

The theory asserts that Shakespeare was murdered by his son-in-law for his money. This theory stems from three interesting facts we know for certain. Evidently, Shakespeare's younger daughter, Judith, married Thomas Quiney, the black sheep of an old and respectable family. One month before his death, Shakespeare had a Will drawn up which states that he was in perfect health for a man of fifty-two. Then he altered it a few weeks later while on his death bed, leaving Judith and her children only a small sum upon his death and entailed away the rest of his estate to Susan his eldest and her kids (Quiney was in the Will prior to this point but his name was crossed out and replaced by Judith’s). 

This is where speculative conclusions are drawn; that for some reason Shakespeare threatened to cut Quiney out of the will thus propelling him into action. On the night Shakespeare took ill, he’d been out carousing with his friends Drayton and Ben Johnson, drinking rather heavily and fell asleep (or alternatively passed out) under a shrub. The theory states that sometime during this night, Shakespeare was slipped the poison which killed him. Sounds a bit like a Christie novel doesn’t it? Or perhaps one of his own plays, if a poison was administered through the ear...

This particular theory is just that - a theory; no one has successfully been able to obtain an order for exhumation for his bones. Since his request to remain undisturbed is written plainly across his grave, “Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.”.

I think the reason why this theory (which has been around since the seventies) isn’t as well known is due to the fact it is over shadowed by the truly controversial death of Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe, who, unlike Jim Morrison, Elvis or Andy Kaufman, may really have faked his own death (which would have been much simpler to do back then). 

One last side note, did you know there is a theory which maintains that Jane Austen might have been murdered? Arsenic poisoning is the theory put forth in the book The Mysterious Death of Jane Austen.

Cheating: Nope no cheating! I sincerely want to get to the UK where I truly long to see a Shakespearian first folio in the flesh so to speak! There are a number on exhibit and I am determined to see one!

AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Ampicillin & Missing Persons

By The Pricking Of My Thumbs

First Published: By The Pricking Of My Thumbs. London, Collins Crime Club, 1968.

I Read: By The Pricking Of My Thumbs. New York, William Morrow, 2012.

Series: Tommy & Tuppence

Summary: Tommy & Tuppence journey up to visit Aunt Ada, a visit which gives little joy to any of the participants. While there, Tuppence chances upon another elderly lady who asks her the strangest question, “Excuse me, was it your poor child?”. Startled (since there are no kids at the home and Tuppence’s are grown) Tuppence doesn't think much of it, until Aunt Ada passes away, the odd woman disappears and a painting is left behind, leaving Tuppence to wonder if there is more going on than meets the eye with her odd old woman.

Review: I enjoyed reading this book quite a bit. Tuppence and her antics made me laugh; they kind of reminded me of my husband and I. In any case, by a crazy random happenstance I actually read two books in chronological order, completely by accident! By The Pricking Of My Thumbs directly follows Endless Night in Christie’s canon of works. While Endless Night is a menacing, atmospheric thriller with a diabolical twist, By The Pricking Of My Thumbs is a far lighter thriller which felt I related to far more readily than Endless Night or some of her other works.

How did I relate to pair of middle age former spies and their spinster aunt? For starters with this quote, “With the choice of getting well or having brimstone and treacle to drink, you choose getting well every time.” (pg.20). This line reminded me vividly of my yearly bouts with bronchitis during my childhood. It was a vicious cycle: I’d get sick, my folks would take me to the doctor and he in turn would prescribe some medicine. Now you must be wondering what’s wrong with that? You received proper medical care. It wasn’t the care which is the issue but the cure. While I didn’t have to take brimstone - thank goodness! - I was given Ampicillin. 

Back in mid-seventies/early eighties, Ampicillin was not prescribed in the lovely pill form it has now. At that point, the mechanism for delivering the antibiotic was via a thick pink liquid -- which I swear was one part fruit punch, one part sludge and two parts yuck (I swore this was the punishment for getting an upper respiratory infection around the holidays). The liquid had to be kept in the fridge, shaken vigorously before use (seriously, if you didn’t Tums has nothing on this stuff for chalkiness) and nothing but time could cleared up the coating it left behind on your tongue (I tried everything, Seven-Up, jam, pudding, and in one desperate moment a washcloth, my mother was not amused). Seriously it has been thirty years since I’ve had to take this stuff and I still loathe, despise, detest this bubblegum colored concoction.

So when I read this line in By The Pricking Of My Thumbs it all came flooding back to me! I swear I got better at the threat of having to take the pink stuff! So Aunt Ada’s axiom seems to bear some fruit apron reflection. 

On a side note I had never heard of brimstone and treacle before reading this Christie thriller and I didn't think it sounded particularly pleasant. When I looked it up it didn’t sound any better. I think I might have gotten off easy with my nasty pink stuff. Brimstone and treacle refers to a syrup composed of sulfur and molasses, which was administered to children as a cure-all in Victorian times (and evidentially in Aunt Ada’s youth around the turn of the century). I cannot image molasses does a very good job in covering sulfur’s lovely rotten egg odor & taste. So perhaps I was too hasty in my thinking my childhood medicine was the absolute worst thing under the sun. (What really added the icing on the cake in my thinking that brimstone & treacle being worse than the pink stuff, it was featured in the Dickens’ novel Nicholas Nickleby, where evidently the boys had to take their portion of the medicine all in one swallow or they were beaten. Fun times.)

This was just one way in which I related to this particular Christie thriller; others included strategies for dealing with cantankerous (read grumpy) elderly relatives, chatty strangers (telling you all kinds of stuff you never needed to know), investigating a painting with unknown origins (seriously this really did happen in our family) and adventures you find yourself in that only your spouse will ever believe really happened! The frothiness which drove me to distraction in N or M was tempered in this book, which was something I worried about when starting my second Tommy & Tuppence novel. By The Pricking Of My Thumbs was the perfect book follow up to Endless Night. 

Favorite Quote: 

“If anybody over the age of sixty-five finds fault with you...never argue. Never try to say you’re right. Apologize at once and say it was all your fault and you’re very sorry and you’ll never do it again.”(pg. 18) Replace 65 with 80 and I thinks Tuppence might be on to something!

“Albert went away to release the chicken from its possible fate of cremation in the oven.” (pg. 146) Just struck my funny bon. Who hasn’t burnt something in the oven?

Random Fact: The central crime in this particular thriller is the disappearance of an elderly woman from her care home. Several different variants of this plot device are repeated throughout this book to good advantage, I think. This type of crime in a Christie novel inevitably leads one to remembering that Christie herself has been part of a similar event. In By The Pricking of My Thumbs there is a scene where Tuppence wakes up in a hospital and does not remember her proper married name, instead she recalls her maiden name and is registered under that one, again not unlike what happened during the missing eleven days of Christie’s life. This book was written fifty years after the events of 1926, so perhaps this was an oblique reference meant to tease her audience a bit about their fascination with her real life mystery.

Christie is not the only artist to have vanished over the years. However, she’s arguably the most famous. I think this fame/infamy stems from the fact that she steadfastly refused to talk about what happened with anyone (I think this really was the best course of action, there was no real way to come out of that situation smelling like a rose) plus the fact she was found alive and well. 

I think had Christie vanished and never been found, her legacy might be similar to one of these four artists who all went missing with a small body of work to their names. 

Barbara Newhall Follett, an American novelist (a child prodigy), published two critically acclaimed novels and was expected to go far in the field of literature, until she walked away from her home and marriage with thirty dollars in her pocket at the age of twenty-five and vanished. This was back in 1939, and in the seventy-five years since, no one has found a single clue to where she went or what ultimately happened to her. 

Everett Ruess, a writer and an artist who created wood cuttings and linoleum prints of natural landscapes, set out into the wilds of Utah in 1934 and was never heard from again. Most believed Ruess died shortly after he posted a letter to his brother in November - either by dying in an accident of some sort or was murdered. A small hope flickers on the idea he might have fallen in love and settled down away from city lights (he did not enjoy urban environments) and became a hermit. This theory is put forth from time to time but most experts tend to discount this idea. In 2009 the discovery of remains in an unmarked grave in the area where Ruess was last known to be led to speculation that he’d finally been located. Unfortunately DNA tests and dental records showed the body wasn’t his and the mystery continues on.

Connie Converse was a singer/songwriter who was active in the New York folk music scene during the nineteen-fifties. She had several successful shows, but ultimately was unable to land a record deal like many of her contemporaries. Giving up on her dream she left New York and went to work as an editor of a small journal. Then just before her fiftieth birthday in 1974, she packed up her VW beetle and left her home in Michigan to “start over out west”. You know what happened next: no one has heard from her since then - her family has alternately believes that she made a fresh start in another city or committed suicide (as she was depressed when she left) but no definitive answer is known.

Lastly there is the performance artist Bas Jan Ader who vanished in 1975 attempting to complete a piece called In Search of the Miraculous. Part of the art included sailing across the Atlantic but after three weeks into his journey all radio contact with him ceased and his battered and partially submerged boat was found off the coast of Ireland ten months later. Ader’s body was never recovered and in a strange twist the boat was stolen shortly after it was salvaged. This theft lead to quiet speculation as to whether the artist actually perished at sea. Again no one really knows.  

If Christie had never been found (or turned up on her own) her legacy might be similar to these other four artists - one of obscurity. They all occupy a much smaller position of influence in their discipline than she (in theory) would have, if their careers hadn’t stopped all most before they started. Similarly Christie’s career would have only spanned six novels, and The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd would have been her swan song so to speak. While Ackroyd is brilliant I am not sure it would have sustained the position she now occupies as The Queen Of Mystery (she went on to pen over 48 books after her eleven day walkabout).

While By The Pricking Of My Thumbs doesn’t break her silence about her personal eleven day vanishing act, I think it was her way of laughing about it.

Cheating: Nope! I am still going strong!

AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: The Butler Did It!

And Then There Were None

First Published: Serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1939. Ten Little Niggers. Collins Crime Club, London, 1939. And Then There Were None Dood & Mead, New York, 1940. And an alternate US title Ten Little Indians for some editions.

I Read: And Then There Were None. William Morrow, New York, 2014.

Series: Not investigated by any particular detective.

Summary: Ten people are lured to an isolated island under false pretenses. Unknown to nine of them, one of their number is a murderer with a plan.

Review: This book is considered by most to be Christie’s masterpiece. And Then There Were None is the mystery which propelled her to superstar status, with only Shakespeare and the Bible outselling her body of works. With a plot imitated the world over, this novel  rules the number one spot each year on Christie’s bestseller list (followed far behind generally by Ackroyd). It took her two years to write and even she admitted the book wasn’t an easy feat to create (and remember she was generally a two book a year writer). 

Yet I am still scratching my head about it. I think my bewilderment stems from the fact this is a Christie which doesn’t feel like a Christie to me. This book contains the highest body count to date of any I’ve read so far and all I could think while reading it was the line No One Here Gets Out Alive (incidentally it's the title of Jim Morrison’s biography). Focused, brutal and unrelenting; not descriptions generally associated with The Queen of Mystery. More of a thriller than a whodunit, this book doesn’t really follow the Rules of Fair Play until the epilogue (not that all her books did, just it’s surprising with the popularity of this title that it does not). Don’t get me wrong, this is a wonderful book; I devoured it in a few hours, I am just left a bit befuddled. 

There is one line/solution which is commonly associated with Christie and her canon, one which AND Then There Was None all most fufills. “The Butler did it!”, I hear this cliche regularly attributed to Christie and (just like the cake) it is a lie. Nowhere in the Christie canon did a real butler actually commit the crime being investigated in the narrative. The most entertaining aspect of this fallacy is the fact Christie’s piece de resistance, And Then There Were None is the second closest in her canon to fulfilling this cliche, yet it still falls short. Mr. Rogers - the butler (no relation to the other Mr. Rogers) - is accused of committing a murder, however his crime is rather nebulous and is not central to the action of the plot. A fine line to be sure but an important one. 

The tree which bore this poisonous fruit sprung up across the pond from Christie in the United States I am sad to say! The woman dubbed the American Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart authored the mystery from which this cliche sprung (let's code name it “The Portal” to avoid spoilers). While that particular line, “The Butler did it!” evidently was never written in the book, it has been boiled down to this singular line which eventually morphed into a cliche and in turn has clung to the genre like a suckerfish ever since.

Two years before Rinehart wrote “The Portal” and Christie and compatriots founded The Detection Club an American mystery author published a comprehensive set of rules. In 1928 S.S. Van Dine (in real life Van Dine was an American art critic named Willard Huntington Wright who was completely scandalized at his own success as a pulp author) wrote an essay called Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Fiction. Rule number 11 states that an author should not choose a servant to be their killer. Why? Servants are entirely to obvious; due to the privileged information they are often privy to and their wide access to the household and/or the victim. Servants are an easy scapegoats and require little on the part of the audience to deduce and even less effort for the author to frame. While authors flout rules all the time (like cats, they don’t enjoy to be dictated to) I think Rinehart should have taken rule 11 to heart. While her fans liked “The Portal”, critics gave it a lukewarm reception and it spawned this awful cliche; so in the grand scheme of things I don’t think the book was a winner.

In hindsight, perhaps Rinehart wasn’t as far off the mark with “The Portal’s” solution as we think. In a true believe-it-or-not moment, in 1947 seventeen years after her book was published, Rinhart was spending some time at her vacation home in Maine. When her cook (named Reyes) came into the library drew a pistol and attempted to shoot the author. Fortunately (for the author) the gun misfired and Rinehart flew from the room towards the servants wing, there the chauffeur was able to subdue him. In a dramatic turn, while Rinehart was calling the police, the cook broke free from the chauffeur and tried his luck again. This time he attempted to stab her with some kitchen knives he’d grabbed. At this point, the gardner alerted by the noise came to the aid of the chauffeur and together they subdued the cook one last time. The Motive? Evidently the cook had been in Rinehart's service for twenty-five years and had his eye on the position of butler. When he was passed over for the promotion and butling duties given to another he attacked the author. While Rinehart made it through the ordeal unscathed, the cook committed suicide the next day in his jail cell, and the butler Rinehart hired over the cook? Hoofed out a window and went into town at the first sign of trouble.

Still “The butler did it!”, lingers on in the minds of many often wrongly attributed and propagated by people who have never cracked the spine of a Christie (or a Rinehart for that matter) mystery. Perhaps someday this idea will die a quiet death, it’s only been 84 years...It could happen!

Not to down play what happened to Rinehart....But do you know where the safest place in a Christie mystery to hide in is? The kitchen! No murder is ever committed in the kitchen anywhere in the Christie canon.

Favorite Quote: 

“Her heart certainly failed to beat...” (pg. 79)

“Thoughts that ran round in a circles like squirrels in a cage...” (pg. 159)

Random Fact: When I was little I used to love playing "Ring-Around-The-Rosie", "London Bridge" and singing "Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary". It wasn’t until older that I stopped and really listen closely to the words that they started to sound a bit peculiar (well a PBS documentary helped). Seriously "Rosie" is associated with an outbreak of the Black Death in London in 1665 which killed around 15% of London’s residents (Btw there is a new-ish theory that rats didn’t really spread the plague. One piece of evidence? There aren’t corresponding number of rat skeletons in houses with plague victims that archeologists have excavated. Hey don’t yell at me, yell at a science!). "London Bridge" has a whole host of ideas on its origins. The most gruesome? Human sacrifice. The theory is children were buried alive in the foundation when it was laid so the bridge would never fall (it didn’t really seem to help since the bridge burned several times over the years). Way to embrace science guys. Lastly, "Mary-Mary" is thought to be about Bloody Mary (Mary I) who executed several hundred people generally by burning them. Not someone you ever wanted to get on the wrong side of. So all in all nursery rhymes while fun to sing and dance around to, really don’t need a whole bunch of help in feeling malevolent

However Christie was more than willing to lend a helping hand! And The There Were None was the first full length novel to feature this plot device (I believe) and wow did she use it! Interestingly enough the poem Christie used had two endings, one slightly more optimistic than the other (again not saying the two variants, spoilers). "Waste not, want not" as the saying goes; Christie used both the poem’s endings one in the book and the other when she adapted it for the stage. This particular title was the very first to be adapted into four different mediums (besides book form obviously) stage, radio, television and film. Generally speaking the mass media versions chose to feature the “happier” of the two endings, but not always (the Soviets when they were Soviet Union opted for the gloomy).

Christie followed up this highly successful nursery rhyme crime by penning One Two Buckle My Shoe, N or M (featured a rhyme in the plot), Five Little Pigs, Crooked House, Pocket Full of Rye, Ordeal By Innocence, Three Blind Mice (technically a play) and Hickory Dickory Dock over the next sixteen-ish years. Each rhyme did their part in helping create a singularly creepy atmosphere in the stories for which they placed (in the ones I have read so far). Christie obviously saw something in these bits of childhood fluff which she could deftly twist into something rather wicked. Brilliant.

Cheating: I will give you a Clue, unlike Miss Scarlet, Colonel Mustard, Mrs. Peacock, Professor Plum and Mrs. White I am not guilty of any crime! 

(btw you really should watch this cult classic)

AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Sunset Boulevard, Avatar & Fika

Endless Night

First Published: Endless Night. Collins Crime Club, London, 1967. Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1968.

I Read: Endless Night. William Morrow, New York, 2011.

Series: Non-Series

Summary: Michael Rogers has everything he wished for: a lovely wife, money, and his dream home. The only snare? A gypsy woman swears the land the house was built on it has a curse on it and they must leave at once to avoid a tragic fate. 

Review: Endless Night is considered the last great classic in Christie’s illustrious career (she wrote six more books after this point, not counting Curtain or The Sleeping Murder. I have read two and while I thought they were quite good they don’t have the shock value that Endless Night does). Most telling, I think, is the fact this book was a favorite of both the author and her husband. Endless Night is a fusion of plot devices I have read in other books and she does a wonderful job of creating something clear and unique from them again (no I don’t want to say which books as it will give too much of the plot away and spoil it for someone else). It really is a fantastic read and one I would recommend without hesitation, not quite one of my absolute favorites, it falls just shy, but it could easily be someone else's!

When I was reading this book I had a strange feeling, by the second page I thought I knew the diabolical twist Christie would employ at the end. I thought I was reading a story which would follow the same lines as the narrator Joe Gills in the movie Sunset Boulevard. To me, the narrator just didn’t sound quite right and I honestly thought Rogers was narrating his own murder. While I did get the ending wrong, Christie creates such a premonition of danger surrounding Gipsy’s Acre and it’s inhabitants that the feeling I was reading a Sunset Boulevard twist stuck with me even when I knew that wasn’t the solution Christie chose to employ.

What I didn’t realize there is a link between Sunset Boulevard and an unsolved murder case occurring about thirty years before the film. The screenwriters wanted to invoke a sense of dread around Norma Desmond so they played with the memories of movie goers. How? Norma Desmond’s (our fictional faded silent film star) name is an amalgamation of film director William Desmond Taylor and actress Mabel Normand. William Desmond Taylor directed over forty silent films and was well respected by one and all in Hollywood. The scandal the screenwriters were hoping people remembered, even subconsciously, centers around Taylor’s death. 

On February 2, 1922 William Desmond Taylor was found dead in his apartment from a gunshot wound (he was shot in the back). What happened next I am not sure even Poirot or Marple could have sorted out properly. The studios in Hollywood were desperate to keep this crime from turning into a full blown brouhaha. Two recent (at the time) scandals concerning Fatty Arbuckle (he was accused of raping and killing a girl - he was acquitted in his third trial) and Olive Thomas (who accidentally drank some of her husband’s syphilis medicine and died) showed them how a media blitz could harm the industry, so they did their level best to make sure that didn’t happen. One stroke of luck in the studio’s favor was the poor crime scene management. First, Taylor’s valet made such a commotion when he found the body (who wouldn’t?) that the neighbors came over to see what was going on. Then a virtual parade occurred through the room where Taylor’s body lay. Then they took a more active role when a friend of Taylor’s (who happened to be a studio exec) went into his apartment and removed personal correspondence/papers, then burned them - before the murder cops reached the scene. They were trying to keep other famous names out of the headlines (the theory is a few married leading ladies Taylor directed wrote indiscreet letters which would damage their careers if they got out - to be fair, this did happen). Years later investigators said pressure was applied to the sheriff’s department to stall the investigation itself since the list of suspects outside of Taylor’s valets, were all people of note/influence. This is exactly what happened, the investigation went stale and remains unsolved to this day (in 1964 one of the initial suspects confessed to the crime but police couldn’t corroborate the statement).

While Taylor’s murder remained unsolved, plenty of other smaller secrets came to light during this investigation. The relevant one here is about actress’s Mabel Normand who was the last person to see Taylor alive. While she was ruled out as a suspect rather quickly, Normand’s addiction to cocaine came out during the investigation. The papers learned of her problem and announced it to the world and crippled her career (audiences back then were less accepting of addiction; remember, we were still in the days of Prohibition and addiction was seen as a moral failing - their words, not mine). 

So that was how the screen writers came up with Norma Desmond’s name; by pulling the middle name from a murdered film director and a portion of a ruined starlet’s last name. They were trying to help foster a feeling of decay and doom in the minds of their audience (there were other things they used obviously, but the conglomerate name is ingenious). 

Christie herself used a real incident to help create a similar oppressive atmosphere. Nora Prichard (Matthew Prichard’s other grandmother; Christie’s grandson who now looks after her estate) related to Christie a local story about a group of Romany (Gypsies) who’d been forced out of their settlement. Evidentially the leader cursed the land before they left and the rise in the number of roadway accidents in the area seemed to corroborate its existence. Additionally, Christie relied on the general knowledge of the Romany to help create a believable sense of tension between the land, the house and its occupants. 

So while both Sunset Boulevard and Endless Night used a similar method to create a sense of unavoidable tragedy, their outcomes are different. And I got the solution wrong.....again. You’d think with nine months of practice by now, I would be more skilled in figuring out who did it! Perhaps I don’t use my little grey cells quite enough! But having a mystery narrated by the murder victim seemed like a twist she would use! Excuse, excuse I know...

Favorite Quote: 

“There’s a saying by some great writer or other that no man is a hero to his valet.” (pg. 52)

Random Fact: There are many great and interesting words out there which English doesn’t have a corresponding word for. One great example comes from Swedish: "Lagom" meaning not too much, not too little, but just enough (Ha! You thought I was going say "right" and go all Goldilocks on you!). A problem which plagues me all the time evidentially has a term coined by the Scots. "Tartle" means the slight, panicked hesitation before introducing someone when you are not 100% sure what their name is. One of my favorite new terms introduced to me by a BBC radio play is the Swedish term "fika", which generally means to take a break, drink a cup of coffee and eat something sweet with a friend. What is great about this word is that it is both a noun and verb! (I knew my love of coffee was genetic!) 

Another fun word which is far more relevant to Endless Night comes from German, "sehnsucht" (btw my spell check is going crazy right now). One meaning of the word is a longing for a far-off country or home you’ve never seen.“A house that in my dreams I would live in with the girls that I loved, a house in which just like a child’s silly fairy story we should live together “happy ever afterwards.” All pure fantasy, all nonsense, but it started that tide of longing in me. Longing for something I was never likely to have.” (pg. 4), This longing or sehnsucht is what Michael Rogers felt for the home he knew his friend Santonix could build for him (Santonix was an architect). If this longing had not taken root within Rogers, he may have been a much happier man, but that would have made a much less dynamic thriller. 

Still not sure you’ve ever experienced this phenomenon? Well, think back to when you first saw the movie Avatar  back in 2009. After you left the cinema or the next day did you feel depressed that you could never visit Pandora? You were not alone; this was a very real problem right after the movie was released. The utopian environment and ideal that Pandora represented coupled with the beautiful visual effects which seemed very real - confused more than one person. News programs reported the uptick in visits to mental health providers with this Pandora longing/depression, and Twitter & Facebook feeds all abounded with people frustration with the fact Pandora is a completely fictional place. However this overwhelming longing to visit Pandora is exactly what the word sehnsucht is meant to convey. 

With a bit of time most people seemed to work past the Avatar Effect, well, that and the fact Cameron hasn’t released a sequel to the film. In Endless Night Michael Rogers' feelings of sehnsucht didn’t lead him any closer to happiness either, even when his impossible dreams seemed to come true. 

Cheating: Nope. I read this one so quick I didn’t have time to even think about it!

AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Jane Haddam Interview

Thanks once again to Jane Haddam for taking the time to answer my questions!

Want to know more about Jane and her books? Click here to go to her website!

1.Your new book, Fighting Chance, is coming out in September. Is it just as thrilling to get a book published now as it was in the beginning of your career?

Good question.  It certainly never gets old.  And I really love this cover.  But with a first book, there's an element of passing into a new phase--of being really published and being really a writer that you don't get later, because by being published you've sort of settled that question.

I think the reality, for me, was that I never expected it to happen.  I never thought I was all that good of a writer, and mostly I still don't.  So there's a part of me that is always just a little shocked that anybody would want to publish these things, and even more shocked that anybody would want to read them.

2.You are closing in on your 30th novel with Demarkian, anything special planned? 

For the 30th? No.  But the 29th, that's the one that's coming out in September--yeah, there are a couple of surprises.

At least, I hope they will be surprises.

I also tend to think that everything I write is really obvious, although from the mail I get, apparently not.

3. Christie is said to have disliked Poirot, from very early on in their career together. Do you like Gregor Demarkain as well now as you did in the beginning of the series? Bonus Question:  Is there any character you have hated writing about, but did anyway, because he was important for the mystery? 

I like Gregor a lot.  Always have, always will.  He's sort of a combination of my father and my late husband, William L. DeAndrea. 

And there isn't a day that I don't wish I could talk to both of them.

As for writing characters I don't like--I do it all the time.  The Demarkian books are all multiple viewpoint, which means that for most of those books I'm in the heads of the suspects, and suspects tend to be suspects because they're really not very nice people.

It's not so much that the plot requires the characters.  It's the characters who require the plot.  I always start with characters.  I start with people and everything goes from there.

And,yes, a lot of those people are really unpleasant.  Sometimes I get really shocked at the way people behave, or confused by it, and then I try to see if I can get into their heads and understand the way that might work.

4.Christie followed (and seldom ignored) the Rules of Fair Play in her books. How important do you think the Rules of Fair Play are in mystery writing? And how strictly do you adhere to them in your books? 

I don't even know what they are.  I've got a book in the house somewhere that has them listed.  It's a book of essays on mystery writing by various people, including the famous one by Edmund Wilson about how awful and drecky the genre is.

But it always seemed to me that having a bunch of rules about how the story is supposed to go makes the story artificial and unspontaneous.  If that's a word.

And Christie may have thought she was following them, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was a deliberate rejection of them.  And I think she was right to do what she did.  It made that book a classic.

5.Like Christie, your books are often called cozy, but that term doesn’t seem to really fit either of you anymore - as the cozy definition seems to have morphed into meaning ones which are cuter or have a theme. Would you place you mysteries in different category, or do you think there should be a new one created to contain your style of mysteries?

There used to be a category called "traditional," and that's what I always thought I was writing.

I never did like the term "cozy."  It DOES sound "cute," and not only do I not write cute, I mostly don't read cute.  I think there's something off-kilter about writing about death and destruction and crime and devastation as if it's trivial, as if you could joke your way through it and it doesn't really matter, or doesn't have long term effects on the people involved.

On the other hand, I do read a lot of what people call "cozy," which are not that kind of book.  The term (cozy) seems to be a stand in for "not a lot of graphic violence."

And if I don't do cute, I also don't do a lot of graphic violence.  I can never see the point.  The whole thing where a writer goes on for six pages about how the murderer cut a slit in the victim's gut and the entrails spilled out and--it just feels to me to be mostly boring. 

Which probably sounds very weird, but it does.  It's like my least favorite parts of Harry Potter movies, the Quidditch matches.  Everybody's running around doing things, and I can't for the life of me figure out why.

So--is Martha Grimes cozy?  Anne Perry? Louise Penney?  Because if they are, then I probably am, because I think that's basically the kind of thing I do.

6. Christie was fond of using poisons as a murder weapon; do you have a favored method of murder you like to employ in your books? And why?

I've got a tendency to shoot something and leave it at that.   Poisons are very tricky.  Not everybody reacts to every substance the same way.  You've got all these considerations, and you have to juggle them or you end up sounding like an idiot, and then people write you e mails.

But I use poisons sometimes. 

Mostly I just try to make sure that my murder methods would actually work.  The murder method in Sayers's Busman's Honeymoon almost certainly would not have worked.  And although I like that book, every time I read it, I sit there going:  hmmm....

7.Is there anything about Christie's mysteries or plot devices which you dislike or find annoying? 

No.  There's a book, though, that I found absolutely incredibly bad, and Christie was almost never bad.  It's called The Big Four, and it's so awful, I sometimes wonder if somebody else wrote it and she published it under her name to do that someone a favor.  The plot is--I don't know what to call it.  Hercule Poirot has an evil twin.

8. Is there any book in the Christie cannon you wish you had thought of first? And Why? 

Well, Roger Ackroyd obviously.  If you go in for fair play, it's hard not to wish you'd written Roger Ackroyd.  One of the problems with writing mysteries is the expectation factor.  Readers who know the genre tend to think they know what the writer will and will not do with the plot.

It's good to blow up those expectations once in a while. 

9. Any Last Words? 

Just thank you for asking me.  I live way out in the middle of nowhere, I rarely get a chance to go into the city or elsewhere where I might see people.  It's easy to get the impression that I'm writing these things out here and nobody is reading them.

Except, of course, for the readers who want to tell me that I made a mistake on page 34, or that I must really hate everybody in Alabama because  the villain said something on page 196,   Those readers I know I have.

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2014

Here is Jane Haddam's new book! Out this month and it is great!

Grab a copy from us today!

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Cranes, Crackers & Deja Vu

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

First Published: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. Collins Crime Club, London, 1938. Murder For Christmas. Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1939. A Holiday For Murder. Avon, New York, 1947.

I Read: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. William Morrow, New York, 2011.

Series: Poirot

Summary: Poirot is spending his holidays with an old friend, the Chief Constable of Middleshire in fact, when an urgent summons is received. The body of old Mr. Lee has been found and unfortunately his death was not from natural causes but from a slit throat! And it being Christmastime, Mr. Lee’s house is filled with his children, all with an axe to grind with their cantankerous parent. So the answer Poirot must wrap up in a pretty bow is this, who had sufficient motive to commit patricide?

Review: I like folding paper cranes. I learned when I was in elementary school when we participated in a multi-cultural week (not how they introduced it, but point in fact that’s what it was) to fold 1001 paper cranes just as Sadako Sasaki in the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. I have learned other forms since then, ducks, chickens, crows and a bunches of others (I like folding birds and bugs best). But for all of that I always seem to return to my first form, the crane. Sometimes when I am working on a crane, each fold will turn out perfectly crisp, line up correctly and fold over easily; my hands turning out the quintessential origami crane. Then there are other times....When I think it is a great idea to fold while I have had a glass of wine (you can, but I have yet to turn out anything great & I have learned not to try and learn a new fold during wine time) or early in the morning when my eyes are still sleepy and my fingers wooden. They turn out with misaligned folds, crunched heads and generally look wanting in a very obvious ways.

Each crane starts from the same square of paper but depending on the focus, skill and dexterity you can end up with very different results. Poirot’s Christmas starts from the same paper which gave us The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Appointment With Death and Crooked House. This novel has elements found in each of these novels (and no I can’t tell you which, spoilers) similar folds and base forms if you will. However if you are creating something new from these base folds you need to be careful and exact or it skews the whole end product and, while not a complete wreck, it is distinctly lacking. When you know what perfect looks like, you know when it is not. So I guess what I am trying to say nicely is that I did not enjoy this book. I had to slog my way through and only the threat of falling behind in my reading propelled my forward progress through the book, generally because I felt the mystery elements were jumbled together, trying to make something new but not really succeeding. It is a slightly bent, misaligned crane which some can look upon affectionately but ultimately I find it disappointing.

(The red one on the left not so hot. The blue as close to perfect as I get!)

Speaking of shiny paper and folding of it, Christmas is a tangential part of this book; it is what allows the old man to draw all his children together, sound familiar? Due to unforeseen circumstances (well unforeseen for them, as readers we know something is bound to disrupt his carefully laid plans) we never get to see any holiday traditions played out on the page, which make the season rather fun or vexing depending on your perspective. Traditions like carefully unwrapping presents so you don't tear the paper, a real feat if you have a family who loves scotch tape the way mine does! Why a feat you ask? Well, I like to take the paper home and iron it, so I can cut it into useful squares of origami paper. It is a total normal and economic thing to do! It helps the environment! Hrrmmfff! Despite the crazy looks your in-laws and siblings give you, it is not off balanced at all! In any case one of the British traditions mentioned in passing in the Poirot's Christmas was Christmas Crackers.  

Not sure what a Christmas Cracker is? I didn't know either until a few years ago when I started to frequent a traditional (or so I am assured) restaurant/bakery. Picture in you mind the tube that paper towels are wrapped around, shorten it slightly, double the circumference and wrap the outside in shiny holiday paper. Fill the tube with a paper crown, a small toy, and a dad joke/pun/riddle of some kind then attack a small firework that goes off when you pull the ends apart and voila! You have an explosive Christmas tradition! On a side note, the quality of the Cracker’s innards is highly dependent of the money spent acquiring the Cracker from $5 to $1,000 (the super expensive ones usually are a limited run and completely crazy). I must admit they were a whole bunch of fun when my folks, husband and I opened a set during New Year's one year!  

Similar to the debates on whether you have ham or turkey for Christmas dinner (we have tacos), when you open presents Christmas Eve or Day, morning or night, or fill Christmas stockings with fruit and nuts (which would kill me) or more useful stuff like socks, toothpaste and shampoo (boring but necessary), the method of opening and distribution of treasures in the Cracker is a hotly debated subject and generally varies from family to family (and let me tell you there is a bit of a culture shock when you encounter first hand traditions celebrated by other people's families which feel completely foreign to you, gives me an itch to study cultural anthropology more closely).  

The Cracker all started as an 1847 marketing promotion for a candy company to help combat their flagging sales. Tom Smith struggled to come up with unique promotional ideas to help sell his bon-bons. He eventually landed on the crack/bang noise when the wrapper pulled apart, which turned into a huge succes. Eventually the candy fell by the wayside and was replaced by a novelty and the modern Cracker was born. The Cracker is not the only tradition whose origins spring from a retailer; the story of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer springs from the same soil. In 1939, Montgomery Ward was looking for a cost saving measure, so instead of purchasing coloring books and handing them out during the holidays, they had Robert May write a story. And it caught on in a big way! But did you know there are two sequels to the original story? Rudolph’s Second Christmas and Rudolph Shines Again both written by the original author! Who knew? (Well I am sure you guys did but it was news to me!)

While the Lee’s family's holiday stayed tucked away, we are allowed a brief glimpse into the closet where their traditions were stored. I do wonder if I will ever read what exactly Poirot did to celebrate holidays or perhaps like every event he is sucked into a solving a murder? Even better! I know Poirot enjoyed stacking playing cards into houses, I wonder how he would have taken to origami? It requires patience, precision and dexterity all things Poirot excels at! He would have been great.

Favorite Quote: 

“People who do not feel amiable are putting great pressure on themselves to appear amiable! There is at Christmastime a great deal of hypocrisy, honorable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c’est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!” (pg. 79) 

Interesting Facts: Tressilian, the long serving butler of the Lee household, was continuously plagued by feeling of deja vu. Playing on this rather universal feeling of disconcertion, books, film and television have taken this one odd event and shown a rather sinister light on it. Christie in this outing uses this sense to confuse our poor butler into thinking he is past it, with only Poirot realizing it’s true meaning. Christie’s use of this devise is rather tame compared to say The Matrix, where nothing good ever came from deja vu. Usually one or more of the characters were attacked after the glitch. Often deja vu is coupled with the theme from Groundhog Day, reliving a day over and over again with only the feeling of deja vu hinting things are far from okay. "Star Trek", "Charmed", "Supernatural", "Twilight Zone" and plenty of others have synchronized these two themes for an episode or two.

While deja vu is slowly morphing into an ominous portent, did you know it has an opposite? Jamais vu. 

Jamais vu creates the same sort of odd feeling, only this time it is when you are doing something you’ve done a thousand times before but this one time you can’t recall what to do next. Or when you are walking to your neighborhood store and suddenly you can’t recall what turn to make next and the entire block look unfamiliar to you, while rationally you know that isn’t true. It is the split second when everything looks alien to your eyes when logically you know that isn’t right. Your eyes are playing tricks on you (or alternatively you feel like you are going completely mad, seriously weird feeling I’ve had this more often than deja vu...). This particular phenomenon has’t been mined in the same way deja vu has, due to the fact amnesia seems far more dramatic to portray since it lasts longer than a few seconds or minutes. 

There you are, your random fact of the day!

Cheating: Since I want to spend my Christmas in the UK, I did not cheat with this installment. No matter how tempted I was to just finish the silly thing!

AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Indiana Jones, Sadism & Bing Crosby

First Published: Appointment With Death. London, Collins Crime Club, 1938.

I Read: Appointment With Death. New York, Harper, 2011.

Series: Poirot

Summary: Once again Poirot is trying to take a vacation, this time to Jordan, when a body crops up. In this case the murder victim, Mrs. Boynton, was a villain in her own right, but Poirot never backs away from the truth and sets out to find the solution. The tiny wrinkle here? He has twenty-four hours to get his man before the suspects scatter in the wind.

Review: Pot roast, definitely pot roast level for this installment. Very good but not my favorite, I had a problem with a singular detail in the big reveal (No, I can’t tell you. Spoilers. But if you send me a message, I will tell you). As I read the forums and such, I seem to be alone in my issue but that’s okay; no book is ever read and interpreted the same way twice. In any case, this was a nice solid outing which showed Poirot’s resolve to find justice  for every victim (even for those who many feel don’t deserve it), “The victim may be one of the good God’s saints - or, on the contrary - a monster of infamy. It moves me not. The fact is the same. A life-taken!” (pg. 125). 

From the first page, the location of the murder - Petra, Jordan - completely distracted me! Well, at least until I focused on the mystery.... Why you ask? Having grown up during the 80’s, I watched Harrison Ford play Indiana Jones in a bunch of movies. Now if you possess certain deductive powers, read this blog regularly and have knowledge of movie trivia then you might guess why Petra would be distracting! 

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade was one of the first movies I went and saw by myself that wasn’t G rated (Hey no laughing, the bump to PG-13 was exciting! I got carded! A lot! Now I enjoy being carded for a much different reason...). A portion of The Last Crusade was filmed on location at The Rose City, aka Petra. From those few first glimpses the city caught my imagination (my day dreams were really good that year, foreign lands and being an archeologist was my goal until age 14 when I wanted to be a writer) and I still think it is one of the most beautiful man-made creations I have ever seen - and I have only seen pictures! Can you imagine it’s beauty in real life?

Splice the location together with the snake on the cover of the edition I was reading and for the first few chapters all I could think about was The Last Crusade. Rather distracting, but that really isn’t Christie’s fault. I had hoped a snake would be featured in the narrative, but alas I was doomed to disappointment. Digitalis, not snake venom, was used to do in our victim. Curiously enough, snake venom is used only once in the Christie cannon, in Death In The Air where Boomslang venom was administered to an unsuspecting victim. So I couldn’t use the quote, “Snakes, why’d it have to be snakes?” in my blog this week but there’s still hope I suppose (hehehe!). 

Western archeologists, real and fictional, have flocked to Petra over the last two hundred years, including Christie’s husband Max Mallowan. Christie herself accompanied her husband on his digs throughout this region, thus setting a mystery in Petra was rather natural (Christie is said to have stayed in the caves she described in the mystery - if you travel there now you must stay in a hotel loosely adjacent to the site, *sigh*). Interestingly enough, Petra was built around the 6th century BC, but remained virtually unknown to the west until 1812. Since then, the Rose City provides scientists and historians with excellent examples of ancient water engineering and management, mines, tombs (ordinary and royal), churches, temples, and the sheer artistic beauty of the rock-cut city. By a crazy random happenstance the legendary Dr. Jones (father and son) travelled to Petra in 1938 in search of the Holy Grail, the very same year Appointment was first published as a full length novel! (but I suppose crazy links can be found almost anywhere and that’s the reason why we have the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, btw I am at 3)

So whether you are a fictional archeologist, mystery novelist or a tourist it seems Petra holds a bit of something for everyone!

Favorite Quote: 

“...Americans are disposed to be a friendly race. They have not the uneasy suspicion of the traveling Briton.” (pg. 29)

“That old woman ought to be murdered! Arsenic in her early morning tea would be my prescription.” (pg. 43)

Interesting Facts: Sadism and Agatha Christie, not two things you would normally put together, but in Appointment With Death that changes. Our murder victim, Mrs. Boynton, enjoyed inflicting pain on those around her and the investigators labeled her as a sadist. Mrs. Boynton controlled her family through subtle threats, emotional manipulation, and money. (I am not giving anything away here, you read this and figure out she isn’t very nice pretty early on). She was a former prison warden, a position she relished and never really gave up, even when it meant treating her family like prisoners. She seems to have a bit of the "Mommy Dearest" quality to her....

Haven’t heard of Mommy Dearest? Well depending on who we believe - Joan Crawford (a legend of the silver screens during Hollywood’s golden age) bears a striking resemblance to Mrs. Boynton. Joan Crawford’s need for control and her alcoholism fueled her explosive sadistic behavior which focused on her two eldest children. After Joan’s death, Christina exposed the horrors of her childhood in the book Mommie Dearest, where Christina alleges Joan tried to kill her, beat her and had one very odd encounter with a wire hanger. While her younger brother supports the claims made by Christina in her book, her two youngest siblings categorically deny the events in the book took place (it seems family tensions were strained even before Joan’s death as she cut Christina and her brother out of her Will). Famous friends and former employees fall on both sides of the fence in this particular controversy. The book has gone in and out of print over the years and was turned into a so-bad-its-good movie starring Faye Dunaway; seriously, it is awful.

The legacy of Mommie Dearest the first celebrity-child-tell-all, was that there were several similar books published harpooning the memory of a celebrity/parent. Children of Bette Davis and Bing Crosby penned similar tales to Mommie Dearest alleging abuse at the hand of their famous parent. Bing Crosby’s eldest son’s book seems to have created the most ripples, accusing Bing of being physically and mentally abusive. Two of Bing’s sons quietly supported his claims while the youngest vehemently denied the claims. 

Christie is fortunately clear of basing her character Mrs. Boynton on either star as the tell-alls were written years after this installment (unlike using an event in Gene Tierney’s life as a basis for The Mirror Crack’d). She does a great job of showing the insidiousness of the sadistic behavior of Mrs. Boynton while not being gratuitous about it. While Mommie Dearest was well after this installment Christie’s writing is comprehensive enough we can recognize the sadistic qualities in a completely unrelated novel - and that is nothing to sneeze at!

And for those of you who were worried I couldn't work a Star Trek reference into this week's post - did you know Denise Crosby who played "Tasha Yar" on Star Trek: The Next Generation is the grand-daughter of Bing Crosby? Tasha Yar was chief of security, friends with Data and died in the line of duty - and she is said to have provided bedrock for the character of Kara Thrace or Starbuck on the new version of Battlestar Galactica.

Cheating: Did you know Appointment was first published in a serialized format in 1937? The same year The Hobbit was published by Tolkien! So with this knowledge, here is my answer on if I cheated this week or not, the translation into the script created by Tolkien is provided by Online Tengwar Transcriber.

AmberMiner©2014 

The Monogram Murders

Here is Urban Waite (the author of The Terror of Living and Sometimes The Wolf who is signing with us on October 21^st at Noon!) posing for our Agatha Christie display!

Don't forget to pick up your copy of

The Monogram Murders today!

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Dogs, Stashes and Names

Dumb Witness

First Published: Poirot Loses A Client published in 1937.

I Read: Dumb Witness

Series: Poirot

Summary: Emily Arundell has a lovely dog named Bob who loves to play ball on the stairs. Bob’s human, Emily, has a habit of knocking around her house at night while the world is asleep. This turns into an unfortunate pairing when Bob’s ball trips the elderly Emily, giving her a bad tumble down the stairs. An accident, an odd collusion of events which sometimes happens. This is what her visiting relatives chose to believe, but Emily is not so sure. She sends a letter to Poirot asking him for his discreet help in trying to figure out if her family is really trying to killer her for her fortune. 

The only problem? Poirot receives the letter weeks after it is written and Emily is already buried in the churchyard. However the lack of a living client doesn’t stop the little grey cells from pursuing the case!

Review: While not my absolute favorite book in the Poirot series, I think this book attains the pot roast level in her canon. An easy favorite of many, gives a pleasant read to most and very few faults to be found in the narrative. Perhaps the first few chapters of the book feel a bit superfluous to me, as in if they were omitted the book may be stronger for it, but ultimately I think they do no harm to the overall book. They just add a bit of length, a small criticism and one I know not everyone will agree with! But such is life.

One interesting bit of the book happens before the mystery ever starts! Christie dedicated this particular book to her dog Peter, “...most faithful of friends and dearest of companions, a dog in a thousand”. Going a bit further with this theme Christie placed a pooch in the cast of characters (not in the list of murder suspects mind you. I have only ever seen a canine murderer once, in a short story by Jan Burke). Bob speaks his own mind (though the humans don’t understand of course) on the events in the household and his guard duties. Christie uses a deft hand in creating Bob the terrier who is neither to cute nor out of place in the story (Bob reminds my of Monsieur Pamplemousse’s Pomme Frites and his observations & interjections in their stories, without the crime solving streak) Bob provides an element of fun to the story which keeps the book light and fresh.

Good news everyone! Beyond containing a four legged character, this book was the second to last mystery featuring Captain Arthur Hastings as Poirot’s foil! Hasting’s last appearance is in Curtain, written two years-ish after this installment (according to legend). Which I think is a bit interesting as there are 19 more full length Poirot mysteries (45 total mysteries if you count all the non-Poirot’s: excluding short stories & plays) after Dumb Witness, meaning Christie didn’t write about Hastings for the last thirty-five years (ish) of her lengthy career. Which make me wonder, we know she detested Poirot from early on but this gap make me curious about how fond she was of Hastings...

Now for something completely different.

This quote is something I think I need to address, “...old people are inclined to hoard a little, I’m afraid -- dear Miss Arundel was no exception....astonishing, you know, the things people collect...two dozen needle books...” (pg. 235) I prefer to think of Emily Arundel not as a hoarder but as a crafter. There is a distinct and subtle difference I assure you (I am not sure my husband would quite agree). What knitter, crocheter, sewer, scrap booker, quilter or needle pointer (can’t list every craft out there, that would be my entire post and someone would still tell me I forgot one) doesn’t have a stash of extra supplies waiting for a rainy day to work on? Or assembled the needed tools to start a similar hobby, but hasn’t quite gotten down to brass tacks and started to learn said new skill? I know I have. I have knitting needles, new wool yarn and several books all waiting for the day when I sit down and learn to knit. I crochet now. This isn’t hoarding, it is saving money in advance as I purchased the supplies at wonderful discounts. See I am being responsible! 

So neither Emily nor I are hoarders; she and I just created a stash of supplies for future use! So maybe on occasion I have forgotten every detail of what is in the stash, but that makes organizing it that much more fun! It gives me a pleasant jolt when I find a wonderful treasure I’d forgotten that I’d purchased. It’s all most like Christmas on a random Thursday afternoon. Right?

Favorite Quote: 

“From time to time he had these lapses from virtue-- though his apologies afterwards were always all that could be desired.” (pg. 31)

“...if one is going to tell a lie at all, it might as well be an artistic lie, a romantic lie, a convincing lie!” (pg.97)

“Anyone who trusted you, my sweet, would be mentally deficient...” (pg. 148)

Interesting Facts: Every genre, it seems, has it’s own set of awards; serious fiction has the Man Booker Prize, picture books have the Caldecott Medal and mysteries have the Edgars. But did you know there is an award given every year for the best odd book title? The Diagram Prize is given out each year by a book publishing trade magazine based in London. Previous winning titles include, How To Poo On A Date, Crocheting Adventures With Hyperbolic Planes (lol, I though this one had possibilities, maybe I will place it in my stash....), Bombproof Your Horse and Highlights In The History Of Concrete (the prize has been given out since 1978 so I can’t lists all the titles - well, I could but typing it would be a bit tedious). 

Why am I talking about odd book titles? Well Dumb Witness had two other possible titles it could have been released as, Poirot Loses A Client (the original UK title) or The Incident Of The Dog's Ball (name of the short story this full length mystery was based on). But for some reason Dumb Witness (the US title) is the name which has stuck to this particular installment. I can’t figure out why. Of all the Poirot books I think the name Dumb Witness is the silliest one. I think the title is referring to Bob, Emily’s dog, but he had better sense than either Hastings or Emily’s paid companion Miss Lawson. I suppose the US title is not as odd as any of the winners of the Diagram Prize, but I don’t think it really fits the book either. I guess that’s why the title of this book bothers me, I think it does a disservice for the mystery it is describing to a potential reader. 

I know that titles and book covers are not supposed to be what we judge books on, but they are important features. Because who among us has at one point or another read a book purely based on either one of these features? 'Fess up! I know I am not the only one! I have read both wonderful and dreadful titles based purely off one or both of these features without reading the back of the book first (I don’t do this often, but it has happened). So when I know there is a better book title out there for a novel, it bothers me a bit when it isn’t used. However this is subjective; as they say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so perhaps I shouldn’t judge quickly. 

Cheating: Felt a slight itch to cheat with this one not really sure why, but I resisted temptation so all is still well! 

AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Shakespeare, Prussian Blue & The Princess Bride

The Pale Horse

First Published: The Pale Horse. Collins Crime Club, UK, 1961.

I Read: The Pale Horse. Pocket Books, New York, 1967.

Series: Ariadne Oliver

Summary: It starts with a priest, who hears the last confession of a dying woman unlike any he’s heard before. The woman gives him a list of names of connected somehow to wickedness; before the Father can do anything about the list, he is brutally murdered. The investigating office finds the list and discovers most of the names on the list belong to people who have recently passed away, seemingly of natural causes. The police surgeon is not so sure.

At the same time, through a series of crazy random happenstances, Mark Easterbrook becomes involved in the investigation. Discovering the deaths all seem to revolve around  something called The Pale Horse, “Revelation, Chapter Six, Verse Eight. And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed him...” (pg. 209). Mark, not one to believe in the supernatural, decides to look for a more concrete solution to how the people on the list really died...

Review: This book, like many before it, is a fantastic read. One which contemplates the nature of evil; not in a preachy way, more Shakespearian in feel. Through this contemplation on the nature of evil, Christie creates a clinging sinister atmosphere on each page of the book, making you almost believe she will write her first supernatural solution to a mystery novel, thus breaking the Rules of Fair Play. Once again, Christie does a wonderful job playing with her audience’s comfort levels and preconceived notions about things we cannot always explain satisfactorily. 

I really loved this book, again not overly surprising. However just like the Miss Marple in The Moving Finger, Ariadne Oliver plays a very small role in the narrative (however larger than Marple in Moving Finger). Actually, it's a deus ex machina role for Oliver which provides Mark Easterbrook with the inspiration for the solution to the mystery, which I found slightly disappointing as this is the only independent encounter with Oliver outside of the Poirot series.  This is really such a small thing it did not perceptibly diminish my enjoyment of the read, just something to know going into the book.

Speaking of a menacing Shakespearian feel to a novel.....How many of you out there have seen a performance of The Scottish play? You know the one I mean, the name that thespians do their absolute level best not to say on stage (or anywhere else for that matter). Have you ever given any thought to how the three witches in the beginning of the play are represented? Often the actress dressed up to look like old crones with hooked warty noses, long black robes, conical hats and black cats, seemingly almost unhinged in nature uttering their prophesies for Banquo and his fellow general, more akin to monsters than women. Did you ever think this is a very safe way of portraying evil?

David (minor character from Pale Horse) a thespian during his college years had a different idea of how to portray the three, “I’d make them very ordinary. Just sly quiet old women. Like the witches in a country village.” (pg. 33). I say I have to agree with David on this point, and subsequently Christie since she is the one who penned the book (and Fran who also things this would be brilliant staging). Done right this could lend an extra layer of malevolence to the three witches scenes. Why? In general we want to be able to identify evil at a glance, we want the stereotypical indicators, we want to Know who to watch out for. Portraying evil as ordinary means it can creep or seduce its way into our lives without our noticing, making it difficult to ward ourselves against. 

This is one reason, I think, serial killers or rapists haunt our imagination, since more often than not they look ordinary. Sometimes they are even charismatic or charming in their way, the ones who have been caught and shown on the news don’t seem to have any one trait to identify them as serial killers. No twitch, sign or limp identifies them to the police and the public as a dangerous individual. Profilers, psychologists and police officers who have extensive training can, through psychology and experience, identify a killer, but not by a birthmark. This is one underlying reason why they seem to be so difficult to catch. But I digress.

This idea of ordinary evil is what makes The Pale Horse such a singular sinister book! (btw if you want to see a really great version of The Scottish Play, click here. Patrick Stewart plays the lead and the three witches are seriously eerie/creepy!)

Favorite Quote: 

 “The dishwashers, the refrigerators, the pressure cookers, the whining vacuum cleaners. 'Be careful,' they all seem to say. 'I am a genie harnessed to your service, but if your control of me fails...'” (pg. 1)

 “It came to me suddenly that evil was perhaps, necessarily always more impressive than good. It had to make a show! It had to startle and challenge! It was instability attacking stability. And in the end stability will always win.” (pg. 3)

 “Why is it that anybody who was a kitchenmaid or an ugly old peasant never seems to get reincarnated? It’s always Egyptian princesses or beautiful Babylon slaves. Very fishy.” (pg.67)

 “Always envisage the worst. You’ve no idea how that steadies the nerves. You begin at once to be sure it can’t be as bad as what you imagine.” (pg. 143)

Interesting Facts: **Spoiler, Kind Of** While I reveal the murder weapon this will not give you the delivery method or the culprit!**

“Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You have killed my father; prepare to die!””

Alas, while I cannot relate Christie yet to this quote (I am hoping for that day), The Pale Horse does contain a slightly more sinister similarity to this 1987 film classic. In The Princess Bride (I am speaking of the movie here not the book, as I have not read it yet, blasphemer I know, and Fran has sternly scolded me) Vizzini (played by Wallace Shawn) claims, “What you do not smell is called iocane powder. It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly into liquid and is among the more deadlier poisons known to man.”. It's the perfect poison for a battle of wits or for the occasional mysterious murder. Happily enough this poison is completely fictional in origin, a poison like that would be disastrous if obtained by the wrong person...

While The Princess Bride relies on a fictional poison to move the story along, Christie decided to use a real poison in The Pale Horse. And just like in The Princess Bride, this poison is orderless, colorless, tasteless, difficult to trace, hard to diagnose and dissolves easily in liquids. A perfect poison Thallium is, so to speak. A poison Vizzini would have loved to use for the same reason, and one which would have been fatal to The Man In Black (aka Westley) because you cannot build up an immunity to it. But I digress.

Thallium is a highly toxic metal and like arsenic was once used as a rat poison and in some medicines (Seriously there has to be some sort of symbolism to the number of people poisoned by something meant to kill rats...). If administered in large enough doses, thallium can kill with in 24 to 48 hours after it is administered. Generally poisoners seem to use it as a slow acting poison (doling it out in small doses) because the symptoms mimic a plethora of other ailments, so when death occurs it appears to be natural causes. The one tell possessed by this poison? Rapid, clumpy and generally large hair loss by the person being poisoned (well, and lab tests should have the poison be discovered in time).

Christie’s description of the plethora of symptoms in Pale Horse is so good, it is credited with saving two lives. In 1975, a woman sent a letter to Christie stating she figured out her husband was poisoning her with thallium after reading the book. Second, a hospital nurse in 1977 diagnosed a baby’s illness (due to thallium) after reading the book. Most astonishing Pale Horse is credited with stopping a serial killer called The Teacup poisoner. Graham Fredrick Young was convicted in 1972 for murdering two of his fellow co-workers while poisoning seventy other people in the factory where he worked. In this case Pale Horse was read by a doctor consulting for Scotland Yard (so the story goes) who correctly identified the poison due to Christie’s book. 

On a complete side note the absolutely best treatment for thallium poisoning is a pigment called Prussian Blue (taken in pill form). It is even better than activated charcoal in removing the heavy metal from the victim's system - due to the complex chemical nature. Not sure what Prussian Blue is? It is the pigment used to make blueprints, well, blue! It is also one of the colors which makes Vincent van Gogh’s painting Starry Night so vivid. It was one of the very first synthetic pigments to be created, around 1706. I does make me wonder who on earth first thought giving someone with heavy metal poisoning a pigment used in paint? But that is a question for a different day! (FYI do not eat blueprints if you think someone is poisoning you. Seriously, there is lab grade Prussian Blue without the other chemical associated with paper & paint! You wouldn’t think I’d have to say that, but the Darwin Awards undermine the theory that common sense is possessed in equal parts in every human!)

Christie is often called the Queen of Poisons and The Pale Horse I think is one of the jewels in this crown. While iocane powder from The Princess Bride came just at the end of her writing career I am sure she could have done justice to it!

Cheating:01001110 01101111 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100101 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01100101 01100101 01101011 00100001 00100000 01001101 01100001 01111001 01100010 01100101 00100000 01101110 01100101 01111000 01110100 00100000 01110111 01100101 01100101 01101011 00101110 00101110 00101110 00101000 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100001 01101100 01110010 01100101 01100001 01100100 01111001 00100000 01001001 00100000 01101011 01101110 01101111 01110111 00100000 01001001 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100001 00101001 

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AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Kelli Stanley Interview

Kelli will be in the shop signing her new book on Thursday August 21^st at Noon!

Reserve your copy today!

Kelli Stanley (Click Here to Go To Her Website!)

1. You have won a Macavity a Bruce Alexander awards for your writing, and have been  nominated for a Shamus and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Is it still thrilling to get a new book published like CITY OF GHOSTS and get some really great reviews for it?

Thank you! J And let me tell you—hearing that people like what you create never, ever, ever gets old. Most creative people are incredibly insecure—I’m no exception—and at the same time we’re public figures, even if it’s on a relatively minuscule level by comparison with actors or household-name writers like Stephen King or Anne Rice.

As public figures, most authors get attacked, abused and belittled just like the “big” celebrities—except that we don’t have the paychecks to make up for the pain. We have to swallow it, and try our best to ignore it. I’m not talking about actual criticism—I’m talking about internet abuse that gets slung in the name of “review” by people who don’t know the meaning of the word.

So when someone you greatly respect, like Tom Nolan in the Wall Street Journal, or Oline Cogdill for Associated Press, or Joe Hartlaub for Bookreporter, praises your work—as has happened with CITY OF GHOSTS—and when you meet fellow writers who read you and readers who tell you how much they enjoy your books or love your writing—well, like I said: it never gets old. In fact, I think recognition becomes more precious the more books you write. And it certainly helps you deal with the more unpleasant facets of publication.

2. In CITY OF GHOSTS there is a possibility Miranda Corbie will go to London in a later book. If she does, will Mirada visit places where Christie set her books? Or possibly meet a certain spinster or dapper Belgian while there?

I’m afraid not. I don’t write the same sort of books Christie wrote. She was a brilliant author of traditional mysteries; I write literary hardboiled/noir. Although Miss Marple has always struck me as a little noir, to be honest. ;)

 Miranda could certainly encounter some of the iconic settings Christie used: the Orient Express, classic London hotels, Harrods, etc. I can see her at Brown’s Hotel … ;)

3. What do you find easier to work on, short stories, novellas or full length novels? Does it depend on the topic you are writing about? And why?

Short stories are difficult for me, because they tend to turn into novels. Macro is easier for me than micro. J

Novels are a long, long grind, but I get a chance to immerse myself in the setting and the character. Short stories require absolute, laser beam focus, and the plot and structure need to be commensurate with the length. In other words, not too complicated, more a “slice of life”. A novella is like a more complex short story, which is great, because it takes some of the pressure off, length-wise. Because I cherish character above all else (I was a drama major and an actress before I was a writer), novels are my preferred cup of tea.

4. Christie used a series of notebooks to sketch out characters, plots and ideas - what is your method of forming ideas for your books? Bonus Question - How did you form your character Miranda Corbie?

I use notebooks as well—big and little, one by my nightstand (so that if I get a sudden idea before sleep, which sometimes happens, I can jot it), some in my handbag. The notebooks themselves are usually Claire Fontaine or Rhodia, French brands with beautiful graphics and paper. Somehow, the quality of the notebook itself makes it easier for me to organize and think.

Thoughts bubble up in funny places … the bus, a shower, basically when I’m not actively trying to chase them down, so I like to be prepared.

I also use Scapple, a sort of mind-map program from Scrivener. Because I tend to draw diagrams and charts when I’m brainstorming, this little program is perfect for me, and I love working with it.

As for Miranda … well, her progenesis was a reaction to the misogyny of film and literary noir. I wanted to create a woman with all the tropes of a femme fatale—intelligence, beauty, courage, sexual power, ambition, etc.—but make her the hero and not the demonized female villain. A femme fatale in the shamus role. She was born from that thought, and took over from there. ;)

5. Agatha Christie was writing contemporary mysteries during the 1940’s, the period in which your Miranda Corbie mysteries are placed - my question is this, has Christie’s sense of this time period influenced you at all when writing your historical mysteries?

Not at all. I write in a completely different style about a completely different economic class in a completely different environment in a completely different country. Even in Christie’s war books (N or M springs to mind) the war seems rather far-off, even though the English went through absolute hell with the Blitz for more than a year and a half before Pearl Harbor brought America into the conflict.  Her goals as a writer were very, very different from mine: she wanted to give people an escape from the war in the form, more or less, of a puzzle. I want to make people aware of the past—and the cultural and political truth of the historical record. I would not be successful at my job if Christie were influencing my history in any way.

6. You noted in your essay in BOOKS TO DIE FOR that Christie’s audacious solutions have been imitated over and over again through the years, so much so that I have heard people (even avid mystery readers) call her books “derivative” even though her books are where the solutions originate, and that’s why some people refuse to read her books. What would you say to those people to persuade them to read them?

I’d tell them that they are choosing ignorance over enlightenment, which is something no reader should ever do. Agatha Christie was the inspiration behind much later imitation, like Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett in my genre. That doesn’t make her less noteworthy or even less readable. If anything, it makes her far more important—crucial, in fact, to anyone who wishes to develop a sense of how the genre developed.  She was an original; she wrote over 80 novels, not all of them masterpieces, but most of them damn fine books and all of them worth reading—the Poirots, the Marples, the Tommy and Tuppence stories, the Parker Pyne and Harley Quinn collections and non-series books. I’ve even read her Mary Westmacott romances and her autobiography. She was a great writer, period,  not just a plot spinner.

And her novels that are masterpieces—AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, SLEEPING MURDER, ENDLESS NIGHT, etc.—are must-reads for anyone professing to be a mystery or crime fiction lover.

No, the idea of not wanting to read the original because you’ve read too many truly derivative books is inane. A book is much more than a plot twist. Why read at all, with that argument? Most plots distill down from The Epic of Gilgamesh or Homer or the Bhagavad gita or the Bible. Should we give up writing and reading?

7. Christie is called the queen of poisons since she used them so often in her books. Do you have a preferred method of murder in your books? And why?

Murders in the Miranda Corbie novels tend to be violent affairs, less planned out and more spontaneous, because that’s a bit closer to how it works in real life. Murder weapons in my previous books have involved guns, scarves, hands, knives and ice picks, and this time around in CITY OF GHOSTS, a garrote (a method that I personally find fascinating).  I don’t really have a preferred method; I try to let the weapon fit the criminal and fit the crime.

I’ve always admired Christie’s knowledge of poisons—she certainly made me beware of any “bitter almond” smell when I was a kid! And her description of strychnine poisoning is vividly horrific.

8. Is there any book in the Christie canon or plot twist you wish you thought of first?

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. I think it’s her most brilliant work, psychologically deep. It’s also the most noirish of her novels, along with the splendid ENDLESS NIGHT (one I like to recommend to people who think Christie and cozy are synonymous.). I loved MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, as I wrote in BOOKS TO DIE FOR—and it was also the first Christie I ever read.

9. Is there a Christie mystery which you did not like, or didn’t feel lived up to her standards?

All of the Marples are terrific. Not so the Poirots. When Agatha was going through the dark period of her life—before she married Max—her books and stories suffered, as was natural under the circumstances. DEATH IN THE CLOUDS is one unfortunate example. At her best, she combined the puzzle with psychological insight. When stressed, she seemed to just rely on the puzzle, contrivance and all. Still, with over 80 books published, she had very few misfires.

10. Any final words?

I love Agatha. She influenced me at a young age (9 or 10), and instilled in me, as a writer, the importance of psychological plausibility. It’s really not about the locked room puzzle, the circumstances and the red herrings. It’s about who is capable of murder—the most severe and heinous of crimes—and why. That’s what Agatha taught me, and continues to teach me when I read her … and I am forever thankful.

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2014

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Problems, Perfumes and The Flu

Sparkling Cyanide

First Published: Remembered Death 1945 - This novel originally started out in life as a Poirot short story called "Yellow Iris", first published in 1937. The identity of the killer was altered in the full length novel. 

I Read: Sparkling Cyanide. New York, William Morrow, 2012.

Series: Colonel Johnny Race

Summary:One year before the start of this novel, Rosemary took her own life while out to dinner with friends. Iris, Rosemary’s younger sister, believed the verdict from the inquest and tried to shove the memory into the back of her mind. Six months later, she is forced to recall all the events surrounding Rosemary’s death. George - Rosemary's husband - shows Iris some letters he received claiming Rosemary's death was more sinister than anyone suspected. When shocking events unfold during a party held exactly a year later to remember Rosemary things come to a head. The question posed by a family friend, Colonel Race (an MI5 man): who stood to gain from these two deaths?

Review: I really wish Christie had written more Colonel Race mysteries! There is such a rich backstory she could have mined for him. I am a bit disappointed she didn’t continue writing mysteries for him (Death On The Nile is his last appearance in the canon). While more action oriented than Poirot’s “little grey cells”, Race definitely gets the job done in his own clever way. I think any espionage novels she could have penned (as he was for some period the chief of MI5’s counter intelligence division) would have been great suspense pieces, more serious in nature than the Tommy and Tuppence novels. However that is strictly my opinion... For clarity’s sake I must say I adored this book. While the solution contained a bit of elasticity (much better than Murder In Mesopotamia!) overall this really was a lively read.

Once again the solution contains a clever method of perpetrating the crime -- but with real world practicality problems. Meaning? I am not sure eight people would/could collectively be so unobservant at the same time. I suppose it could conceivably happen, I mean who is at their mental peak after a couple of drinks and dancing? But even the sober wait staff didn’t notice what happened at their table! But this is what makes Christie’s books great, while you may not think something could happen, there is just that bit of wiggle room allowing for the possibility of plausibility which then opens up the mystery scenario to believability and thus credulity is obtained.

Another problem I thought I saw in the mystery dealt with the motive behind Rosemary’s suicide (I am not giving anything away here; this is on the first page). The theory put forth by the authorities in the book claimed Rosemary took her own life because she was depressed after having the flu, “I mean lots of people have influenza and feel a big depressed afterwards...” (pg. 36). I don’t know if any of my readers (yes I mean all six of you) have heard of this, but I never had! I thought this was a conveniently contrived motive cooked up by Christie, since after the flu I am always happy to be rid of the stupid little germ! And eating really spicy food because my taste buds are out of whack due to not being able to breathe properly for a week. But depressed? Nope can’t say that I can attribute any of my low periods to that. I should never have doubted The Queen of Mystery....

This is a very real and very scary thing. 

It is not the flu, per se, which is the issue; it is our body’s defensive mechanisms for stomping out the germ which can cause depressive symptoms to occur (lack of energy, sleeplessness, lack of concentration and general malaise). In turn, these symptoms can exacerbate underlying problems (diagnosed or not) already present. The problem is flu symptoms can linger on for weeks after the actual bug is done (hence my eating scorchingly spicy foods for a couple of weeks after my last bout). Before the flu, a person can have their depression (mild or severe) managed - but the kicker is the symptoms of the flu convincingly mimic the symptoms of depression and they can stick around on for weeks, thus twisting persistent flu symptoms into something entirely different and dangerous if left unchecked.  Which is why the flu can pose a greater problem for those already prone to depression and why everyone should get a flu shot each year! (Well I believe this now after having my first real encounter in years with the stupid bug this last spring.)

While Christie did every so often make a slight mistake, like a continuity error in your favorite movie (seriously why does Harry Potter in The Half-Blood Prince ask Slughorn about his collection of famous witches and wizards at Hogwarts? Slughorn already told him about it when they first met in the muggle's home?!) I thought I had caught Christie out for making a serious blunder. But after a bit of research, the premise of Sparkling Cyanide is completely plausible. While Rosemary was not depressed, exactly, (according to the book) there were a number of issues in her life which gave credence to the police’s theory of motive. 

(BTW should you ever think anyone around you or you yourself are suffering from depression or thinking of self harm seek treatment! Depression is very real and you can’t just walk it off. Click here for suicide crisis lines from around the world.)

Favorite Quote: 

“Indeed a ‘tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’” (pg. 101)

“The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves that they don’t give a damn.” (pg. 107)

“Like that queen in history -- Eleanor of Something, that followed the clue to Fair Rosamund’s Bower and offered her the choice of a dagger or a cup of poison.” (pg. 243)

Interesting Facts:“She never drank spirits or beer, and he had never realized...her passion...eau de Cologne...” (pg. 55) This is a thing. Never knew it was, but it is. 

Generally this odd habit is associated in the U.S. during Prohibition, often in middle class and high society ladies. Why? Generally speaking they were the women who didn’t have the opportunity to frequent a speakeasy, due to their social position, politics (as some were part of the Prohibition movement) or lack of knowledge of where to obtain the prohibited drink. So they drank what alcohol they could get their hands on: perfumes and colognes. Which is the completely wrong type of alcohol to drink! Plus there are all kinds of other stuff added by perfumers to make it smell pleasant, but can be rather harmful if consumed. What happened to these ladies with this predilection for potent perfumed potables? At best they became very intoxicated with interesting smelling breath (with possible side effects of headaches, nausea, coma, dizziness and seizures), and at worst it killed them dead.

If you're like me and thought this was a just a historical phenomenon you would be wrong...(To be honest I had never heard of this practice before reading Sparkling Cyanide, and only one person out of my informal poll even had a dim recollection of this fact.)

In Russia, especially during the Soviet and Gorbachev era, the popularity among men in drinking non-beverage alcohol is staggering. Generally it is aftershave or cologne due to their high concentrations of alcohol, but even cleaning solvents aren't deemed out of bounds. Like our prohibitionists, this experimentation with non-beverage alcohol is causing the average life expectance of the Russian male to plummet. The main reasons I read for this dangerous experimentation, the fact that colognes & perfumes are significantly cheaper than alcohol, giving a bigger bang for their buck as these colognes can contain up to ninety-seven percent alcohol - much higher than beverage grade alcohol. For alcoholics who need to consume large amounts of beverage grade drinks, these cheaper alternatives are tempting. But just like our prohibitionists, they are dying for their drink.

This consumption of perfume is also rumored to be a problem in some Muslim countries today where beverage alcohol is banned. Usually teens/young adults are drinking them for a thrill without understanding the dangers associated with this practice.

Drinking perfume is not quite as deadly as drinking cyanide, which is what happened in the case of Rosemary's death. But consume enough perfume either over time or all at once it can be just as deadly. Drinking perfume is like chocolate for dogs, they think it smells awfully nice but is deadly if ingested. 

Cheating: Slightly weird post this week (more humor to come, I promise!) but no, I did not cheat! Would be a shame to spoil my streak this far in, wouldn’t it?

AmberMiner©2014  

My 52 Weeks With Christie: It Was Bound To Happen...

The Man In The Brown Suit

First Published: See below.

I Read: The Man In The Brown Suit. New York, William Morrow, 2012.

Series: Colonel Race

Summary: Anne Beddingfeld’s father has passed away. Feeling like a bit of flotsam with an uncertain future, she sets out for London with the family solicitor (nothing untoward, he is just looking out for her) to find an adventure or a job - whichever comes first.

As it turns out, it is a mystery which crosses Anne’s path first, and while not a typical adventure, Anne grabs onto it with both hands and leaps into the fray. While waiting at the train station after a job interview, she watches a man fall onto the tracks who dies with a look of abject terror on his face. The police rule the death as an accident, but Anne is not so sure. A man in a brown suit who claimed to be a doctor acted very suspiciously while helping the man after the accident, plus he dropped a mysterious paper when he fled the scene. Then, when a woman’s body turns up in a manor house which links to the the death she witnessed, Anne sets out to discover the truth the police are willing to let lie.

Review: This is one of the funniest & spirited (does that make me sound old? But it is the best way to describe Anne) book I have read so far by Christie. Not a typical whodunnit like a Marple or Poirot, it is more of an adventure revolving around a central mystery. This was a fun and easy read, one which provided a much needed break from the psychological methods of Poirot. If you can’t tell, I had a good time reading this book.

The first title Man In The Brown Suit was dubbed with was "Anne, the Adventurous" (serialized in the the Evening Star in 1924, and they decided on the title). Evidently Christie thought the title silly, and while I agree it is a bit silly I think there is some merit in it. The wide, fresh-faced exuberance of Anne - who for the first time is free to follow her own notions - does lend this book a wide-eyed feel - she cannot imagine failure befalling her. This book would be one I would give to a younger reader (I am thinking female or open minded male) to cut their teeth on Christie, if they were a bit daunted by her popularity and/or breadth of works, due to the fact it eases you into the period in which her books were set, it is more action than others in the canon, it is funny, and due to the nature of our heroine, the book feels younger and more relatable than a middle aged Belgian detective or an elderly spinster.

**From The Office Of Revelations: Spoilers Ahead. You have been duly warned. Skip this part and go to the end if you want to avoid the Spoilers!**

Plus this book gives you a glimpse into the inner workings of a career spanning decades. How? In writing over 55 novels during her career Christie occasionally repeated plot devices in her mysteries (J.D. Robb of the In Death Series with Eve Dallas is another plot device repeater in her 48+ series, and Dean Koontz does as well). Sometimes disguised by subtle differences others are plain as day and easily spotted. For a quick example in Murder Is Easy and Cards On The Table, we learn of two women who are murdered by the seemingly accidental ingestion of hat paint. Whether due to forgetting she’d used the plot point before (which happened here) or purposeful retooling, this repetition on a theme did occur.

Why is this relevant? When I was reading The Man In The Brown Suit I recognized two very significant plot devices plucked from this mystery set into other books. One she used to astonish her readers and the other plunged the novel into mediocrity. However their combination in this mystery created a wonderful and dynamic mystery!

About two years after The Man In The Brown Suit, Christie penned her masterpiece The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. In doing so she honed to perfection a device she first introduced in The Man With In The Brown Suit, streamlined the idea so to speak, that of the misdirection of the reader’s attention from the actual culprit through withheld information on the part of a narrator which belie with facts presented by the book’s investigator. In both books, the killer is introduced on the first page, but you only see this fact in retrospect. This device, while used with good effect in The Brown Suit, is completely astonishing in Ackroyd and the twist is what makes it the one of the best mysteries of all time.

Murder In Mesopotamia, written twelve years (ish) after The Brown Suit, is where we are off to next with the revelation of identity swapping brought to light in the eleventh hour. In The Brown Suit, this plot twist completely works! But the device works because it is a minor plot point, one which adds another level of complexity but does not steal the focus of the mystery (in fact I like the people involved with this twist so much I hope to see them again in another book, but I am not holding my breath). In Mesopotamia the switch plot device is slipped in as the frosting on the cake motive wise and is completely unnecessary, cluttering the solution to Mesopotamia and stealing the focus from the relevant details of the solution, slipping it from a fine to a middling level of mystery. This ill use of a plot mechanism is unfortunate because it really is a wonderful book right up to the end.

This is why I think The Man In The Brown Suit is an important entry in the Christie pantheon. You see two different plot twists spliced into other novels with very, very different result. The retooling of the these two plot twists were so obvious I could not let them pass without mention their significance.

**Spoilers Have Ceased** Continue Reading

This was bound to happen at one point or another, an entry centering on spoilers (I tried to be as vague as I could in them, while still making sense) but I felt this idea of the rejiggering of plot points, especially as it relates to Roger Ackroyd, was too important to ignore. I know there isn’t a funny life story or weird fact in my post today, I tried to add some but they felt like I was trying to shoehorn in less than relevant ideas....Regularly scheduled spoiler free programing will be back next week with Sparkling Cyanide.

Favorite Quote: 

“I wonder if husbands know as much about their wives as they think they do.” (pg. 12)


“Adventuresses must not be too scrupulous in their methods” (pg. 30)

"Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.” (pg.139)

Interesting Facts:  Sir Eustace Pedler has a butler working for him named Jarvis. This is funny (to me) because the name and the role popped me right out of the narrative giggling, (my fellow bus riders gave me a wide berth after this, evidentially none of them were readers and didn’t understand I wasn’t crazy but enthralled in my book!) all I could picture during the scene was the disembodied voice of Jarvis from the Ironman series!

A piece of advice, if you were to start the books featuring Colonel Race I would start with this one, even before Cards On The Table. You learn some important facts and rumors about him not available in other books which become relevant later on down the line.

Cheating: “If Things happen anywhere, they happen in London. I shall keep my eyes open and, you’ll see, something will turn up!” (pg. 10), good to know! I may have to start our adventure there....I have read that London can be a magical place (and that is without the influence of the Harry Potter series). I am feeling confident in my ability to keep the cheating at bay! Only a few more months!

AmberMiner©2014 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: Hellos, Goodbyes & The Black Museum

Cards On The Table 

First Published: Serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1936. 

I Read: Cards On The Table. New York, William Morrow, 2011. 

Series: Poirot 

Detectives: Poirot, Superintendent Battle, Colonel Race, Adriane Oliver 

Summary: “The four murderers and the four sleuths-- Scotland Yard. Secret Service. Private. Fiction. A clever idea.” (pg. 60) 

This is the basis for Cards On The Table where four notable sleuths must work together to investigate the murder of Mr. Shaitana, a man who enjoyed cultivating the image of being a Mephistophelian figure who ferreted out one secret too many and baited a killer into action. 

Review: I know I say this a bunch, but I really loved this book! For me it is on par with The Moving Finger, Murder Is Easy or Towards Zero. What made this mystery so memorable is each of the suspects was guilty of a death before they ever came to the attention of the four investigators (I am not spoiling anything you know this by page 4). You spend the rest of the book sifting through what motivates each suspect using diverse investigative methods, which gives you a highly entertaining read. Incidentally if you are not overly fond of Poirot (there are some who are not as keen on him which I totally get), Cards gives you a Poirot mystery which isn’t overly Poiroty. If you know what I mean. 

This book heralds the very last appearance of Superintendent Battles, which I am saddened by as I love reading how criminals completely underestimate him, by design. Battles takes advantage of the notion that police detectives are an unimaginative and slightly stupid lot which lulls suspects into complacency until he strikes. Making up for this exit was my first encounter with Colonel Race, who brought a shrewd brain and action oriented personality to the investigation, which pleased me to no end. I do love a detective who dashes about.... 

The other introduction made in Cards which I was tickled with was Ariadne Oliver who injected a fair bit of humor and cleverness into this case, helping to diffuse the seriousness of the other male leads in the book without ever seeming like a dingbat or a brainless twit. “...I only regret one thing--making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I am always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done.” (pg. 66) Substitute "Belgian" for "Finn" and you hear Christie speaking about Poirot and her exasperation about writing his mysteries! Which is why reading Ariadne so much fun to read! The resemblance between Christie and Ariadne in the area of writing is often very funny - through Adriane, Christie is able to voice humorous anecdotes from her life as a writer. Since Ariadne herself penned a series of detective novels with a Finnish detective, she was the perfect foil for Christie.  

In Cards, Adriane lamented about fans writing her about inaccuracies in her books, beyond the mistakes written about Finland. Both of which did happen to Christie in real life, one very famous example of getting a detail wrong comes from Death In The Clouds. A blow pipe was featured as a possible murder weapon on the plane where the crime took place. The issue here is real blow pipes are over six feet long and Christie wrote hers a as being about eighteen inches in length! Fans took her to task about her mistake, apparently repeatedly. 

I was delighted to read about both these new-to-me characters of whom I will learn more about in the coming weeks.

Favorite Quote:  

“The stupid little man! Oh, the stupid little man,” murmured Hercule Poirot. “To dress up as the devil and try to frighten people.” (pg. 26) 

Interesting Fact: Early on in the story Poirot comments to Shaitana, “You have then a private ‘Black Museum’.”(pg. 4), which made me wonder what Poirot was referring to. If you live in the UK you probably already know this, but for those of you who do not, it turns out that Poirot is referencing Scotland Yard’s Crime Museum known for years as The Black Museum. The name was coined by an irritated newspaper reporter denied access in 1877. “The cup used by the Brighton murder, the jimmy of a celebrated burglar...”(pg. 4), here Shaitana scorned the fabled repository, boasting his living exhibits were far superior to the Yard’s bric-a-brac, since all his specimens were the most successful kind of murderer - the ones who’d gotten away with it. 

It makes complete sense that Poirot had heard of the Crime Museum and it is equally obvious why I had not. Out of the around 240 museums located in London this particular one has never been open to the public. Opened for training purposes, it houses items from famous/notorious cases Scotland Yard has handled over the years. In order to visit the exhibits you need to make an appointment, be a member of the police force and fill out an application (I think, their website wasn’t overly clear on the finer points). However these prerequisites aren’t always followed as the Black Museum has invited dignitaries, royalty, Gilbert & Sullivan, Houdini, and Laurel & Hardy among others into its private domain. 

According to the Yard’s website one of the most commented on pieces in the exhibit are the death masks cast from people hanged at Newgate Prison. Back in the day, death masks were often cast (using wax and plaster) for identification purposes before photography was invented or commonplace. This type of mask has been around for ages, King Tutankhamen, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, Peter the Great, Pascal, Voltaire and Abraham Lincoln were all casted after death. On a complete side note to creep you out...Purportedly CPR Annie, the dummy used to teach CPR, facial features are based off a famous death mask from the late 1880’s. The model is an unidentified woman dubbed L’Inconnue de la Seine; she was found drowned in the Seine River in Paris (she’s thought to have committed suicide). According to legend, a pathologist believed her face was so lovely, he had to commemorated it by casting a mask (that’s the story which may or may not be true, but either way the mask and a photograph exist). I do admit there a strong resemblance between her and Annie, I will never look at CPR dummies the same way again... 

Back on point. Besides the death masks the Crime Museum is said to display artifacts from Jack the Ripper, Crippen, the Great Train Robbery, the Millennium Dome Heist and other grisly crimes. Pressure has been steadily building on Scotland Yard to open the museum to the public, especially with their scheduled move in 2015 to new digs. Some in the public domain feel one way to fill budget shortfalls that all government agencies seem to have would be to open full scale exhibits for general perusal. Citing the fact that the Yard has handled some of the most famous cases in the world, charging admission inspect evidence in classic cases seems like great money making scheme. On the other side, families of the victims feel it would be profiteering off of suffering of others and oppose the move. Scotland Yard thus far has steadfastly refused to open to the public, but have not categorically denied the possibility. 

While Shaitana scoffed at the museum, I wonder how Poirot felt about the collection or for that matter what Christie thought of it. The Scotland Yard website does not mention Christie as ever having visited the museum (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did). I wonder if she did and her visit isn’t mentioned (as there aren’t any females on the list) or her name wasn’t recorded in their guestbook (as was known to happen) to protect her reputation from being tarnished (which is silly). If Poirot weren’t fictional I think it would be probable that he would have visited at some point.  

Would I visit it? Now there’s a pickle. It reminds me of exhibits in wax museums depicting scenes of torture from the inquisition and witch trials - they give me the heebie-jeebies but possess a certain macabre fascination. I haven’t a burning desire to see The Black Museum but If I was invited I think I would go (not that I ever see that happening). If the museum was opened to the general public, I would skip it. I do not want to stand next to that guy who indulges in an inappropriate line of commentary while walking through the museum and you know there would be someone like that there.  

Cheating: “Cards on the table. That’s the motto for this business. I mean to play fair.” (pg. 157) and I am still playing fair as well. The four amigos may have been talking about solving a crime, but I think the quote is relevant in my continued abstinence from cheating! 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: AmberMiner©2014