Tag: Disappointed

Agatha Christie – The Secret of Chimneys | Review

Title: The Secret of Chimneys

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 310

Rating: 3/5

This one’s a bit of a strange one because there aren’t any of Christie’s iconic characters for us to enjoy and it’s arguably more of an espionage thriller than a classic cosy mystery. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing here to like, but it does mean that if you’re expecting some classic cosy crime then you’re probably going to be disappointed.

I think my favourite thing about this book was probably the old lady who’d lived a blameless life and who ended up being blackmailed by someone. She realised that the blackmailer had got the wrong person, but she decided to play along anyway, even giving him some money, which she would otherwise have spent on a dress. She just wanted a little bit of excitement in her life, and fair play to her.

From there, someone gets murdered, and then we kind of slowly move on from there. The pacing is pretty good and the overall plot itself works out, it’s just that it’s nowhere near as gripping as some of Christie’s other work and so it feels relatively disappointing as a consequence. It’s definitely something that you’re only going to want to read if you’re a completionist like I am, or if you’re lucky enough to get a copy of the facsimile edition without paying, like I did.

That’s pretty much all I’ve got for you here. I guess the only other thing that I’d mention is that one of the characters speaks like Poirot does, using English but sprinkling in random bits of French here and there. I feel as though Christie was just keeping herself in practice there and it didn’t really work so well. You see, not everything she touched turned to gold.

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Agatha Christie – N Or M? | Review

Title: N Or M?

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 304

Rating 3.25/5

 

 

This book is one of Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence books, and while I’m a reasonably big fan of those books compared to the average Agatha Christie reader, I couldn’t help feeling just a little bit disappointed by this one. I think that’s because it had so much promise, dealing as it did with espionage during the Second World War. In particular, it dealt with the idea of The Fifth Column, German agents who were living in the UK in a sort of Trojan Horse type situation.

And the story itself was interesting enough, neither better than nor worse than the majority of the plots that I’ve seen from Christie and pretty unique because of the fact that it’s more of an espionage thriller than it is a cozy mystery, although the reality is that it has elements of both. I think that’s what made it worth reading for me, although the story itself was just fine and it was of course very well written, being a Christie book.

Other than that, I’m not sure what else there is that I can say about this one, because even just a couple of hours after finishing it, not much of it remains with me. The only thing that I will say is that I quite often find that Christie’s books either have excellent characters or an excellent setting, but rarely both. In this one, it’s mostly the characters that stand out, and indeed there were points at which I sort of zoned out of what was happening and couldn’t remember whereabouts we actually were.

Overall, it’s a decent enough little book and pretty typical for Agatha Christie. And that’s one more ticked off.

 

 

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