Tag: Parker Pyne

Agatha Christie – Surprise! Surprise! | Review

Title: Surprise! Surprise!

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count: 224

Rating: 3.5/5

This book is something of an oddity, and in fact I hadn’t even heard of it until I spotted it going as part of an Agatha Christie job lot on eBay. Essentially, because different publishers released different books in different regions, there are some unique USA titles that never came out in the UK, and vice versa.

That mostly applies to short story collections, of which this is the perfect example. In fact, to say that I read this is almost cheating because I only bothered to read the stories that I hadn’t read before, and so there were only four of the twelve or thirteen in here that I actually read. I remember the ones that I skipped, though.

In fact, this is actually a pretty decent little read, if only because it features a bunch of Christie’s most well-known characters, from Parker Pyne to Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. It also includes the title story of The Witness for the Prosecution, which I’ve seen performed as a play before. I think the play was a little better than the short story, but both of them are very much worth consuming. All in all then, I’d have to say that this one is worth reading.

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Agatha Christie – The Sittaford Mystery | Review

Title: The Sittaford Mystery

Author: Agatha Christie

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 203

Rating: 7/10

 

Agatha Christie - The Sittaford Mystery

Agatha Christie – The Sittaford Mystery

 

The Sittaford Mystery is a quaint Christie classic, a murder mystery set in a tiny village on the outskirts of Dartmoor. This story features Inspector Narracott, a character who also appears or is mentioned in several other of her novels, and I always found him to be an interesting character. In many ways, Christie’s more traditional detectives are more interesting and more likable than her more mainstream characters, like Miss Marple and Parker Pyne.

It’s also interesting to note how the novel contains references to The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – both are set in Devon, both feature weird dogs and the Christie novel even name-drops the great writer as a potential source for comment in an article about a seance. Christie and Conan Doyle were two of the greatest crime novelists to ever live, and so it’s interesting to see this crossover.

Overall, while it’s not the best of her books, you can do much worse than The Sittaford Mystery and it’s a must-read for anyone who’s interested in crime novels and the work of Agatha Christie.

 

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

 

Click here to buy The Sittaford Mystery.