Title: The Unexpected Guest
Author: Agatha Christie/Charles Osborne
Type: Fiction
Page Count: 246
Rating: 3.75/5
This book is kind of weird because it started out as an Agatha Christie play before being novelised by Charles Osborne, who’s one of two people that the Christie estate has authorised to continue her legacy.
Unfortunately, Sophie Hannah is better than Osborne, and so I would have preferred to have read her take. She does a better job of imitating Christie, while Osborne writes and says stuff in a way that Christie would just never have said, or in ways that she wouldn’t have said it.
With that said, the core plot is pretty good, as you’d expect from Agatha Christie, and while Osborne’s prose doesn’t exactly shine, it doesn’t ruin the story either. I guess I’d say that he’s pretty competent, or at least competent enough to carry the story line.
There are also plenty of twists and turns along the way, and that made me really want to see the play. The cool thing about doing that would be that those twists would hit you more rapidly and so it would just mess with your head until you didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore. What’s not to like about a story like that?
Would I recommend it? Yeah sure, if you’re a Christie fan. If you’re new to her, you should read something that she actually wrote though. Enjoy.
