Title: Black Coffee
Author: Charles Osborne
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 186
Rating: 4/5
I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this one, because it’s essentially a novelisation of an Agatha Christie play by an author called Charles Osborne. Osborne is a novelist in his own right, but he’s also a biographer who’s written about Christie at length. It turns out that those fears were unfounded, because this doesn’t read like fan-fiction. It reads like the real deal.
Osborne even mimicked some of the stuff that I’m not so much of a fan of, including Christie’s colonialist approach to the world and the casual racism that her characters seem to display towards foreigners, including a reference to poison being an Italian weapon. That actually made me laugh though, because an Italian once tried to poison me by putting bleach in my drink, but that’s another story for another time.
All in all, I enjoyed this, and I’d definitely recommend it to fellow Agatha Christie fans. Although I do also want to both read and see the play itself.
