Hi everyone! So, I saw other bloggers doing mini-reviews, and I thought that it’s perfect for me since I have a backlog of books I want to review, but don’t have enough thoughts on to fill a full review. So my Mini-Review Mondays will be a quick lightning round of books about a particular theme or books I’ve recently read.
Without further ado, I’ll be talking about the three murder mysteries I’ve picked up just this month. It’s strange to hear, but I find a good old-fashioned whodunnit very comforting. It actually makes sense that I was in the mood for murder mysteries at the start of the year – beginnings have always been daunting for me, and immersing myself in the clean, black-and-white world of murder mysteries may have given me the reassurance I needed to face the uncertainty of the new year.
In any case, here are the three murder mysteries I’ve read so far this January, in order of date read.
1. Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
My Rating: ★★★★★ (4.5 stars)
Magpie Murders is actually two books and two mysteries in one, but despite the length I devoured the book in the space of a few hours. It was enjoyable, gripping, and very, very clever.
At the beginning of the novel, we have our protagonist, editor (and, unbeknownst to her, future detective) Susan Ryeland, preparing to read the latest mystery by her publishing company’s most prized writer, Alan Conway. But the further along Susan gets in Magpie Murders – Conway’s manuscript – the more she realizes that it holds clues to solving a mystery that happens in real life – and that she seems to be the only one who sees it. So, with the insatiable and compulsive curiosity of a true mystery lover, Susan follows the trail of bread crumbs Conway has left for her in his novels to discover the identity of the killer.
This was a highly addictive page-turner that kept me up until early morning. Both mysteries were very tightly plotted – I can just imagine Horowitz storyboarding and sequencing everything on a large bulletin board just to keep track of all the little clues, details, and characters that have to be in place for both mysteries to come together neatly at the end – and I was delighted that a number of the clues that involved wordplay. It was still very satisfying to watch the clues from Conway’s Magpie Murders and Horowitz’s Magpie Murders line up.
I also found Horowitz’s commentary on mystery tropes interesting. Susan, for example, talked about how the solution to cases seem to depend in part on the serendipity of stumbling on particular clues, or how real-life interrogations don’t go as smoothly as fictional interrogations. They weren’t particularly subversive, though, since Horowitz ultimately uses the same conventions to forward and wrap up the mystery in the book. Still, the meta-fictional lens was refreshing – simultaneously a reverent acknowledgement of Christie’s legacy and a sly commentary on her bag of tricks.
All in all, this was a great read, and I’d be anxious to get my hands on the next book in this series.
Read from January 3-5, 2019
2. The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
My Rating: ★★★☆☆
I found that my appetite for cozy mysteries was really whetted after reading Magpie Murders, so I just had to pick this up – the Queen of Crime’s first novel (i.e., where the entire genre of murder mystery began). This doesn’t yet have subversiveness of her famous works (i.e., Orient Express and Roger Ackroyd), but all the familiar elements are there – Poirot’s mannerisms, the red herrings, and of course, all the clues hidden in plain sight. I kept changing my mind about the identity of the killer and couldn’t fathom how it was done until all was revealed at the last chapter.
My only complaint about this particular book was that it became too unwieldy towards the end – everyone seemed to be acting suspiciously in ways that really weren’t connected to the murder, and everyone seemed to have sufficient motive to kill. It made for very long and convoluted explanations from Poirot, which, admittedly, were too much for my ‘little gray cells’ to handle. I’m also not very good at visualizing spaces or remembering details like where X was at Y time, so it took me awhile just to comprehend the sequence of events that Poirot was laying out. (That might also be why I might never tire of murder mysteries – I’m just no good at keeping the clues straight, so I’m always surprised at the end!) Very enjoyable though, and exactly what I was in the mood to read.
Read from January 8-9, 2019
3. Evil under the Sun by Agatha Christie
My Rating: ★★★☆☆
This edition is part of an Agatha Christie box set that just arrived at my doorstep this week. I bought the set as a gift to my brother, since he wants to get into mysteries, but it actually doubles nicely as a gift to myself, since his books are stashed in my shelves anyway… 😉
Evil under the Sun is the 24th book in the Hercule Poirot series, and in it, Poirot investigates the murder of a famous actress on a beautiful island where he’s vacationing. Admittedly, I wasn’t as interested in the blurb as I was in the title, which I knew to be a biblical allusion. I always find titles drawn from other works intriguing since the work is poised to be a specific take on the work of origin.
As will be explained a few pages into the book, ‘evil under the sun’ is a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes 6:
1 I have seen another evil under the sun, and it weighs heavily on mankind: 2 God gives some people wealth, possessions and honor, so that they lack nothing their hearts desire, but God does not grant them the ability to enjoy them, and strangers enjoy them instead.
Sure enough, this is one of the themes in the book – it seems that all the main suspects are wealthy or rich in some sense (in fame, for example), but can’t seem to completely enjoy their good fortune because they’re still longing for that elusive one more thing that would make their lives complete. In fact, this longing – or this desire, which is its more urgent form – underlies the conscious motivations of each suspect for committing murder.
As such, Christie plays with this notion of evil and achieves surprise by turning the notion of ‘evil’ around. But then, how the killer went about the murder strained belief. It was just too gimmicky, and I think not even the sharpest mystery reader would have been able to guess it with all the clues lined up.
Another thing that didn’t work for me: I found the third-person omniscient perspective disorienting, especially coming from the concentrated first-person narration of Captain Hastings in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It felt like a cheap trick for the omniscient narrator to zoom in on the characters during their most incriminating moments, only to abruptly cut the scene before further context can divest them of suspicion. It felt like an amateur writer’s sleight-of-hand rather than the more masterful manoeuvres of a respected author.
Also, compared to the three other Christie novels I’ve read, this was more bloated than usual with a cast of inconsequential characters. A number of them were introduced in the beginning, which made me think they would play an important part in the story; but despite their numerous appearances and the perplexing number of lines dedicated to their peripheral remarks, they contributed very little to the murder investigation itself.
I’m wondering if Christie used them in the story to form a composite image of the murdered actress’s character in the minds of the readers. In that sense, it’s an interesting device – after all, we don’t usually have access to the interiority of public figures; instead, we stitch it together from fragments of gossip. Christie achieves this effect by having every minor character voice their quite authoritative opinions of the dead actress, despite never having interacted with her before. Intriguing set-up, but I still wish she’d prune away some of the cast.
I sound like I’m nitpicking her work now – this always seems to happen when I sit to write a review – but really, I wasn’t thinking any of this while in the grip of the story. I always enjoy the compulsively readable nature of Christie’s works and I look forward to the next book I’ll pick up from her oeuvre.
Read from January 10-13, 2019
Mini-Review Monday:
3 Murder Mysteries I’ve Read This January
I’m still very much in the mood for murder mysteries or thrillers, so if you have any recommendations, please let me know in the comments! I’d really appreciate it. 🙂
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Gil Reads Books 
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie is one of my favorite books 💕💯
Glad you liked that! I’ve only read 4 so far but I would say Murder of Roger Ackroyd is my favorite. The Mysterious Affair at Styles was a fun read, though 😄
Great reviews! I haven’t read any of these yet, but I really should pick up more Agatha Christie this year, and the Horowitz novel is on my TBR so I’m glad that one worked well for you! I’m very attracted to the “two mysteries in one” concept.
Thank you! That’s my resolution this year as well, to read more Christie. Her novels are both considered classics in the genre and also reliably entertaining. 😀 I couldn’t resist Magpie Murders; its metafiction premise is practically catnip for book lovers. If you ever get to reading it, I’d love to hear your thoughts. 🙂
Great reviews! I love Agatha Christie but I haven’t read either of these ones yet. I guess I won’t prioritise them based on your mixed response, but I’m enjoying gradually working my way through her extensive back catalogue. 😊
Thank you! One of the pleasures of reading Christie is that you can always go at your own pace, and there’s so many reliable titles to choose from depending on your mood. 🙂 Happy reading!
Very true! 😊