BooksOfTheMoon

This is an odd book. For the first few chapters I wondered if Gutenberg had accidentally mislabelled a PG Wodehouse book as Agatha Christie. Especially the early bits were very dialogue-heavy and that dialogue did feel like it had been cribbed from a Wodehouse novel. That’s not a bad thing, I’m very fond of Wodehouse, but it surprised me here, although it was done well. Christie is surprisingly good at that sort of humour.

While this is billed as a Superintendent Battle book, the PoV character was Anthony Cade, a chap who starts the book as a tour guide in Bulawayo, before returning to England to hand in a manuscript to a publisher in exchange for a portion of a hefty sum of money, as well as finding and returning a stash of blackmail material to the lady it was from. Obviously it’s not as straightforward as that and he’s soon involved with not one but two murders.

Having recently read a couple Christie whodunnits with a very specific twist, I wondered if she was going to play the same trick here, but no, there was a twist, but in a completely different direction that I was not expecting at all! Cade is a charming protagonist all the way through, and he seems to disarm Superintendent Battle as much as the reader. Speaking of the redoubtable Battle, he’s a bit of a cipher. Specially chosen to investigate this politically sensitive mystery due to his discretion, he remains taciturn. If the fussy little Belgian is famous for being loquacious, Battle is the polar opposite, and we never really get to know him.

The murder mystery is only part of the book, as the political shenanigans around the fictional country of Herzoslovakia form a major part of it too, but all in quite a lighthearted way. Le Carre this is not. Lord Caterham, in particular (owner of the titular Chimneys stately home, where much of the action happens) is very much a peer in the fashion of Lord Emsworth of Blandings.

I enjoyed it a lot, but you need to have your “product of its time” glasses firmly in place, as there’s more uncomfortably racist language than I like to see (ie greater than zero).

The second Poirot novel starts with Hastings on his way back to England to meet up with his friend when he runs into a young lady on the train. In what will become a theme throughout the book, he’s arrogant and chauvinistic towards her before she escapes at Paris. The main plot involves Poirot being asked to come to a village in France to help protect a client, but by the time he arrives, the client is already dead.

Much of the fun of an Agatha Christie for me is in following along with the clues and seeing if I could figure it out myself (narrator: he never can), but with this one, I’m not sure that we were given enough clues to figure it out. That takes a bit of the fun away, but it’s always great seeing Hercule Poirot at work, disdaining the Holmesian method of physical investigation, here propounded by the police inspector Giraud. Poirot relies on psychology and using his famous Little Grey Cells and, of course, they don’t let him down.

So the mystery part of it was fun and I enjoyed it, but Hastings was pretty unbearable in this one. Maybe I’m too used to Hugh Fraser’s loveable bumbling sidekick in the TV series, but between chasing anything in a skirt and the chauvinism, I wanted to shake some sense into him.

So a good murder mystery, but beware the creepy sidekick.