Murder by Death
Feb. 16th, 2026 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Appointment with Death, by Agatha Christie
I will be honest: all those Poirot films featuring Peter Ustinov and set in the Middle East merge somewhat into each other in my memory (even when it turns out they aren't set in the Middle East), so whilst this felt like a familiar story, I wasn't sure which fragments would occur or not, and I wasn't certain until I checked IMDB, and I could see the approximate form of the solution (although not the detail) in advance. But it was still a good read: it's as much about who each of the suspects think did it, and how they react to that, as who actually did it. I wonder how often Christie made the victim a malevolent character (most obviously in Murder on the Orient Express), to make us shuffle awkwardly around our morals. There's also some playing with the fourth wall: references to Poirot's acceptance of the official verdict in the Orient Express case ("I wonder who told you that") and Colonel Carbury's request ("I suppose you couldn't do the things the detective does in books? Write a list of significant facts - thins that don't seem to mean anything but are really frightfully important - that sort of thing").
I will be honest: all those Poirot films featuring Peter Ustinov and set in the Middle East merge somewhat into each other in my memory (even when it turns out they aren't set in the Middle East), so whilst this felt like a familiar story, I wasn't sure which fragments would occur or not, and I wasn't certain until I checked IMDB, and I could see the approximate form of the solution (although not the detail) in advance. But it was still a good read: it's as much about who each of the suspects think did it, and how they react to that, as who actually did it. I wonder how often Christie made the victim a malevolent character (most obviously in Murder on the Orient Express), to make us shuffle awkwardly around our morals. There's also some playing with the fourth wall: references to Poirot's acceptance of the official verdict in the Orient Express case ("I wonder who told you that") and Colonel Carbury's request ("I suppose you couldn't do the things the detective does in books? Write a list of significant facts - thins that don't seem to mean anything but are really frightfully important - that sort of thing").