Comfort Reading
Apr. 15th, 2020 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: The Murder on the Links, by Agatha Christie
This came from a book swap shelf last year, and it seemed the right time for some lighter reading. Although the presence of death is obvious, in a Golden Age crime novel it is safely distant from the reader. This is the second Hercule Poirot novel, originally published in 1923 - a time when memories of the First World War and the 1918 flu pandemic must both have been strong.
We start with Captain Hastings returning from Paris to London, but almost on his arrival in their apartments, Poirot receives a letter summoning him to France, where M Renauld fears for his life, so they return to the seaside town of Merlinville-sur-Mer, only to find that their client has been murdered that very morning. As such, Poirot is set to co-operate and compete with M Giraud of the Sûreté, rather than Scotland Yard. The French police have heard of the Belgian detective, but relations are not cordial.
There are some clever twists and turns, and although I had worked out one or two threads, the overall solution was not apparent until the final chapter. Not all of it holds up to too much scrutiny, with a lot of coincidences and convolutions, and Hastings definitely makes an ass of himself, which seems quite weakly thought through now. Perhaps as the second novel in the series, the characters were not so well established as we might perceive them now.
This came from a book swap shelf last year, and it seemed the right time for some lighter reading. Although the presence of death is obvious, in a Golden Age crime novel it is safely distant from the reader. This is the second Hercule Poirot novel, originally published in 1923 - a time when memories of the First World War and the 1918 flu pandemic must both have been strong.
We start with Captain Hastings returning from Paris to London, but almost on his arrival in their apartments, Poirot receives a letter summoning him to France, where M Renauld fears for his life, so they return to the seaside town of Merlinville-sur-Mer, only to find that their client has been murdered that very morning. As such, Poirot is set to co-operate and compete with M Giraud of the Sûreté, rather than Scotland Yard. The French police have heard of the Belgian detective, but relations are not cordial.
There are some clever twists and turns, and although I had worked out one or two threads, the overall solution was not apparent until the final chapter. Not all of it holds up to too much scrutiny, with a lot of coincidences and convolutions, and Hastings definitely makes an ass of himself, which seems quite weakly thought through now. Perhaps as the second novel in the series, the characters were not so well established as we might perceive them now.