A GREAT CONVERGENCE: Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero

“I like a good detective story . . . But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that – years before sometimes – with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at …

Advertisements

A MOTIVE FOR LOVING CHRISTIE

Every so often, a confluence of events brings about enlightenment. It’s how we got penicillin and harnessed electricity and learned how to fly. In the art world, it happens when paints mix together fortuitously or musical notes embrace in harmony or Warner Brothers produces The Maltese Falcon three times before they get it right. As an …

I SECOND THAT EMOTION: Mysteries That Make You Feel

Dale Carnegie said: “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures of emotion.” Try applying this truism to the classic mystery, and you can perhaps see why some people turn away from the tendency of these stories to shortchange the emotional aspects of murder, while others are …

THE GREATEST DETECTIVE OF THEM ALL

First the good news: The Tuesday Night Bloggers are back, and we’re bigger than ever! And we have a month of posts planned for you that focus on the greatest detectives that ever lived . . . in the pages of literature. We do this in honor of a new book, edited by Eric Sandberg, …

FIGHTING THE FIFTH COLUMN, GAD STYLE – PART ONE: Christie’s N or M

Last year, moviegoers and Netflix subscribers (I count myself as both) were inundated with mid-20th century British history. Beginning with Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, followed by The Darkest Hour, which covered the same events from Churchill’s point of view (and assured its star, Gary Oldman, of an Oscar), continuing on to Season 2 of The Crown, …

ON MY THIRD READ OF CHRISTIE, THE BOOK I BOUGHT FOR ME: Three Blind Mice

When I began my Adventures with Agatha at the tender age of eleven and a half, I was pretty much flying blind. I had been led to And Then There Were None by the machinations of a brilliant babysitter, but after that I was on my own. There was no internet to look Christie up …

GOOSEBUMPS: THE CHRISTIE EDITION

Mr. JJ of The Invisible Event (you do know that JJ is his last name, not his initials, right? His first name is Al) recently posted on my favorite topic, Agatha Christie, detailing some of the highs and lows he had experienced after nearly twenty years of reading the Queen of Crime. It was a …