Laughton played Poirot in Alibi, a 1928 play by Michael Morton based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It ran for over 500 hundred performances. Christie was unhappy with some of the changes that Morton made to her story, but finally agreed based on the options available for it to work onstage. One option was to make Poirot a young and charming man named Beau Poirot!
Laughton looks appropriately dapper for the role!
Although the cover and the title implied that it is not going to be a whodunnit like Christie's other books I have read so far, but still even being a crime thriller, not only it delivered a tinge of whodunnit, also an unexpected twist.
Spoilers Ahead:
>!When it was closer to the end, I was thinking that each one of them was involved in the murder and had framed ABC, but I couldn't figure out as to why they all wrote to Poirot but eventually after reading the whole thing made the twist more plausible.!<
The first two tiers were pretty easy to rank. After that, there’s no particular order within each category.
While watching the 1937 movie Love From A Stranger, based on the short story Philomel Cottage, we spotted a familiar face. There was a young Joan Hickson, the future Miss Marple, playing Emmy the slightly dotty maid!!
Just finished this last night (enjoyable read), and I am confused by the title. All throughout the book they keep using this term "Poison Pen" to describe the villain writing these anonymous letters. Why isn't the title "The Poison Pen"? Why "The Moving Finger"?
I'm sure "the moving finger" refers to writing the letters, but you had a perfectly good and dramatic term describing such throughout the novel.
I say THE OTHER WOMAN, and ATTEMPTED MURDER, and CATHOLICS.
so Far I've read
Murder On the Orient Express, Roger Ackroyd, Peril at the end house, HP's Christmas, death on the nile, Five Little Pigs(my favourite), murder on the links, Mrs McGintys dead, Evil Under The Sun, and the Mousetrap
At the end of the Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, >!does Marina kill herself,!< or does >!her husband kill her?!<.
If she >!killed herself, did her husband know about it while it was going on?!<
I know Miss Marple believes >!strongly in capital punishment. But—carried out by a private party?!<
At the beginning, I felt a little overwhelmed — so many characters were introduced at once, and the shifts between scenes and people made it a bit hard to keep track of everything. But once the plot settled and the murder took place, the mystery really started to grip me.
There are so many suspects, and you're constantly questioning everyone's intentions. I kept wondering who was actually hiding what, and the way the final reveal came together was quite satisfying.
Overall, a solid read that kept my curiosity alive throughout.
Anyone else read this one? What did you think of the mystery and the ending?
I am collecting these Harper Collins Signature edition covers and made this post recently for the books I needed - https://www.reddit.com/r/agathachristie/s/Uwgae7yjOR
u/TapirTrouble contacted me and went out of her way to help me get this book. She scoured ebay to find it and let me highlight the fact that -
SHE SENT IT TO ME ALL THE WAY FROM CANADA TO INDIA THAT TOO FREE OF COST!
u/TapirTrouble you are the goodest, kindest and most generous person I met on reddit. I hope you save all the Tapirs in trouble in the world. 😁
PS : I still need 15 books to complete the set. Will post when I have them all.
In her memoirs, Agatha Christie describes receiving an unexpected financial windfall -- The London Evening News offered her 500 pounds (equivalent to well over 26 thousand pounds today) to serialize The Man in the Brown Suit. I was trying to come up with a date for this, and the best I could do was sometime in late 1923. (The serialized version came out in November of that year, and the complete novel was published the following summer.)
Her husband Archie suggested that she could buy a car. (I was interested to hear that back in the 1920s, you could buy a pretty good horse for that much -- and I guess that's the technological equivalent.) I'm assuming that they didn't have one already, because Agatha was astonished to hear Archie say this. Her family (though comfortably off) hadn't owned one -- she'd mentioned that they didn't even have a horse and carriage when they lived in Torquay. She wrote, "Nobody I knew in our circle of friends had a car. I was still imbued with the notion that cars were for the rich." She stared at Archie "like a zombie" (honestly I hadn't expected to come across that comparison in a Christie book).
So she bought a Morris Cowley. The type is referred to by auto historians as "bullnose" (after the round-topped radiator used on some early Morris cars), though she describes it as "bottle-nosed" in her memoirs. Apparently it was grey. I compared photos and it looks like she's in the longer 4-door touring version, rather than the two-seater or coupe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Cowley
It seems that Archie knew how to drive already -- maybe he'd learned in the military? He'd given her a couple of lessons, but she was still pretty nervous on the main roads. Her book mentions this was happening during the General Strike, but the only reference I could find was to one that happened in spring 1926, and it didn't seem likely that she'd have waited for years before learning how to drive. So either it was some other labour disruption she meant, or she had forgotten the exact circumstances (understandable after 30+ years).
She pointed out in her book that you didn't have to pass a driving test to get a license back then (and this was also the case in a lot of other places -- some US states didn't require that until after WWII). There's a rather funny description of her problems trying to back up, and stalling the engine. But she became expert after practice, and describes how freeing it was, to be able to go to places whenever you wanted. She could drive down to Torquay to see her mom, and they could go visit friends who lived in remote areas. (Another reason why that General Strike anecdote is probably inaccurate, since that happened weeks after her mother's death.)
"I don't think anything has given me more pleasure, more joy of achievement, than my dear bottle-nosed Morris Cowley."
Most of the driver's eye view Morris Cowley videos on YouTube are the smaller two-seaters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhvkqZ6faD0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnFL-XButpM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TbhO5qwOy4
Outside view of one of the tourers, driving around in a field. It's a 1925, though it looks like the design probably didn't change much until 1926.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzqy61ogi7Y
A 1926 Morris Oxford tourer, which looks somewhat similar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz15lA7uydY
The starting procedure:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMe90Y4UQWg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjcRBw1H8Ww
>!Love this book, love the twist and its execution, but there is one thing that nags at me about it. Dr. Sheppard, worrying that Roger Ackroyd will have heard about his blackmail of Mrs. Ferrars, is making plans to kill Roger, y'know, just in case. Sure. One of those preparations is to rig up Roger's dictaphone so it can be set to start playing at a given time. All well and good. My question is, how could Sheppard possibly know that anyone would wander within earshot during the duration of the dictaphone tape playing?!<
Hey! I don't know if this is allowed but I recently have been getting into Agatha Christie and other mystery novels, and thought it might be fun for me to post my thoughts and theories here as I try to work out who the murderer is for various books, is it okay if I post that here?
Thought I'd share a picture of my Agatha Christie book-collection, as just today I received a package with 81 books in it. I now have all the Miss Marple novels and short stories, all of the Poirot novels as well as all (I think) short stories. Plus a couple of handfuls of her "stand-alone" novels, including "And then there were none". I really must get around to reading that.
Right now I've jumped into "The Mystery of the Blue Train".