One, Two, Buckle My Shoe – by Agatha Christie

21 07 2024

I like that Agatha Christie gives some of her books nursery rhyme titles, so here’s another one I grabbed from a local charity shop – I wonder if there are any others, I’ve read a few now!

The title has very little to do with the story other than she does manage to tell it broken into sections which come under each line of the poem. The incident is actually set in a dentist’s surgery – Poirot goes for an appointment in the morning, then around lunchtime, the dentist is found dead with a gun by him; all signs point to suicide, but Poirot thinks there’s more too it.

I walked past my dentist surgery in the week and couldn’t work out why it gave me the creeps, until I remembered that I was reading this!

It’s good fun (murder aside), Poirot is on form as ever, and it keeps you guessing the whole way through. I do struggle sometimes with remember who each character is, but that’s probably more on me than the author!


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The ABC Murders – by Agatha Christie

8 11 2022

I watched an adaptation of this on TV years ago, and yet couldn’t remember what happened, so I was able to go into this completely free of spoilers!

Poirot received a letter from “ABC” telling him a murder is going to be committed in Andover on a specific date, it happens, and the victims name begins with A. So when he receives a follow-up letter threatening a murder in Bexhill, it’s taken as more than a hoax! You can see the pattern forming for yourself…

Thought to be the work of a maniac, Poirot is still keen to find reason, he insists that even a maniac will have a perceived logic behind what he or she is doing. So even when an arrest is eventually made, for Poirot the mystery was not solved until he had discovered why.

Obviously it’s a mystery, so I’m not going to tell you much more. I was worried it was going to be a bit sedate when something was revealed relatively early on, but not to worry, it’s as clever as any of her others that I’ve read so far!


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Death on the Nile – by Agatha Christie

31 10 2021

My third Agatha Christie and my second Poirot!

I’m starting to notice a pattern now (unless it’s just coincidence with the ones I’ve read so far), which is why I’ve struggled to get into each one, and that’s that she opens the book by introducing an absolute shedload of characters with maybe a couple of pages each, and then the story properly starts, at which point my head is spinning, trying to work out who’s who.

That said, it then doesn’t seem to take long after that, and always gets better once a diagram is thrown in. This time it was a plan of the cabins on the boat with all the names of the occupants, though it didn’t appear until about halfway through the book.

The early character confusion aside, I really enjoyed the book, the further I got in, the faster I read, and the less I was able to put it down! Obviously, it’s a murder mystery, so I’m not going to give much away as that’s the fun of the book (if you can call books about murder “fun”, but given Christie’s insane success, I think it’s ok to enjoy it!), but it’s got all the twists and turns and red herrings you’d hope for, and Poirot’s brilliant lines, as well as a couple from Christie herself!

As I was borrowing my mum’s copy I didn’t turn down pages to remember the quotes I really liked, but it turns out that this was time wasted since I fell asleep on the book last weekend and totally creased the cover – what a fail!

Anyway, there’s a Kenneth Branagh film of this coming out next year, the cast includes Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Russell Brand and Adam Garcia, so naturally I’m intrigued and excited to see that! Trailer below:


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And Then There Were None – by Agatha Christie

23 02 2021

I recently read the following quote from Val McDermid: “Agatha Christie is the gateway drug to crime fiction”, and am finding this more and more so to be true! Having read Murder on the Orient Express last summer, I asked for another for Christmas – my brother got me this and it was excellent!

I don’t know if this true of all of her books, but in the two I’ve read, they’ve started by introducing a whole load of unrelated characters, and then starting to tell the story, this means they can take a while to get to grips with, but in this one I kept a couple of post-its in pages with info that was helpful to flick back to frequently, eg the character intros, why each of them had journeyed to this tiny island, and the rhyme that gives the structure of the story, “Ten little soldier boys” (although it’s had other names in the past, which have also been the title of the book, but have since been deemed less than PC).

But fairly soon, all of them were familiar, and I was hooked! I kept grabbing it to see who was going to be killed off next (it brings out a very dark side!) and if the people I thought might be responsible really were – completely addictive.

I will certainly be asking for another for my birthday!


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Murder on the Orient Express – by Agatha Christie

25 05 2020

I had always assumed that Agatha Christie books would be a bit stuffy and high brow, and hard work to read. My goodness I was wrong – not that it’s trashy, not at all, but I just read a book in a week, I was completely gripped!

We cover the sleeper carriage of a train which departs from Istanbul and gets stuck in a snowdrift on the same night that someone is killed (this is hardly a spoiler, it’s a murder mystery!), and given that the detective Poirot is already on the train, we work through his investigation, with all it’s twists and turns.

In all honesty, I was completely won over just by the contents page – as a maths and data brain, the structure to this is just beautiful. To some, the idea of this could be off-putting, but don’t worry – even with all it’s organisation, it still flows as one continuous story.

The other thing I really and truly loved about this book was how it helped you keep track of everything going on. There are a lot of characters, a lot of things happening, and so at points in the book we are provided with a labelled map of the train carriage, a timeline of the events we know so far (because Poirot wrote it down to be ‘neat and orderly’, a recap of what we know of all the suspects so far, and a list of questions we still need to answer. I found I had the corner of each of these pages folded down so I could refer back to them easily. It’s just entirely useful!

I hadn’t seen the film, so had no idea what was going to happen, but what was interesting was that while my copy of the book has the film poster as it’s cover (see below), all the characters looked totally different in my head (my Poirot was, of course, David Suchet). I had imDbed to work out who was meant to be who – but that didn’t help at all!

I really want to see the film now!


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