keelywolfe

Since my last proper Agatha Christie post, I have read:

• The Man in the Brown Suit - Anne Beddingfield is a lunatic and I love her! The book has elements of Christie's espionage stories but is more of a crime caper with the Big Boss mystery in the middle. I was SO worried that Anne's new friend Mrs. Blair would turn out to be the villain! Anne and Mrs. Blair are such strong, distinct personalities, and it's fascinating how Christie can voice characters well. Shame about all the casual racism against black Africans, woof.


• N or M? - This was a relief to get to next, because I'd read a bunch of Christie's non-murder mysteries in a row, which was a little frustrating. Technically this one is still espionage, but there is a whodunit contained to a single location with a locked cast of characters, so it's functionally like a murder mystery. Also, another Tommy & Tuppence book! I was startled about the time skip, so they're now in their 40s and have adult children and are in a second war, what a time.


• Hallowe'en Party - This was fun! A tragedy of a child’s death at a party after she boasts about having seen a murder, and an investigation years after the fact. I liked the setting, and I figured out some of the elements from the clues themselves, plus I didn’t find Ariadne Oliver as grating as I otherwise sometimes do. The writing/pacing felt really smooth in this one.

After finishing that last one, I vaguely recalled that Branagh's third Poirot movie might've been loosely based on it, so I looked it up and it was, so I watched it!

Surprise surprise, I actually like Branagh's version! Which is HILARIOUS because I thought his Orient Express was just okay, and skipped Death on the Nile entirely (for cast reasons, but when I heard about the moustache's backstory, decided that that was probably a good decision).

Looking back, the problem with Orient Express, I think, was that it was close enough to the book that it made the differences more frustrating, and brought into sharper relief the things that Branagh didn't think were important but I, personally, felt were important, and vice versa. Then Death on Nile looked like more of the same.

A Haunting in Venice however, is a full-on remix, and I think the right way to go! Instead of pretending to be an adaptation, it does its own thing while retaining the broad strokes for some of the characters and some of the specific dynamics, especially ( mild spoilers ) but in a new way that I found legitimately fun. Because it's a remix it's more enjoyable to spot what's been retained and what's been moved around, and it allows (for me, at least) more generosity in parsing this version's new themes, in this case the weight of death and guilt clinging on to the living and not allowing them to move on. (Brought to the most extreme with the murderer, even before the first murder.)

Of course, now that I want Branagh to make another, he's not going to.

Not the Jules Verne novel, but the pop science book by David Whitehouse that has the subtitle The Remarkable Voyage of Scientific Discovery into the Heart of Our World. It's about what's inside planet Earth: crust, mantel, core, and all the fun stuff that happened to or happens because of these elements, i.e. earthquakes and volcanoes, continental drift, magnetic shielding, and so on. I got this book at a warehouse sale yeaaaars ago.

Fun topic! But the writing is unfortunately awkward. I've read enough pop science books by this point, sometimes in topics that are so far reaching (that book about time and time keeping, for example) yet have a certain flow that works to bring the reader bobbing along gently in the eddies of a topic even as it sometimes swerves in unexpected directions. The book makes attempts to do that, and uses the Jules Verne book as a signpost of sorts as it brings the reader "into" the planet layer by layer, but turns to various asides without warning (sometimes from one paragraph to the next underneath it) that are not brought back into the main narrative in a cohesive way, and the asides are sometimes too long for the actual point they concern the main topic -- especially true for asides of various scientists Whitehouse wants to highlight in the historical discoveries of earthscience. Also, author does not explain a lot of terms he should be explaining! I already know what declination is, for example, but it was harder still to follow certain descriptions, especially when it came to the movement within the mantel and how using seismographs to map the inside works. The author knows his stuff, but needs a better editor.

Anyway, planet earth is weird and has a dynamo inside that is one of the key factors leading the life on this planet. Also its way bigger and deeper than people usually think it is, and in many aspects we know less about it than we do about outer space.