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Murder in Mesopotamia (Hercule Poirot, #14)

Agatha Christie

Start date: April 1, 2019

Finish date: April 30, 2019

Discussion: Archive: Poirot Buddy Reads

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Archive: Poirot Buddy Reads

* Reading Order for the Unofficial Poirot Buddy Reads
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last updated Dec 27, 2020 08:20AM

Poirot Buddy Read 40: SPOILER THREAD Curtain
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What Members Thought

Mar 27, 2019 Susan in NC rated it really liked it

Shelves: reread, christie, want-to-reread

So enjoying rereading the Hercules Poirot mysteries with the Reading the Detectives group! I first devoured all of the Marple and Poirot mysteries in my teens and early twenties - so it’s been decades. I generally have not remembered the murderers and methods, so it’s been like discovering the books all over again!

Here, for an interesting change, we have not Captain Hastings as Poirot’s sidekick, but rather the brisk, sensible nurse Amy Leatheran, working in Iraq and asked by an archaeologist to ...more

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Mar 25, 2017 Nanosynergy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017read, fiction, fiction-1930s, british, mysteries-thrillers-espionage, reviewed, series

Hercule Poirot visits an archaeology dig in Iraq of archaeologist Dr. Leidner and his wife Louise. The atmosphere is tense and foreboding. Louise Leidner is inexplicably afraid for her life and to comfort her, Dr. Leidner hires a nurse to care for her, apparently not believing his wife is in any real danger and having psychological issues instead. However, when Louise Leidner is found murdered in her bedroom with all the doors and windows shut, Poirot engages the grey cells in pursuit of the kil ...more

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Sep 04, 2023 Marcella rated it really liked it

Shelves: murder-mysteries, fiction, 2023-75-book-challenge

“'Well, her first husband was killed in the war when she was only twenty. I think that’s very pathetic and romantic, don’t you?'
'It’s one way of calling a goose a swan,' I said dryly.
'Oh, nurse! What an extraordinary remark!'
It was really a very true one. The amount of women you hear say, 'If Donald—or Arthur—or whatever his name was—had only lived.' And I sometimes think but if he had, he’d have been a stout, unromantic, short-tempered, middle-aged husband as likely as not."

Agatha, you are a b “'Well, her first husband was killed in the war when she was only twenty. I think that’s very pathetic and romantic, don’t you?'
'It’s one way of calling a goose a swan,' I said dryly.
'Oh, nurse! What an extraordinary remark!'
It was really a very true one. The amount of women you hear say, 'If Donald—or Arthur—or whatever his name was—had only lived.' And I sometimes think but if he had, he’d have been a stout, unromantic, short-tempered, middle-aged husband as likely as not."

Agatha, you are a bitchy cat. Love it.

"It’s a pity all young people are prigs! They condemn the ‘old morality’ and then proceed to set up a much more hard-and-fast code of their own."

The more things change...

And then the absolute weirdest part of the book:

"Poirot broke off suddenly and addressed the young man in a personal, highly confidential manner. 'Mon ami, let this be a lesson to you. You are a man. Behave, then, like a man! It is against Nature for a man to grovel. Women and Nature have almost exactly the same reactions! Remember it is better to take the largest plate within reach and fling it at a woman’s head than it is to wriggle like a worm whenever she looks at you!'"

Agatha, are you all right? Who hurt you? What caused all your internalized misogyny? The above is so offensive not just for its content but because having reread more than 10 Poirot novels this year I know for a fact that Poirot never ever exhibits an opinion like this before. In fact he's usually solicitous of the "delicate feelings" of women. It doesn't fit in this book (even though this is one of the more misogynistic tales, where a woman's fate is basically sealed by her being beautiful and self-satisfied--while she definitely does morally questionable things, you can tell her real crime was being Too Much) and it doesn't fit in with Poirot's characterization as a whole. It's not just a matter of "those were the times" either. Dorothy Sayers wrote similar murder mysteries in the same time period and even though sometimes she's also a mouthpiece for the era's ingrained sexist thinking, she never actually advocates for violence as "behaving like a man." It's also a weird passage because this is basically how the victim was killed. Is Christie suggesting she earned it? She seemed to want us to feel a level of pity for the victim as well. Morally, it's gray. Sorry, I meant grey.

This is one of the Christie novels that takes place in an exotic location, and I've always liked those for their time capsule nature. Here we are in an archaeological dig in Iraq a few years before WWII, and it's clear Christie enjoyed drawing details from her own time as an archaeologist. (It's very much told from a colonialist perspective, British Empire yada yada, the natives are this and that, but what can you do.) Sometimes Christie gets so carried away in setting up a new and inventive method or motive that the result doesn't pass the sniff test of "would this ever actually happen." I mostly just give her credit for trying to never be boring. The setting makes up for any suspension of disbelief; the group of distrustful strangers in a strange land drawn together by a common interest and little else, at once claustrophobic by being stuck together in one building and agoraphobic by being an island in an endless sea of sand and hostile terrain and foreign culture. It presages the ingredients that made And Then There Were None so successful. ...more

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Nov 12, 2008 Nancy Oakes rated it liked it

Shelves: crime-fiction-uk, crime-fiction, classic-mystery-fiction

Not one of my personal favorites among the cases of Hercule Poirot, but still quite engaging.

Told from the perspective of Amy Leatheran, a nurse hired by a Dr. Eric Leidner to take care of his wife Louise at an archaeolgical excavation out in the deserts of Iraq. The nurse arrives to find that there is a somewhat strained attitude among the members of the expedition, and most of that has to do with Mrs. Leidner. However, Mrs. Leidner is murdered, and it is established that the murderer could onl ...more

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Nov 19, 2022 Laurie added it

The rare Agatha Christie book where I actually *did* remember the ending correctly, or at least part of it. I think I remembered it because the ending was so completely bananas. This is a very enjoyable book, especially if you're into archaeology, but there are several aspects of it that do not hold up from a 2022 vantage (😬) and the resolution requires some pretty acrobatic suspension of disbelief.

But I really enjoy these Poirot books written from the first person perspective of a character we ...more

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Mar 04, 2009 Laura Anne rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mystery, middle-east

2025 Series Re-read: I love the voice of Amy Leatheran as she explores the archeological dig and shows us our dear Poirot through fresh eyes. There's a bit of the solution that stretches credulity, but I can look past it. ...more

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