Jesse > Recent Status Updates

The first two novels are pretty fun as far as murder mysteries go. There’s romance, intrigue, plot twists, melodrama, and sequential reveals. I imagine that Christie was howling while she wrote Hastings’s point of view when he is mooning over every young woman he meets. I was dying when he asked Cynthia in the first book to marry him, only to get laughed out of the f’n forest. Just savagely refreshing.

I had a few good ideas about the importance of some clues but these murder mysteries do a good job of throwing so much doubt around that you never really know whodunit until Poirot gets his time to explain every feature of the affair. Dulcie is an interesting female fool for the narrator - an acrobat with morbid curiosity, a smart mouth, and wrists of steel, who prevents another murder at the climax.

I’m kind of familiar with the Christie format from the standalone collection I read but Poirot is a different if still familiar animal with how so many sleuths have been patterned if not after him then the Holmes. It’s more interesting to think of how far removed the story feels from portrayals of late-Victorian England (re: SJtR) given the society that Christie is writing about comes only 20 or so years later.

Finished /The Mysterious Affair at Styles/. Next is /The Murder on the Links/.

It’s a sweet book and wants to say a lot about written stories, the people who read them, and the authors who write them. The fact that it mostly takes place in the Italian countryside makes it a tad less fantastic but I want to see where Funke takes the characters across Inkspell and, maybe, Inkdeath. Idk about the 16 yr old Farid being in love with the 12 yr old Meggie tho. That’s pretty squicky