Rob Baker > Recent Status Updates

More Poirot wisdom/suspense building:

"In every case of a criminal nature one comes across the same phenomena when questioning witnesses. Everyone keeps something back. Sometimes--often indeed--it is something quite harmless, but--I say it again--there is alawys something. I am Herculae Poirot, and I know" (99).

Agatha really knows how to build suspense and curiosity, like when Poirot hints that he might know who the murderer is, but he isn't ready to explain it yet :)

"It is a theory--a theory only. I hoped to find a certian object on that list. Eh bien, I have found it. It is there; but it seems to point in the wrong direction. The right clue on the wrong person. That means there is much work to be done" (84).

Interesting to see what air travel was like in 1935. Some seats faced one another (like in a train), and they served a three-course meal (one entrée option was tongue).

A countess asks the steward to get her maid from the other cabin so that the maid can get the countess's makeup bag which is just a few feet from the countess. 🤣

"All of these things set her apart and made her inestimably precious" (222).

"She needed nothing from me other than that I do her no harm, which might serve as a motto for all wild animals" (168).

"Many hares cover as much as 9 to 12 miles of ground at night to forage. I tried to superimpose this in my mind upon the landscape around me, quickly realising how many roads and human structures would cut across it, and that all the pressures of modern life--the need to produce more food and build more houses, our intensive use of every scrp of land--shrunk the freedom of movement of these wide-raning creatures."

"It was excessive. It was absurd. It was beautiful" (119).

Heidi feels like a literary cousin of Anne of Green Gables, an orphan who brings joy and laughter wherever she goes.

Were "Heidi" written today, the beginning would probably have been darker, focusing on trauma and victimhood.

Five-year-old Heidi's, whose parents had suddenly died a few years back, is abandoned by her aunt (who no longer wants to care for her) at a remote cabin where her depressed, angry grandfather lives.

The writing has a much lighter mood than a modern novel dealing with such topics would use.

"The thought that his life might end instantly, explosively, in a fraction of a second, scared a stillness into him h knew would be with him the rest of his life" (89)