My “thriller winter” studying theme continues, and this week I made a decision to show to the “Queen of Crime” herself: Agatha Christie.
I requested my sister, a whodunit connoisseur, for her suggestion. She immediately steered “The Homicide of Roger Ackroyd,” a Poirot thriller that many take into account to be Christie’s masterpiece. Not solely is the plot suitably twisty and the setting suitably typical (richest man in a sleepy village discovered murdered inside a locked room of his fancy home), however the characterizations are sharply hilarious. And the ultimate reveal, which exploits the conventions of the thriller style to ship a genuinely unconventional denouement, is proof of Christie’s ability.
Subsequent up was her 1941 thriller, “Evil Below the Solar,” set in a glamorous seaside lodge. It evokes the actual claustrophobia of many social novels, with the characters feeling surveilled and scrutinized as a result of they’re a part of the identical broader net of sophistication and society, even when they don’t really know one another. (For those who want a last-minute Christmas present and have a spare $19 million, the island and lodge that impressed the novel are on the market.)
Subsequent on my listing is “The Penguin Guide of Homicide Mysteries,” which The Instances’s crime critic guarantees is stuffed with “missed and underappreciated” gems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I even have my ordinary stack of political science and historical past books, however for the second, I’m going to depart them on my desk. I’ll be taking a break for the vacations, so The Interpreter will probably be off for the following couple of weeks. And whereas I normally discover that type of studying participating and enjoyable, I’m feeling extra of a necessity than ordinary to disconnect from the information and its historic antecedents. So no less than for the following few days, I’ll be in fiction-only mode.
Blissful New Yr to all of you, and thanks for studying, emailing, and in any other case being a part of the fantastic Interpreter neighborhood. See you in January.
Reader responses: Books that you just suggest
Shava Nerad, a reader in Arlington, Mass. recommends “When Victims Turn out to be Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda,” by Mahmood Mamdani:
I’m rereading this due to the dynamics of the Israel/Gaza battle. It’s an evaluation of the Rwandan genocide with lots of ideas on human nature and dehumanizing neighbors. Laborious learn — however price it.
