Tag Archives: I try to solve an Agatha Christie mystery

2023 Recap: My Year with Christie

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In 2023, inspired by booktuber emmie’s mission to solve The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and the dozens of other similar booktuber videos since, I decided to try my own hand at outsmarting the Queen of Crime. Based on my blog recaps, I’ve done 10!

And how did I fare? Ahem…

  • The Moving Finger (Miss Marple) – no, not even close, alas
  • At Bertram’s Hotel (Miss Marple) – kinda? I figured out whodunnit, and parts of the howdunnit and whydunnit, so a half-victory rounded up to a win?
  • Cards on the Table (Hercule Poirot) – LOL no. But at least I was close. And honestly, this was so much fun to try to solve!
  • Murder in Mesopotamia (Hercule Poirot) – LOL, not even close. But kudos to Dame Agatha; this big reveal made me yell so loud I scared my cat away.
  • A Caribbean Mystery (Miss Marple) – nope, and this made me shake my head because the key clue seemed so obvious after the fact. This has also become one of my favourite Marples and overall Christies, because of how deliciously twisty it is.
  • Peril at End House (Hercule Poirot) – YES I DID!!! FINALLY!!! And not even in a half-victory-I-kinda-figured-stuff-out way, but in a full-blown YES I GOT IT victory! Woohoo!
  • Five Little Pigs (Hercule Poirot) – YES I’M ON A ROLL!!!! I must say, solving one of these is such a fantastic high!
  • Evil Under the Sun (Hercule Poirot) – And so my streak ends. No, I was not even close on this. Bah. How the mighty have fallen…
  • Hallowe’en Party (Hercule Poirot) – Yes, but this victory felt more puzzling than victorious for some reason. Poirot turns a bit philosophical in this one, and some of his meanderings threw me off.
  • Honourable Mention: A Haunting in Venice, the movie (very loosely) adapted from Hallowe’en Party – I watched that in the theatre, and I DID solve it before the big reveal. So there! (Maybe that’s why solving the book version felt more puzzling than victorious? Because possibly some of the elements from the movie played a role in my solving the book?)
  • A Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple) – kinda, yes. I got the whodunnit and their motive, but the method was all wrong, and my guess about an accomplice was totally off-base. So yet another half-victory rounded up to a win?

And there we have it! Out of the 10 Agatha Christie books I tried to solve, I got 3 fully right, and 2 partially (mostly?) right. Plus I did solve the movie adaptation. And honestly, that’s actually far better than I thought I did! Woohoo!

Christie Finale for 2023

My final Christie book for 2023 was, fittingly, none other than Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. I last read it over a decade ago, and couldn’t remember whodunnit, so I started taking notes to try to solve it. But as I kept reading, I realized I knew a couple of key elements, including the significance a key clue from the crime scene. So I figured I remembered the story more than I thought, likely from seeing the Suchet adaptation, and the more the clues started to point towards a particular suspect, the more confident I became that I remembered the story in full.

Did I Know Whodunnit?

LOL, no, as it turns out, the person I was so sure was the killer turned out to be innocent, and the killer was someone who I never even suspected. So Christie managed to get a final knockout blow in and secure her utter and undisputed dominance as Queen of Crime and mystery puzzler extraordinaire before the end of the year.

But 2024 is a new year! And there are many, many more mysteries for my little grey cells to solve!

Honourable Mentions: Japanese Honkaku Mysteries and Dorothy L Sayers

  • New case, new writer, new detective notebook!
  • Ready to solve this case!

In an attempt to branch out beyond Agatha Christie (and really, soothe my ego by solving potentially simpler puzzles), I also tried my hand at solving Golden Age-inspired detective fiction from Japan and Christie’s Golden Age contemporary Dorothy L Sayers.

And how did I fare? Well…

  • The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji – LOL, no. My gut did lean towards the right answer, but my rational mind got in the way. I went with the answer that made sense but turned out to be wrong, so well done, Yukito Ayatsuji.
  • The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo – no, I didn’t, and worse: this mystery takes pride of place as the first story where I didn’t even realize the reveal was about to happen. I just kept reading and then accidentally learned the big reveal without meaning to. Still a good mystery, and I have a copy of another book in the series, The Inugami Curse, on standby for 2024.
  • Whose Body? (Lord Peter Wimsey) by Dorothy L Sayers.- yes, I did, but it didn’t carry the same thrill as solving a Christie. Sayers is pretty transparent about Lord Peter’s thought processes throughout, including all of his theories, so the big reveal was pretty obvious. That being said, I’ve since learned that Sayers was a very different kind of writer: she was less interested in creating a puzzle to be solved than in exploring / reflecting the social mores of her time. She’s an incredibly skilled writer, and while I didn’t enjoy this as much as Christie’s books, a blog commenter convinced me to try one of the later Wimsey books. So I have Gaudy Night on standby for 2024.

I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | A Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple)

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Okay, first of all, I’m 86% into this novel, and absolutely LOVING it! One of my favourite scenes in an Agatha Christie, bar none, is Miss Marple’s entrance about 40% through. First, she swans onto the Fortescue estate in a taxi:

So charming, so innocent, such a fluffy and pink and white old lady was Miss Marple that she gained admittance to what was now practically a fortress in a state of siege far more easily that could have been believed possible. Though an army of reporters and photographers were being kept at bay by the police, Miss Marple was allowed to drive in without question, so impossible would it have been to believe that she was anyone but an elderly relative of the family. [41%]

And then she reveals that she’s there not to investigate the suspicious deaths of the wealthy Mr and Mrs Fortescue, but rather that of their nervous, “rabbity” maid, Gladys, whom it turns out Miss Marple herself trained for the service.

“It was the clothes-peg that really worried me,” said Miss Marple in her gentle voice.

“The clothes-peg?”

“Yes. I read about it in the papers. I suppose it is true? That when she was found there was a clothes-peg clipped onto her nose?”

Pat nodded. The colour rose to Miss Marple’s pink cheeks

“That’s what made me so very angry, if you can understand, my dear. It was such a cruel, contemptuous gesture. It gave me a kind of picture of the murderer. To do a thing like that! It’s very wicked, you know, to affront human dignity. Particularly if you’ve already killed.” [42%]

I just LOVE this image of an elderly woman managing to get past police barricades because of her fluffy pink and whiteness. And then, to have all that fluff pull back to reveal an avenging angel set to get justice for a dearly cared for servant girl. How wonderful it is that the main victims for this killer are presumably the super wealthy husband and wife, and yet it is the naive and innocent maid whose death will bring about their downfall! These passages are Christie’s masterful pen at work, and I loved every second of it.

Now for the case:

The wealthy Rex Fortescue dies at work after drinking a cup of tea. Yet the poison, taxine, is slow-acting, indicating he must have ingested it while still at home. Oddly, his pocket is full of cereal, rye to be exact.

At first, Inspector Neele suspects Rex’s much younger second wife, Adele, who is beautiful and glamorous, and also having an affair. Yet she’s the next to turn up dead, of cyanide poisoning in her tea. Then finally, Gladys’ body is found; she may have witnessed something about Rex’s murder.

Tying all three together is the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” which includes a pocket full of rye, a queen dead after eating bread and honey, and a maid whose nose is pecked off by a bird. The nursery rhyme also features blackbirds, which may provide a clue to the killer’s motive.

As for suspects, there’s a whole household full of them. There are Rex’s three children with his first wife: eldest son Percival, main heir to his father’s business; black sheep son Lancelot, who was summoned back home after Rex and Percival had a falling out, and daughter Elaine, who was in love with a man her father disapproved of. There are also the respective romantic partners: Percival’s quiet and lonely wife Jennifer; Lancelot’s independently wealthy wife Pat; and Gerald, Elaine’s communist ex-lover who left when Rex threatened to disinherit her, and returned after Rex was killed. And of course, the servants: cool and efficient head maid Mary Dove, whom Inspector Neele describes as almost performing her name; grouchy butler Mr Crump, and his grouchy wife, whose talent as a chef keeps them both employed. There’s also Vivian Dubois, the man Adele was having an affair with, and possibly the women working at Rex’s office.

Upon much reflection, I’ve narrowed down my suspect list to two key players. Per usual, I’ll type it out below, and check back in to see how I did!

Did I Solve It?

Kinda? I figured out the mastermind behind the murders, and I figured out their motive. But I got the method wrong, and my guess on an accomplice was totally off-base. There were a couple of clues that I skimmed past that turned out to be significant (or rather, I figured they may be important, but couldn’t figure out how, so I forgot about them); and at least one major clue I thought was significant but turned out to be nothing.

So, technically, this is a win, because I did figure out whodunnit and why. But I missed so many of the details that I feel only semi-victorious.

And, honestly, I’m happy about it. Because the big reveal I did not guess made me gasp out loud, and question everything I thought I knew about this case. And that, to me, is the hallmark of the most satisfying Christie mysteries.

Plus, of course, Miss Marple as a fluffy and pink and white avenging angel = sheer perfection!

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

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I Try to Solve an Agatha Christie Mystery | Hallowe’en Party (Hercule Poirot)

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I’d given up on trying to solve Hallowe’en Party, because I couldn’t wait any longer to see the Kenneth Brannagh film adaptation A Haunting in Venice. But when I started reading the book again, I realized that the story was so drastically different that the motives and circumstances behind the crime, and possibly also the murderer, must be different in the book.

So, flush with my success in solving the movie version of this mystery, I decided to try my hand at the book. I’ll admit that my first attempt in trying to read this book and solve this mystery gave me a bit of a headache. Not only did we not know who the murderer was, we also didn’t know who their original victim must have been!

See, in the book version, Joyce Reynolds isn’t a psychic medium hired to channel the spirit of Rowena Drake’s dead daughter. Rather, she was a thirteen year old child who claims to have witnessed a murder a few years ago, but didn’t realize it was a murder until only recently. So when she turns up dead in the bucket used for bobbing for apples, it seems reasonable to assume that she was killed by whomever had committed that first murder, to keep her from revealing their identity.

Except that Joyce never actually said whose death was actually a murder, and so the next few chapters have Hercule Poirot basically compiling a list of mysterious deaths in the area over the past few years. The list of suspects, potential victims, and potential murders kept growing, and as much as I tried to keep track with my handy dandy notebook, my head hurt with trying to figure out what’s actually important information versus what’s just noise. It’s only on my second attempt to read it, and after watching the movie, that I think I managed to get some of the information straight.

There’s a shop assistant Charlotte Benfield who was killed on a footpath, and her two ex-lovers are suspects. There’s a schoolteacher Janet White who was killed on another footpath, who told her flatmate (and possible lover?) that there’s a man she was worried about.

There’s also a wealthy widow, Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, who died of heart failure. Interesting note here is that her will had a handwritten codicil leaving everything to her au pair, Olga Seminoff. The codicil was later determined a forgery, Olga goes missing (but keeps writing letters to a friend for at least six months after), and Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe’s estate instead goes to her niece and nephew, Rowena Drake and her husband. (Like the movie, Rowena also hosted the Halloween party. And I don’t think the movie covered her husband, but here, he was disabled and died in a car accident.)

There’s also Lesley Ferrier, who was knifed in the back. He’s a notorious womanizer and the general consensus is that the husband of one of his lovers killed him, but he also worked at the law firm representing Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe’s estate, so hmm…

Poirot also seems really interested in Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe’s sunken garden, which she created with the aid of Michael Garfield, a handsome landscape architect. She left him the garden and a house as long as he kept it up for visitors to enjoy, but it seems he sold it to someone else? There’s also a scene that gives me weird vibes, where Michael sketches a 13-year-old girl, Miranda, who was Joyce’s best friend. She keeps asking where the wishing well is in the garden, and Michael tells Poirot he pretends there is one for her sake, but there really isn’t; there used to be a lucky tree but it was struck down by lightning. Anyway, the creepy vibes I got were from the adult man just randomly sketching a young girl and saying she’s someone he wouldn’t forget even when he moves away. Eww?

Back to the mystery: which death did Joyce witness and recognize only later as murder? Who was the murderer? And given that barely anyone at the party paid Joyce’s story any attention, why even bother killing her over it? And perhaps some of these stories are just noise, but perhaps also some of them are relevant. How?

This book is far twistier and more convoluted than the movie adaptation, for all the ghosts and jump scares Brannagh added in. I have a wild guess, but my gut is that my guess is far more convoluted than the solution actually is.

Did I Solve It?

Huh, I actually did. Or rather, I solved a chunk of it, and the remaining pieces of the puzzle were only possibilities I mentioned in passing but didn’t actually bother to consider in full. So, not quite feeling like it’s cause for a full celebration, but more feeling confused that I actually did figure most of it out. That’s pretty cool.

This is such a twisty Christie, and I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. I do appreciate how it confused the heck out of me, but also, I’m not sure I enjoyed her writing in this quite so much as in some of her earlier books. Poirot’s observations get a bit philosophical / poetic / flowery at times, and he makes some off-the-wall observations that feel Marple-esque but don’t quite work as well with him. Possibly all part of Poirot being older in these stories, but I think I prefer his earlier mysteries.

*** SPOILERS BELOW ***

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