Grace's PRABE week 8
Week 8: The Complete Miss Marple Short Stories by Agatha Christie (published by London’s The Folio Society, 2003)
Ah, good ol’ British detective fiction! Jolly Good! (I gotta put this phrase in here though it is irrelevant to what I’m saying :-D)
But! Here’s my confession - I’m actually not a big fan of Agatha Christie’s works EXCEPT for her Miss Marple series. I don’t think I can relate to Hercule Poirot, probably because a) he’s a man and b) he speaks French. Yes I gotta say this here, it is frustrating for a reader of detective stores to read French (even if it doesn’t show up very often) when the reader don’t know any French. I mean, what if I’m missing an important plot point?!
I’m digressing a whole lot here so I won’t put in all my rambling thoughts except for this - I was just thinking that they didn’t showcase any of Christie’s work in the opening ceremony of the Olympics, even though according to Wikipedia (who got this source from the Guinness books for world records) she is the “best-selling novelist of all time.” Anyway.
Another confession - I don’t think I have a whole lot to say about this book either. Not that the book isn’t good, it is, I think I’ll need to reread it again so I can come up with more thoughts about it. I think it’s a good sign that I want to re-read it, because I enjoy re-reading books I like and usually during one of my re-reads I discover something new.
Now, a note of pride here. Since most of Christie’s detective stories are whodunit puzzles, I felt proud of myself that I actually figured out ONE of the murderer in a story! I attribute this small victory to all the other detective stories I’ve read (which aren’t much, I actually don’t read many of them except for Miss Marple and Dorothy Sayers’s works). When I read this one story “The Idol House of Astarte,” I thought to myself: “hmm…in stories like this, the person who approaches the victim first is actually the one who did it…” and lo and behold, I was right!
Oh, and I just remembered this too. Another contributing factor to my figuring out the clue is actually from watching and read Detective Conan. Who would have thought a Japanese manga and anime from my youth would have had such a lasting impression?
Ah, good ol’ British detective fiction! Jolly Good! (I gotta put this phrase in here though it is irrelevant to what I’m saying :-D)
But! Here’s my confession - I’m actually not a big fan of Agatha Christie’s works EXCEPT for her Miss Marple series. I don’t think I can relate to Hercule Poirot, probably because a) he’s a man and b) he speaks French. Yes I gotta say this here, it is frustrating for a reader of detective stores to read French (even if it doesn’t show up very often) when the reader don’t know any French. I mean, what if I’m missing an important plot point?!
I’m digressing a whole lot here so I won’t put in all my rambling thoughts except for this - I was just thinking that they didn’t showcase any of Christie’s work in the opening ceremony of the Olympics, even though according to Wikipedia (who got this source from the Guinness books for world records) she is the “best-selling novelist of all time.” Anyway.
Another confession - I don’t think I have a whole lot to say about this book either. Not that the book isn’t good, it is, I think I’ll need to reread it again so I can come up with more thoughts about it. I think it’s a good sign that I want to re-read it, because I enjoy re-reading books I like and usually during one of my re-reads I discover something new.
Now, a note of pride here. Since most of Christie’s detective stories are whodunit puzzles, I felt proud of myself that I actually figured out ONE of the murderer in a story! I attribute this small victory to all the other detective stories I’ve read (which aren’t much, I actually don’t read many of them except for Miss Marple and Dorothy Sayers’s works). When I read this one story “The Idol House of Astarte,” I thought to myself: “hmm…in stories like this, the person who approaches the victim first is actually the one who did it…” and lo and behold, I was right!
Oh, and I just remembered this too. Another contributing factor to my figuring out the clue is actually from watching and read Detective Conan. Who would have thought a Japanese manga and anime from my youth would have had such a lasting impression?