At the begining of the month my wife and I hit the big book fair in St. Louis. There choices for our favorites were limited, so we decided to try increasing our collection of enjoyable mysteries.
And what better mystery writer was there than Agatha Christie? Probably many, but with classics like Murder on the Orient Express, and 10 Little Indians, we realized we couldn't go wrong.
$70+ dollars later (at an average of $1.00 per book) we had bought ourselves a wonderful paperback collection of Agatha Christies.
I grabbed one at random to read. Its title, "They Came to Bahgdad."
Was I ever surprised. Writen in 1949, this was not a murder mystery. It was one of the first Spy novels I've ever heard of. At least one of the first Cold War spy novels. It discusses an American/Soviet war as inevitable.
It also captures several of the basics that will be repeated in things like James Bond. It has mysterious superpowerful organizations bent on world domination. It has agents undercover, using drop boxes to communicate.
It also relies too much on luck and chance, but that is an Agatha Christie tradition I think.
It also has Iraq as one of its main stars. It ads a whole, unintentional, level to the book when I read the names Kuwait, Kirkuk, Musal, and Fallujah. One character even mentions the phrase, "What safer place could he be than in the holy city of Karbala." Then the radio talks of the most recent fire fight there.
There is also some discussion of Archeology, the heroine taking on the guise of a photographer at an Iraqi dig. Only later did I discover that Agatha Christie's husband was an Archeologist who did a lot of work in Iraq, and that Agatha Christie herself was the dig's photographer.
This little book that I bought as brain candy has been, well, so much more. I had to mention it here.
Posted by katharina (Member # 827) on :
Agatha Christie is NOT brain candy. The plots are disposable, but the characters and the observations of human nature are dead on. I love Agatha Christie.
I like that one. Posted by Elizabeth (Member # 5218) on :
Oooh, thank you. I love ANYTHING about Iraq. I have been a Sumer-head since high school. And I love mysteries.
Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
Hmm. I thought I had read all her stuff, but I don't remember that plot. I shall have to read (or reread, as the case may be) it ASAP.
Thanks, Dan. Posted by Leonide (Member # 4157) on :
*owns just about every Agatha Christie novel/short story ever written*
gotta agree with katharina's run-down of Christie's talents...pretty dead on.
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