Yesterday I had a feeling there was something else. I was not so lame as to only read 2 books in a month and a half. (Can’t believe I totally missed July.) I also read Agatha Christie’s Third Girl. The title comes from the concept of sharing expensive apartments in London – a young, working woman and a friend would get an apartment and then they’d need a third girl. It is a Poirot mystery with a completely unbelievable solution, but Mrs. Oliver always amuses me. I never get tired of Christie essentially satirizing herself, or at least herself as famous author, hating the detective she invented on a whim and has had to live with ever since. There is something about later Christie that never quite works as well as Christie between the wars, and probably up to the 50s. She moved with the times, it’s always around the year she wrote, so there are young working women and artists and drugs, but somehow it always worked better for me in an isolated old mansion with silver chafing pots keeping breakfast hot for all the guests in the morning, minus the ones who’d just been killed.
Not the cover I had, but much better. Honestly, I begin to think cover art is a lost art. Maybe because of ebooks. I did read an ebook, but it still had a cover of a door open and a shadow stretching into a room. Yaaaaawwwn. Knives and numbers and peacock feathers much better. Anyhoo, it starts with the third girl in an apartment visiting Poirot because she thinks she may have killed someone. Then she bugs out without saying more because Poirot is Too Old. This, naturally, wounds Poirot’s amour propre and he goes to see his friend Ariadne Oliver for some comfort. It turns out Mrs. Oliver was the one who recommended this girl see Poirot to begin with so tracking her down becomes much easier. Finding the crime is much more difficult and the book is entertaining enough as you read until you get to the end and think, yeah, no way. I can’t, of course, tell you why without giving the whole game away. I would say this is probably only for Christie completists. Or fans of Mrs. Oliver as she’s in fine form.
ravenscroftcloud 