Tag Archives: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Over on Reddit they had an interesting discussion regarding negative book reviews (you can check it out here) and it reminded me of my own personal book review horror story.

As an independent author, I very much appreciate and love when readers take time to review my books. Thankfully, the bulk of the reviews have been positive and, again, I so very much appreciate it.

However, there was this one time I had a review on Amazon.com for one of my novels that really set me off.

While I don’t have the exact quote (I’ll explain in a moment) the reviewer stated something to the effect of: “This was not the book I wanted to order” and gave my novel a 1 star review.

The reason I don’t have the exact quote is because I wrote to Amazon and requested they remove this review.

What the reviewer was essentially saying was that they somehow mistakenly ordered my book instead of whatever they wanted, were pissed off -I can only suppose!- that my book was out there confusing them, and therefore I deserved a 1 star review for being a pain in the ass… or something.

I told Amazon.com that the review made no sense. They were not reviewing my actual product but were somehow upset by their own actions and were taking my book down (the overall stars went down as the book had just been released and had few reviews) with their 1 star review.

To give credit to Amazon, they took the review down.

But I know there are many other bad reviews out there that make no sense.

Perhaps the one I see far too often involve giving 1 star reviews for delivery of books, where the package is mauled or wet or the book is damaged in transit… and that somehow is the fault of the author of the book how?

Ah well.

Curtain (1975) a (very) Belated Review

Published in 1975, Agatha Christie’s Curtain, featuring the last case of her most famous creation, Hercule Poirot, is a novel that I’ve read before and, to this day and after reading it again (perhaps for the third or so time), bewilders, amuses, amazes, and frustrates me, almost all in equal measure.

Curtain (Hercule Poirot, #42) by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie wrote the book in the early 1940’s and while World War II was raging. She feared she wouldn’t make it through the war and decided to create a final tale for Hercule Poirot and put it in a lock box with the intention of having her heirs release it at some future date.

Of course, Agatha Christie survived the war and continued writing until her death in 1976 and, shortly before passing away, she authorized the release of Curtain, which wound up being the final book released while she was still alive (there was another book, Sleeping Murder, which was her last written work and which was released posthumously).

Intriguingly, I’ve read the there was no attempt to revise the novel and it was released as Mrs. Christie wrote it back in the early 1940’s, even though its actual first publication was some thirty five years later.

In this novel, we’re witnessing an elderly, frail Hercule Poirot, bedridden yet anxious to solve one last crime involving a mysterious man or woman he calls “X”, who may well be the most nefarious criminal he’s ever tangled with: The wo/man has had a hand in at least 5 different murders yet somehow is never suspected and, further, in all cases others are very clearly the murderer.

Yet, Poirot insists to his companion/Watson/narrator Arthur Hastings, this “X” is clearly the puppet master and the one who caused the murders… and is about to commit another.

The story takes place in Styles Court, the same location Agatha Christie’s first novel (and first Poirot novel) The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) took place.

Thus the proverbial circle closes, with our Belgian detective and his right hand man, now some 25 years or so later, come together one last time to solve one last mystery.

Agatha Christie would write several Poirot novels after Curtain and, while this novel does make mention of previous books/mysteries Poirot was involved in, there are no mention of the novels that came afterwards. Further, Christie, no doubt realizing the novel would be released in some unknown future date, kept any real world events/technologies to a minimum. We get no descriptions of vehicles, for example, and the entire story takes place in its one setting, isolated from any other locations.

I said above that the novel bewilders, amuses, amazes, and frustrates me and I mean what I said.

The story itself is somewhat typical Agatha Christie: Once again we have a clever murder story which (as is typical of Mrs. Christie), the murderer is the person the reader least suspects.

Mrs. Christie made a literal king’s fortune out of her ability to present her story, then build up our suspicions on this character or that, sometimes hitting us with red herrings, before often shocking us with the surprising murderer.

This is very much the case in Curtain!

But the novel frustrates me at times, too. The plot, once all is said and done, is almost too clever for its own good. Both Poirot and our “X” are engaging in such a high level game of chess that can only exist in a novel and not in real life.

This is a common complaint, by the way, I have of Agatha Christie’s stories: If you take a cold look at the plot, you realize there are so many things that have to fall into place for the story to work that its an impossibility.

However…

The books are so damn well written and Curtain is yet another example of Agatha Christie’s incredible talents.

The book itself, compared to some tomes (looking at you, Stephen King) wastes no time getting going and has almost no fat at all to wade through. Each word, sentence, paragraph, and page present something interesting for the reader to read, and you’re so involved in the book you don’t notice some of the absurdities until well after you’ve come to the wrapup.

Interestingly, Agatha Christie chose to end the novel not unlike (you’re not going to believe this in a million years) And Then There Were None. If you’ve been reading my ramblings for the past few weeks, I’ve noted how I’ve been in a weird And Then There Were None temporal/spatial trap (read all about it starting here, continuing here, surprising me here, and then ending with my review of the famous novel here!).

Thinking about it some more, Curtain is in many ways very much like And Then There Were None, though to get into the details involves considerable spoilers (I’ll do that below).

If you’ve already read both novels, then by all means read what comes below but, if you haven’t and are curious to read these books, please DO NOT READ WHAT COMES AFTER THE SPOILER WARNING.

In sum, Curtain is another grade “A” Agatha Christie novel, slim and to the point yet entertaining as hell even as the story told is at times rather preposterous.

Highly recommended.

Now then…

SPOILERS FOLLOW!

I’M SERIOUS!

*****

STILL THERE???

*****

YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

*****

Let me start with the differences and then I’ll get to the similarities between And Then There Were None, what many consider Agatha Christie’s best novel (I can’t say I disagree!) and Curtain.

And Then There Were None involves a group of 10 people called to a secluded island under false pretenses who realize they’re trapped and accused of murder. In the course of the book, one after the other is in turned killed and those who remain become suspicious of each other, thinking they could be the murderer.

In Curtain, we have a group of 13 people at Styles Court -not trapped- who are enjoying their country vacation (or working, in the case of a few of them) with Poirot aware that one of them is a mastermind murderer targeting the others.

In And Then There Were None, the reader suspects everyone even as they do as well. We have a couple of semi-clear protagonists, but with each murderer, anxiety and suspense rise.

In Curtain, we have, in the end, “only” 3 deaths, two of which are considered by everyone but Hastings and Poirot suicide and the last which is Hercule Poirot’s death… which may well have been by natural causes.

And Then There Were None has all the murders being obviously that. In Curtain, the deaths are obviously more devious.

Those are the differences.

Now the similarities:

In both And Then There Were None and Curtain, we’re dealing with a master manipulator/murderer. Both novels feature masterminds and, in the end of And Then There Were None, the murderer is indeed the one we “least suspect” (a trademark of Agatha Christie) because it is someone we thought already dead.

In Curtain, there are two killers: our Mister (as I said, SPOILERS) “X” and… Hercule Poirot himself.

Mister X tries, as we find out in the end of the novel, to kill three different people. He’s thwarted, we find in the end, by one of the manipulated people missing his shot (or perhaps sanity prevailed before the murderous impulse was let loose), while in another Poirot defused the situation. In the third case, one of the cast of characters is indeed murdered but it was because of confusion on the part of others, and this character’s death is labeled a suicide in the end.

The final murder is that of Mister X, and that death is also ruled a suicide because it is in a locked room with no possibility of anyone else having done it…

…which, of course, turns out not to be the case. For the “invalid” Hercule Poirot, with no way to stop this mastermind killer, created the illusion to others that he was a total invalid and confronted Mister X, drugged him to sleep, then put him in his room, shot him in the forehead, left the man’s door key in his pocket, and with a duplicate key, locked the door from the outside and returned to his room.

Everyone thought Mister X killed himself and Poirot himself is found dead the next day of natural causes. Or, perhaps, he purposely didn’t take his heart medication, knowing this would end his life after he -the one person we least suspected of murder- actually committed the murder.

Like And Then There Were None, Curtain ends with our murderer (in this case Poirot), writing a declaration of everything that happened and explaining what he did in the story. He, like the killer in And Then There Were None, is dead and this is his declaration and explanation.

The only reason this exists, by the way, is to give readers a resolution of the story. For if either book didn’t have these declarations, they would be left in the dark as to what exactly happened.

It’s not unusual for authors to reuse certain concepts and when you write as prolifically as Mrs. Christie did, its bound to happen.

Still, it was interesting to see her using the “written last testament” ideal found in And Then There Were None used again in Curtain to give us this finality to the story.

The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie (1936), a belated review

I admire the hell out of author Agatha Christie.  In her lifetime she released an almost obscene amount of novels (66) and short story collections (14) many of which, today, are considered classics in the crime/mystery genre.

During her lifetime she also created not one but two very famous “sleuths” to inhabit many of her novels.  The more well known of the two, Hercule Poirot (the other is Miss Marple), appeared in 33 of those 66 novels and some 50 short stories.  Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot is a detective with an intelligence that is superior to those around him.  He makes all the connections between crime and murderer and solves crimes that leave all others baffled.  Curiously, also like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie grew to hate the character of Poirot, though unlike Mr. Doyle reserved the “last” Poirot case, Curtain, for release in 1975 (Mrs. Christie would pass away in 1976).

Over the Holidays, Amazon.com offered many books for sale.  Among them were several Agatha Christie novels, some of which I read and others which I didn’t.  I think I read her 1936 Poirot novel The A.B.C. Murders many, many years ago.  However, if I did, I recalled no details so reading this book was, essentially, like reading it for the first time.

The ABC Murders: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot series Book 13) by [Christie, Agatha]

The book is the 13th to feature Mr. Poirot in the lead and it is an interesting book to read, though because of my familiarity with Mrs. Christie’s writing style I found some of the bigger surprises not quite as surprising, I suspect, as most virgin Agatha Christie readers might find them.

To begin, the mystery presented is different from some of the usual Agatha Christie affairs.  Hercule Poirot, living in London, receives a strange letter from someone who signs it “A.B.C.”  The person states s/he will kill someone in a certain town (the town’s name begins with the letter “A”) and dares Hercule Poirot to find and stop him/her.

The police wonder if the letter is written by some crank and Hercule Poirot hopes this is the case while clearly worried it is not.  To make a long story short, a murder is committed and the victim’s last name also begins with an “A”.  Then a second letter arrives, indicating the next victim, who will have a “B” in their last name, will be found in a town that begins with the letter “B”.

What’s fascinating about this novel is that many of the Agatha Christie novels I’m familiar with tend to be murder mysteries revolving around a set of characters and this novel and this one hints at the possibility of Hercule Poirot going up against a serial killer.

What is even more fascinating, I found, is that at one point Mr. Poirot states something along the lines of wanting to get into “the killer’s mind”, a big plot device used very effectively nearly a half century later by Thomas Harris in his Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs novels, both of which were eventually made into very good movies (I refer to the Michael Man directed Red Dragon adaptation Manhunter rather than the remake done post Silence of the Lambs).

As I read the novel, I was fascinated by how well Mrs. Christie writes.  She manages to say a lot with very little, often allowing the dialogue to propel the story along and giving us tasty hints as to what characters are all about.  I particularly enjoyed the way the character of Thora Grey was presented.  MILD SPOILERS In the end, the character was revealed to be a gold-digger and her plans fell by the wayside.  I suspect in other author’s hands the character would have been presented as much more nasty but Agatha Christie manages to show us the relative good in her even as she’s revealed to be a calculating woman.

Unfortunately and as I mentioned above, being familiar with Agatha Christie’s writing style, some of the bigger surprises the book offers didn’t surprise me as much as I would have hoped, though I would easily recommend this book to anyone interested in sampling Mrs. Christie’s novels.

To get into that, I’m going to have to get into some bigger…

SPOILERS

Still there?  Again, if you want to read the novel, I strongly urge you to look away from what I’m going to talk about.  Beware!

Still there, redux?

You’ve been warned!

The A.B.C. Murders tries to make us think we’re dealing with Hercule Poirot going up against a mad serial killer yet almost from the very first page I knew there had to be more to the story.  Again, I may have read the story before many, many years ago, so maybe its not so much that I’m clever but rather that I had details of the plot buried deep in my subconscious.

Regardless, from the moment we deal with the idea of a possible mad serial killer taunting Hercule Poirot, I somehow knew the murders he’d face were a distraction and that this whole effort to present the idea of a serial killer was, in reality, an effort to hide one particular murder.

Once you’ve put yourself in that frame of mind, as I did early in the novel, it was clear which of the murders (there are four in total), was “the” one.  It was easy to figure out as it was the murder that others had the most to gain from.  As in money.  Three of the victims came from simple means and one was a wealthy person who would leave behind quite a bit of money.

Once I determined the murders were a diversion, and this was well before that victim was named, I started looking for the clues to whodunnit and why.  It became a simple bit of deduction on my part and there were only two possible candidates for the role.  However, this was also where parts of the novel started to stretch credulity.

The idea of presenting us with a bogus “mad” killer is all good and well, but when you have an actual character presented in the book who is being framed for this, a character who is absolutely perfect for the frame (he’s a WWI vet who suffers from blackouts and therefore isn’t even certain if he committed some of the crimes), you begin to wonder just how much free time the real murderer had to a) find the patsy, b) plan out the elaborate charade, and c) commit the actual murders without being found out until getting to the one that was the true victim.

As entertainment, The A.B.C. Murders is nonetheless an enjoyable, entertaining novel whose biggest flaw is that it hopes readers will accept all the above and not question it…at least not too much.

While at times preposterous because of this, The A.B.C. Murders is nonetheless worth checking out.

Black Money (1966) a very belated book review

Fashioning myself something of a writer, there are several authors out there whose work I greatly admire and keep circling back to in awe and for inspiration.  A partial list of some of the best of the best, IMHO of course, include Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Joseph Conrad, Isaac Asimov, and Raymond Chandler.  This is but the tip of the iceberg.

Without getting too far afield, I also really, really like the Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald. (pen name for Kenneth Millar, 1915-1983).  The 18 Lew Archer novels (there were also a handful of short stories) appeared between 1949 (The Moving Target) and 1976 (The Blue Hammer).  While the first few novels were decent enough, Mr. Macdonald/Millar really hit his stride quickly, soon producing one excellent novel after another (the only one that disappointed me was the very last Archer novel, The Blue Hammer.  Mr. Millar would ultimately succumb to Alzheimer’s disease and I suspect that this last published novel was marred to some degree by the early stages of that terrible disease).

As damn good as the Lew Archer series is, I suspect today’s audiences don’t know all that much about these books.  If they do, it may be because of two Paul Newman films, 1966’s Harper (The Lew Archer character name was changed to Lew Harper for the screen but the film was indeed based on the first Archer novel, The Moving Target) and 1975’s The Drowning Pool (based on the second Lew Archer novel of the same name).

While Harper is considered something of a classic (you can read my belated review of that film here), The Drowning Pool isn’t quite as good, IMHO.

The character of Lew Archer would also appear in television shows and on the radio yet, as mentioned above, I suspect not all that many people today know about the books.

Why is that?

Perhaps one of the reasons is because the Lew Archer character and the stories he is in are so very, very derivative of Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe books.  If one is less kind, one would say Mr. Macdonald/Miller were straight out simply trying to make more Phillip Marlowe books.  Derivative or not, if one can put that aside you’re in for a treat as the Lew Archer novels are incredibly rich works of detective fiction.

The reason I mention all this is because the Coen Brothers (FargoThe Big Lebowski, No Country For Old Men, etc. etc.) recently announced that one of their next projects is a film adaptation of the 13th, and what many, including author Macdonald/Millar, feels is the best of the Lew Archer novels, Black Money. (for the record, my favorite Archer novel is the book that preceded Black Money by a couple of years, 1964’s The Chill).

When I heard the Coens were interested in making Black Money, I tried to recall the novel but given all the years since I read it I couldn’t.  Luckily, I have almost every one of the Archer novels so I headed to one of my bookshelves, picked the book up, and gave it a spin.

And what an enjoyable experience it was.

While The Chill still remains my favorite Archer novel, Black Money proved yet another well written work of detective fiction complete with well defined characters, tragedy, murder, and more than a few red herrings.  Macdonald/Millar had a knack for writing works that appeared deceptively spare yet had a great depth to them.  The novel is indeed short and consists mostly of dialogue between characters yet is packed with interesting scenarios and events.  Some are quite humorous while others are very dark.

The plot, briefly, involves Lew Archer being hired to check up on a supposed ex-pat in hiding Frenchman temporarily residing at an exclusive Californian Tennis Club and romancing a young woman who also resides there.  The man hiring Archer loves and wants to marry this woman and feels, as do several others at the club, that the Frenchman is a fraud.

To reveal much more than this would be a crime (pun slightly intended), but suffice it to say that things get very twisty from here on out and the past and present collide alongside characters who have hidden agendas.

As enjoyable as the novel was, and I certainly recommend it along with the other Archer books to anyone who likes the works of Raymond Chandler, I admit to being a little worried as to how/if it can be successfully adapted into a movie.

Again, this novel consists mostly of dialogue (which is more than fine) between Archer and the various people he encounters but, frankly, there is little actual action to be found.  Obviously the film will be promoted as a work of detective fiction, but I worry people may find the lack of said action a detriment.  And adding -or expanding- on whatever action there is for the sake of creating some exciting scenes may alter, perhaps for the worse, the film/book’s story.

Having said that and given their success rate, if there’s anyone that can make this work it would be the Coens.

So, if you’re a fan of the Coen brothers and want to get a jump on one of their next projects or if you’re a fan of good detective novels, give Black Money a try.  Just be warned: You may be tempted to look up all the other Archer books afterwards.