Search Results for: monogram murders

The Monogram Murders

July 18, 2015 by Elizabeth

The question that kept occurring to me while reading Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders was not who but why? The novel came out last year, but the paperback version was just published. So probably many of you have already heard about it or perhaps already read it. Sophie Hannah writes super-creepy domestic thrillers, books that will keep you up late at night wondering if the woman’s husband can possibly be that evil or if she’s insane, or what really happened to the first baby? She’s a terrific writer and I can see why, given that someone somewhere decided the world needed another Hercule Poirot book, she was chosen to write it. The question, as I pointed out, is why? Or to put it a different way, does the world really need another Hercule Poirot book, now that his creator is dead and has been since 1976?

Perhaps it won’t surprise you that I’m going to posit that the answer is no. Because Poirot is not Hannah’s creation, and in her hands he’s somewhat lifeless. The Monogram Murders reads like a puzzle. One could argue that Christie herself, in spite of her greatness and the awe with which her name is generally treated, did in fact write some books that read more like puzzles than like living breathing characters, and I would agree. But that’s not the point. It’s very hard to write someone else’s character–you’re worried constantly about getting the voice and mannerisms right, and as a result the character is either false or lifeless. Hannah falls into the second error. Others who have tried (Jill Paton Walsh trying to channel Dorothy Sayers springs to mind) have fallen into the first, where Walsh’s Lord Peter and Lady Harriet are just wrong. I haven’t read Sebastian Faulks attempt to do Jeeves but I’ve heard similar complaints. And my personal opinion is, don’t even try. Yes we’re all sorry not to have more of (insert favorite dead author here). But, in case you haven’t noticed, that is life. Get used to disappointment.

However, Sophie Hannah is a terrific writer and she’s done as good a job as could possibly be done. The Monogram Murders has a very good plot, a puzzle as good as anything created by Dame Agatha herself. Poirot himself animates the mannerisms and ticks we’ve come to expect from him, and he has a new hapless sidekick, Edward Catchpool of Scotland Yard, who happens to live at the boarding house where Poirot has come to spend a quiet month. He’s duller than Hastings (Poirot’s companion in many of Christie’s books) and, for a policeman, has a strange aversion to dealing with dead bodies that I felt never came into its own as a literary device.

The book starts out terrifically. A woman, frantic, upset, comes into the coffee shop where Poirot habitually takes his evening meal on Thursdays. She announces to him that she is going to be dead soon and that she deserves it, that it needs to happen for justice to be done. Later that night, Poirot discovers that 3 people have in fact been murdered, their bodies laid out neatly in the rooms of a nearby hotel. Each one has a monogrammed cufflink placed in their mouths with the initials PJI on them. And something the woman in the coffee shop said seems to point out a connection, and imply that she is to be the fourth victim.

Poirot sets out to find her, to find the connections between the 3 victims, to find out who PJI is. The trail leads him to send Catchpool to a small village, where he befriends the vicar’s widow, finds out the backstory on the victims, and forms some rather strong opinions as well (much as Hastings would). Of course, only Poirot is brilliant enough to see through layers of deception and misleading clues to arrive at the truth.

Overall it’s not a bad book at all. If you like Christie you may well enjoy it. The plot is good, the characters aren’t bad. It’s just that Sophie Hannah is a brilliant author. I’ve got her latest upstairs (it publishes in August) and I can’t wait to sit down with it. Whereas The Monogram Murders was adequate, fine, but not up to either her usual work or Agatha Christie’s. And it’s always a bad sign when you’ve written a book, but someone else’s name dominates the cover!

Closed Casket

September 21, 2016 by Elizabeth

Closed Casket is Sophie Hannah’s second foray into the world created by beloved mystery author Agatha Christie, and I think she’s very brave to even try. Hannah stands on her own as an excellent author of really creepy domestic thrillers (curious? Here are a couple of my reviews on her books The Other Woman’s House and Kind of Cruel) in which no one is sure who’s going insane and who is just unadulterated evil. So when the estate of Agatha Christie decided to try and revive Hercule Poirot, her famous Belgian detective who surely needs no introduction to readers of a website about books, they turned to Hannah to do so.

Like in her first Poirot book, Monogram Murders (linked to my review), Hannah tells things from the point of view of a new sidekick for Hercule Poirot–a policeman named Edward Catchpool. I think she’s modeled him on Christie’s character of Captain Hastings, Poirot’s slow and stupid sidekick, and one of my least favorite of Christie’s characters. Pretty much anyone that Hastings admires is certain to be a villain. Catchpool is much more subtly drawn and sympathetic. He’s much younger than Poirot and looks up to him.

The novel opens with the duo visiting the Irish country home of Lady Athelinda Playford, the popular children’s author, who has recently dropped a bombshell on her lawyer. She has decided to disinherit her two children in favor of her secretary, who is a dying invalid under the care of a round-the-clock nurse. She won’t tell Poirot and Catchpool why they’re invited, but Poirot is suspicious. Does Athelinda expect a murder? She certainly seems to.

A murder does occur, and it’s up to Poirot and Catchpool to deal with the recalcitrant local police, research the dead man’s past, and in other ways look for clues. Because it doesn’t make sense to kill this particular man, and the witness who stumbled upon the body has a story that also makes no sense.

Hannah is growing in her ability to recreate Christie’s world, but she still has a ways to go. Poirot reads like a series of ticks and mannerisms, rather than like a real character. He feels very wooden. Catchpool is better, but still not as fleshed out as Hannah’s characters from her own books. Of course I have no complaints about the plot–Hannah is brilliant at creating puzzling mysteries and characters with motives that are beyond murky. Towards the end, I found myself really enjoying it, but I have to admit that those tended to be the parts without Poirot. An improvement, but I wish Hannah would go back to writing about women who might be insane and their evil, evil husbands.

A Summer of Agatha Christie: Read-along

June 8, 2014 by Elizabeth

I don’t know about you, but I first fell in love with mysteries with the stories of Agatha Christie, and I suspect I’m not alone. When I was in junior high, I began raiding my mother’s bookshelves of her Christie books, along with other favs like James Herriot and P.G. Wodehouse. And while I don’t often read Christie anymore, she retains a soft spot in my heart.

This September, a new Hercule Poirot mystery is arriving, written by Sophie Hannah, a current favorite of mine. (I’m working my way through her entire oeuvre at the moment, each one more delightfully creepy than the last.) I’m excited to read it, although it will be interesting to see how she manages to re-create another author’s characters.

Book Club Girl is celebrating both this latest addition to Poirot’s mental exploits and the 75th anniversary of his first book with a Christie read-along this summer. I’m going to participate, and I’d love to have you join me. Wouldn’t it be fun? Picture yourself, at a park or in your backyard, relaxing with a nice crisp mystery (as Wodehouse puts it).

The following details and instructions are from Book Club Girl’s website. Click on the link to officially sign up. If you do, please let me know in comments below. It’ll be fun to be in a virtual book club together.

The Agatha Christie read-along begins with a discussion of And Then There Were None, tied to the 75^th anniversary of the world’s best-selling mystery with more than 100 million copies sold!

The read-along will officially kick off June 30^th and run through the publication of The Monogram Murders this Fall (9/9).

Here’s a schedule of when I’ll post questions to discuss for each of the books:

June 30^th– And Then There Were None
July 30^th: Dead Man’s Folly, and we can discuss the book and the premiere of the movie adaptation on Masterpiece Mystery airing July 27^th.
September 2^nd: After the Funeral (be sure to pick up the new edition on sale August 5th with a foreword by Sophie Hannah explaining why this is her favorite Agatha Christie mystery)
October 6^th: The Monogram Murders, featuring a guest post by author Sophie Hannah

Later in October we’ll announce Sophie’s live Book Club Girl on Air chat!

How to sign-up? Write a post saying you’re signing up, grab the image above to post to your site and then paste a link to your post in the comments section below. Then tweet about your reading Agatha Christie all summer using #monogrammurders.

Our Summer of Agatha Christie: And Then There Were None

July 15, 2014 by Elizabeth

I was going to title this: “In Which I Am Unusually Flakey, Even For Me,” but I thought Jennifer might not like that.

Remember Book Club Girl’s Summer Read-Along? We (me and several of you) were going to read the books and join in the discussions both here and over at her website, starting June 30th which was, oh, two weeks ago now. I dutifully (and delightedly) read And Then There Were None in plenty of time, but on June 30th I was in a car (with air-conditioning, yes, thank you for asking) headed south from Oregon to California on a day where it was 109 degrees on the Siskyou Pass, and if you don’t think that’s unusual for late June, or actually for any time, it’s obvious you’re not from around here.

We visited my in-laws, and yes it went fine, thanks, but what with one thing and another, I completely forgot to follow up. I believe that a little procrastination is a good thing, and that it’s not too late at all. It’s not too late for you to join in either. Seriously, you can read a Christie book in an afternoon should you happen to have one that doesn’t involve bosses with ridiculous standards about amount of work finished, or children expecting things, as they do. It also works best if you don’t have that disease wherein you can’t read or relax if your house is messy.

I’ve read And Then There Were None before, years ago, but happily had managed to completely forget almost all of the plot, so I had no idea who was doing it. I did remember that it is one of her creepiest novels, very disturbing.

Below are Book Club Girl’s questions and my answers. Please play along in comments or over at Book Club Girl. (If you do that, please let us know here. Thanks)

1- When we first meet the “ten soldiers,” while they may not have been the best group of people, you don’t necessarily wish them ill will. As their pasts are revealed and their true personalities unmasked, did you feel any sympathy for them as a victim of the situation? Do you think that we, the readers, were predisposed to dislike certain characters more and feel sympathy for others?

Yes, I do. I think we’re predisposed to Vera initially, and to the married couple who serve the group. They seem innocuous. I think people tend to instinctively trust judges also. But we learn pretty early on that one of the characters is misrepresenting himself, and that seemed suspicious.

2- Each soldier was initially defined by their stature or position in life, did that change for any of them as the story progressed, or did they rely more on their roles off the island for survival?

I think it varied from character to character. Several recognized that they needed to use whatever skills they had at the time, and that it didn’t matter who or what station they had off the island. Others relied more on their past.

3- One of the themes present throughout And Then There Were None is guilt and the effect it can have on a person. How did each character deal with the guilt of their past crimes? Who handled it the best? And who was the most torn up from it?

This was the best part of the book for me. I thought Vera’s progression from denial to guilt-ridden was especially interesting. The judge, however, in many ways denied his guilt up to the end, justifying his original decision in his letter.

4- What did you think of the use of “Ten Little Soldiers” throughout the book, both the poem posted in the bedrooms and the little disappearing figurines on the dining room table? How do they both figure into the story? Do you think the reminder of the “Ten Little Soldiers” poem was necessary throughout the story?

I thought this was brilliant. Yes, the reminders were necessary–in fact, I went several times to the poem at the beginning of the book to see how the latest murder fit. And the figurines and poem were just so very creepy! They did a lot to create a sense of dread and of being doomed for the characters.

5- If you were trapped on Soldier Island, which character’s behavior would you most identify with and why? If not, what would you have done differently?

Oh please don’t ask me this! It’s going to give me nightmares. I suppose I most identified with Vera–certainly we see things most from her point of view, and she is most like me in class and situation, although I would like to stress that I have never caused the death of a child, although nannying was one of my college jobs. I don’t know what I would have done differently, and that’s distressing as I expect I would have died.

6- From the very beginning certain characters are drawn to each other to form alliances in their strange situation—at first Vera and Emily, later Blore, Armstrong, and Lombard, Armstrong and Wargrave, and then Vera and Lombard. What do you think brought them together? How do these alliances affect events?

None of them know who they can trust, but they are (like all humans) drawn to the familiar, to someone who is like other people in their life up to that point. The alliances just make things creepier.

7- Did you have your own theories about who Unknown was before getting to the “Manuscript Document” and if so, at what point?

Yes of course, but they weren’t correct.

8- It’s widely commented that Christie “violated the standard rules of mystery writing” by making it nearly impossible for us to solve the mystery before she explains it to us. How did that make you feel as a reader?

I didn’t mind at all. I quite like watching plots unfold (this can be bothersome in real life), so I don’t mind waiting till the end to figure things out.

9- As Agatha wrote in her author’s note, the plot was so simple, yet so baffling, that she herself was most pleased with the outcome for having done it. Are there any mysteries from recent years that you think come close to what she accomplished here?

It’s brilliantly done. I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

I can’t wait to read all of your answers, and please add any thoughts or observations I may not have covered here.

Join us for our discussion of Dead Man’s Folly on July 29^th. And be sure to watch the PBS premiere of Dead Man’s Folly on July 28^th! Don’t forget to tweet us using #monogrammurders!