Tuesday, January 01, 2008

On... Murder on the Nile by Agatha Christie

I'll never forget when I finally learned that Agatha Christie was a real person and not just a pen name. I don't know why I figured that Agatha Christie was a pen name... perhaps because her books are held in such high repute that she's become legend. ;)

Something that continually drives me nuts with her books... though not so much with this one... is that she crafts her mysteries in such a way that it is impossible for the reader to discern clues and figure out the answer to the mystery or simply be stumped at the end. The term "deus ex machina" comes to mind.

In this book though Christie drops many hard to discern clues in the first few chapters in which she also throws so much information at the reader that one is left picking up the pieces and trying to determine which bit of information is important. In any other genre besides a mystery this would annoy me but the beginning of this novel awakened my inner detective.

The actual murder... well, the first out of three... doesn't happen until about a hundred pages into the book. Actually, I was wondering when the murder was going to happen and thankfully Christie spared the readers an entire book of detective work and instead gave only half a book. :D

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