Tuppence for My Thoughts

by Eric

I just finished reading The Secret Adversary and The Mysterious Mr Quin so I figured I might write something about their author, Agatha Christie. Unfortunately, whereas Mary has read pretty much all of Christie's works, I've read only a fair number. Then too, it's difficult to write about mysteries intelligently without giving too much away. Don't you hate it when the blurb on the back cover of a book recounts half the plot?

Nevertheless, I'm going to make a few random observations, the first of which is that I have never read a Christie I didn't like. For example, I've seen some bad reviews of The Third Girl but I found Poirot's excursion into the sixties counterculture rather entertaining. Some people seemed unhappy that Christie had abandoned the country estates and quaint English villages where she "belonged" but I've always been more attracted to her exquisite mystery puzzles and the interplay of her characters than her settings.

So not surprisingly I also enjoyed Death Comes as the End, the mystery set in decidedly not English ancient Egypt. No picturesque gardens, only sand. No stately mansions. Pyramids aren't really stately, are they?

This book highlights another characteristic of my Christie experience. Never once have I guessed the killer. You'd think I'd have done so simply by chance but Christie inevitably manages to point me towards the wrong suspect. I don't suppose I'm giving much away if I reveal that in Death Comes as the End the suspects are knocked off, one by one until the suspect list has dwindled to two. And even then I got it wrong!

You might gather from the above that I am not averse to less typical Christie mysteries. It's true. I even prefer the books that do not feature Miss Marple or Poirot. Indeed, reading about Hercule can be quite laborious.

It always annoys me when Christie's books are described as cozies. Her settings may not be gritty and she doesn't go in for graphic descriptions of violence but the motives and actions of her characters can be very black. I simply do not see much similarity between what she wrote and the sort of books marketed as cozies today. There was often a hard edge to Christie. A Crooked House, for instance, strikes me as downright noir. Christie listed it as one of her personal favorites.

In keeping with my taste for the atypical Christie I finally got around to reading The Secret Adversary. Childhood friends Tommy Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley go into business as The Young Adventurers and are hired to find a British agent who vanished while trying to deliver a secret treaty. A secretive criminal mastermind, bent on fomenting labor unrest in the interest of Bolshevism, is also after the agent and the treaty. Tommy and Tuppence end up chasing and being chased all over England. There's plenty of humor and snappy dialogue. And though it's more a spy/thriller than a mystery Christie keeps the identity of the arch-criminal well concealed until the surprising (to me at least) conclusion.

The stories in The Mysterious Mr Quin are odder still. In each tale Harley Quin (not the comic book character) appears as if by magic and through conversation acts as a kind of catalyst, allowing the narrator, the mild mannered socialite Mr Satterthwaite, to solve a mystery. The Mr Quin character is based on Harlequin, as the stories make clear through clever descriptions. For example: "Mr Quin smiled, and a stained glass panel behind him invested him for just a moment in a motley garment of coloured light..." There's a definite aura of the supernatural. There are no physical clues in many of the stories. Rather, as Mr Satterthwaite gradually discovers the histories and relationships of the characters the solution becomes apparent. These reminded me a bit of Georges Simenon's books where Maigret figures out whodunnit by uncovering the secrets of the people involved.

So much for my reading of uncharacteristic Christie. I'm not familiar with the mainstream novels she wrote as Mary Westmacott. Maybe one of those should be next.

An Inspector Calls -- Finally

by Mary

Why yes, since you ask, I am indeed a fan of Alistair Sim and the film in which he plays Inspector Poole is a particular favourite. But what has my header to do with happenings at Maywrite Towers you may well ask.

Well, early one morning in late October, hearing a racket we got up, looked out our back window, and discovered an industrial-sized excavator was parked close to the wall just a few yards from our buggy, a scene presenting the appearance of, to lift a phrase from Dickens' American Notes, a light-house walking among lamp-posts.

The excavator was scooping up huge buckets of soil, swinging back and forth with a rumbling roar. Thus we began our journey to the world of modern plumbing some weeks after a grinder pump had been installed in a pit near the window. It was finally our turn to be hooked into an up-to-date sewer system.

An electrician was at work by 8 am, an early riser indeed given he mentioned ours was his second job of the day. A jolly fellow constantly cracking jokes, he wired in the grinder's dedicated line even as his cell phone constantly jingled with warnings about bomb threats phoned in to local schools.

Despite its size, the movements of the massive excavator's toothed bucket, guided by delicate manipulation of control sticks reminiscent of those used in video games, were precise enough to avoid damaging the grinder pit almost touching the septic tank next to it as the latter was exposed along with the house drain, daintily setting aside basketball sized and even bigger rocks.

With the septic tank disconnected and the house drain connected to the grinder, the next job would be pumping out the tank and filling it with gravel. However, the contractor was late and arrived after everyone else had left, leaving the excavator guarding the back lawn for the weekend. Once the tank was emptied the job would be inspected, after which the tank and the two large holes in the lawn would be filled in. As it turned out the inspector was working elsewhere in the state and his colleague would not return from holiday until the following Monday. However, he'd be here on Tuesday.

On Saturday a recorded message from the electricity company announced an 8 am to 3 pm power outage needed to carry out scheduled maintenance -- on the same Tuesday. Oh dear, thought I, talk about playing the cat and banjo with the contractor's plans. Then I remembered the remaining work would be done outside so it, at least, could proceed as planned.

Tuesday morning dawned bright and bitterly cold and over several hours the house temperature fell ten degrees while outside the well-muffled crew worked on cheerfully enough. As Julius Caesar almost said, the inspector came, saw, and considered. Not much later, the first load of gravel for the septic tank arrived. On its second run the lorry got stuck in boggy ground caused by torrential rain the previous week. The excavator had no trouble as it trundled about on tracks and so was able to help push the lorry back to the road. (A few days later the propane tanker became immobilised in the same way. It took an hour and a half to get it back to the road, even with the assistance of a tow truck.) While the excavator leveled the ground the lorry returned to deliver a large load of top soil, followed by layers of grass seed and fertiliser, the whole topped off with straw.

So now we not only have updated drainage but also a large area of back lawn starting to grow on the best soil in the place. Can't beat that with a big stick!