#blog12daysxmas Day 4 Murder in Mesopotamia

I have spent many years reading and rereading Agatha Christies in the Christmas break. This year was no different as I yesterday reread one of my favorites, Murder in Mesopotamia. This Poirot story was published in 1936 and is set in an archaeological dig in Iraq and like many of Agatha's books draws heavily on her experiences on archaeological expeditions with her husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan. Some say that the character of the murdered woman was indeed based on Agatha's experiences on the excavation where she first met Mallowan.

The book is told in the first person by a nurse who is introduced into the expedition to care for the expedition leader's wife. This technique allows Christie great scope to describe the site, the characters, the archaeological practices and local customs and people with an outsider's view which is often incredibly funny. I love Christie's own account of life on a dig, Come tell me how we live, itself a very amusing account, but more from the inside.

#blog12daysxmas Day 2 Seven dials mystery

Agatha Christie is always a good Christmas topic. Her name almost says it (even if it was an assumed name) and she has been part of my Christmas for decades. How many Christmases can I remember when one of the books I eagerly unwrapped was a "Christie for Christmas"? She might have been writing them to combat her issues with British tax but I didn't care. Reading Agatha Christie was part of MY Christmas and my holiday reading.

Imagine my surprise last week when I was browsing the Hawthorn Library new books shelves as is my daily custom and I saw this cover! It is a reprint of the original 1929 cover so that made it stand out but when I picked it up I had no memory of the plot! Was this an Agatha Christie that had managed to escape my notice? I know I don't own all her books by any means but I thought I had read them all, even the Mary Westmacott ones. Needless to say I grabbed the book and borrowed it.

The Seven dials mystery was published in 1929 as one of a series of 7/6 novels by Collins. Others included detective and wild west stories by authors I have never heard of, or ones which have disappeared from popularity but that I can remember from my early days in public libraries mainly because they were being weeded. The book I borrowed is a facsimile edition that HarperCollins put out in 2010 and I enjoyed reading it for that reason alone. The cover artwork and the internal font and layout of the book were quite of their age.

The book is partly set in Chimneys, the scene of some of her other books, but it isn't a Miss Marple or a Poirot. Instead it features a couple of young people who come upon a mysterious death which is rendered curious by the seven clocks on the mantlepiece of the dead man's bedroom. The book is a definite cozy with a romantic interest, some of Christie's humorous characterization and a quirk to the plot at the end. I enjoyed reading it.

If I had read it before, I certainly didn't remember it though the investigator Lady Eileen "Bunty" Brent seemed to ring some bells with me. Maybe she appeared in another of Christie's books? Or maybe I need to do some Christie rereading? At any rate, I am very glad I found a "Christie for Christmas".

#blog12daysxmas Day 11 #librarytwittermysteryamonth

On the 11th Day of Christmas I didn't blog but expressed concern that I had got behind. So on the 12th day of Christmas I am doing that blog.

What I want to confirm here is that some of us Twitter library types and non-library types for that matter are going to start a mystery a month book club. The commitment will be to read the recommended 12 mysteries a year and to blog about them. Please tweet the blog post and identify your blog post when you tweet it with hash tag: #librarytwittermysteryamonth.



We are going to follow the recommendations of crime writer @tara_moss who is posting them monthly here. She has information about the author and the book on the site but we all might like to post further information about the author and book on our blogs or on Twitter. So for example here is a link to the Wikipedia article on Murder on the Orient Express.

I look forward to rereading this classic Christie title and sharing how I feel about it with you. Now just remember we are READING the book: that includes print or ebook but not watching films :)) A number of people have indicated interest but if any other want to identify themselves please comment below or tweet to me @polyxena.

#blog12daysxmas Day 8 #librarytwittermysteryamonth

On Day 8 we were all faffing around looking for new challenges for the New Year. Would it be a daily image of oneself on Flickr as @sirexkat was touting? Or would it be the #2011PAD on Flickr? I had really enjoyed looking at other people's PADs on Flickr last year so decided on that one rather than the image of me. We did a similar thing for a month at @restructuregirl's behest in 2010 and it made me really think every day about what photo I wanted to post. It also made me realize (grumble, grumble) that the Flickr i-Phone app doesn't do groups. Ah well, I shall survive using a proper PC or other work arounds. I am particularly happy to be doing PAD as there are very few of my friends on it so it means I will be getting to know a whole of new people! Yay! Of course, it will also be great if you all join as well. The more the merrier and many of you post images every day already!


And what might all of this have to do with a reading blog, you may be asking? Well, late in the day @Tara_moss posted a link to an online mystery book club where she would be recommending a mystery a month. She is starting with Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express for January. That seemed right up my alley! By this morning a group of us library people on Twitter had decided to go with it as #librarytwittermysteryamonth! We decided we would start with Tara's suggestion for January but were finding the website it was posted on a bit problematic. There is info there about Agatha and the book but there doesn't seem to be anywhere to post comments. So we will go with the book and perhaps work out some other way to communicate about our reading. We look forward to having lots of you joining in our #librarytwittermysteryamonth! Here's a link to the Wikipedia article as well to get you going! You can let me know either by Twitter @polyxena or by posting a comment below if you want to participate.

#blog12daysxmas Agatha Christie Day 4

On the fourth day of Christmas I finally got around to blogging about the Agatha Christie biography that I have out from the library and that is overdue. Well, I hope I will.


As I have mentioned in previous posts, for many years a new Agatha Christie was always part of my Christmas! Well Agatha always said "A Christie for Christmas" so it was quite appropriate. So when I was planning to go to England earlier in 2010 and emails were going back and forth about places we all wanted to go to, I realized we were going to be in Devon. Wow! So I put my hand up for Greenway, Agatha Christie's house in Devon, that I knew had been given to the National Trust by her grandson. Luckily Hazelanne, Maria and Ronnie with whom I was doing the West country road trip were agreeable and what a fabulous experience that was! Well, the whole road trip was but I found it wonderful to visit Agatha's house, see the pet cemetery, see her bedroom, see her piano and sitting room and see Max' artefacts. Though it was never her primary residence and later given to her daughter and son-in-law, so many of the classic Agatha photos depict her there that it seemed very familiar.


You can see the house and and its location overlooking the Dart above as well as a shot of the garden. If you want to see the other photos I took you can check them out on Flickr in my West Country 2010 folder. If you start with this one and go forward you will catch them all.


And so to the overdue book. Agatha was born in 1890 so we all felt that there would be a new book in the lead up to that anniversary. And sure enough Richard Hack's Duchess of death: the unauthorized biography of Agatha Christie appeared in 2009. Hack is an investigative writer who has previously undertaken investigative biographies of Howard Hughes, Michael Jackson and J. Edgar Hoover. Hack has done a very thorough job of his research, focusing in particular on the 5,000 or more documents at the University of Exeter's Special Collections division. These documents provide a wealth of documentation that has not previously been used.

I enjoyed reading Duchess of death. There was much in it that was familiar but often written with a different viewpoint given the sources and it was certainly interesting to get some family views on other members. Hack doesn't care for Max Mallowan and some of his comments about him are not very well substantiated whilst he leaves out other stuff that would have been interesting to pursue. Some don't like his writing style, but for anyone who is a Christie fan, I recommend the book as a good read. Maybe you could get it out of your local library and read it over the 12 days and blog your experience? I'll be taking this copy back to my library tomorrow.

Book 8: The Body in the library

The latest book I have read for 2010 is another Agatha Christie but one I hadn't read for a long time. It was one of a batch of old paperpacks I was recently given: an old Pan edition printed in 1959 0f the originally published in 1942 The body in the library. You can read all about it here on Wikipedia. It's a Miss Marple and she comes up with the goods, of course. Her friends Colonel and Dolly Bantry wake one morning to the news that there's a body on the hearth rug in the library and Miss Marple is involved soon. It's a nice read, a comfortable Christie. The cover illustrated here is from the first 1942 U.S. edition where it was first published.

Book 2: The man in the brown suit

And yes, Book 2 is another Christie! Whilst the first was a Miss Marple this is one of Christie's books that doesn't have Poirot or Miss Marple as the detective but is rather a stand-alone book with a redoubtable young female Anne Beddingfeld who heads off into the unknown as Agatha herself did. No doubt this draws on her own travels to South Africa but there is also some lovely archaeological images early on. I refer to the description of Anne's father and their household.

Again this was one that I hadn't read for years and it was fun to enjoy again! Thanks, Karen!

Book 1: A murder is announced

After all this phaffing around playing with BookJetty and then with Goodreads which has some things going for it over BookJetty but still has the same lack of Australian content, I think it is probably about time that I wrote about reading a book! I am not really sure of the order in which I read the first few books and may well have been reading them simultaneously while watching television with my mother over my January mother-sitting.

Anyway the first book that I am going to mention is one by that old favourite of mine, Agatha Christie. It's A murder is announced and the copy I read wasn't the one pictured above but an old Pan paperback that I recently got given when a friend was clearing out a house after a relative's death. Like all Agatha Christie A murder is announced has been published and printed and reprinted in many, many formats and languages.

I was glad to have it as I don't think I own it (?) and it was nice to read at a stressful time. Despite not having read it for years I remembered the solution in the first chapter and enjoyed myself immensely picking out the clues that Agatha had placed in the text throughout. It is probably quite appropriate that an Agatha Christie is my first book for 2010. I have been reading and rereading her since I was a teenager and cannot even start to count the number of hours of pleasure I have gained from her books (and the films of the books).