top 5 agatha christie novels (bonus question bottom 5 agatha christie novels)
ok caveat that all agatha christie novels have like, a layer on which they're a mystery novel, and a layer on which they're very deliberate social commentary, which is really interesting to me but not necessarily 'good' let alone 'endorsed'
top 5:
murder on the orient express the reason everyone likes this one is because it's good evil under the sun i just think this is well done. classic, central example of the christie mystery structure and cast of characters, fun setting, fun writing, fun solution. a brief swerve toward goofy commentary on Teens, but i think it rescues it in the end. a mirror crack'd from side to side very fun marple. i really love miss marple which is kind of an unpopular opinion amongst christie fans, and i think she's shown off well here. not a perfect book but in practice i reread it often because i just really like the one-off characters and i think it's a fun example of the classic agatha christie The Solution Is The Personality move. sleeping murder more marple! fun mystery premise, enjoyable characters, well-written, not history's most difficult mystery to solve but a good enough time that i don't care. the hollow really fun interesting character work. obvious of me to love henrietta but i insist upon doing it anyway
[pause here for the best-worst superposition book, a murder is announced, which on the one hand is a clever, fun, entertaining book with a great setup and great use of miss marple and on the other hand is one of the cruellest, most needlessly antisemitic depictions of a holocaust survivor you could possibly imagine]
bottom 5:
every single thriller. this includes every tommy and tuppence novel. they're bad examples of an already bad genre. she just wasn't good at writing these and they're all very overwrought, very boring, and depict the least meaningful conception of Organized Crime possible elephants can remember just not good. this has maybe the most unbelievably obvious solution of any christie novel i've ever read, it's not otherwise particularly good on any axis, and the whole thing just feels like a plod toward the book finally agreeing to reveal the incredibly obvious twist. they do it with mirrors also reeeally obvious, at least if you've read a few christies before, and it's set in a school/rehab/asylum for Criminal Youths and therefore involves a lot of agatha christie explaining her understanding of the top criminal psych theories of 1952
the pale horse i just didn't like this one. she's going for an Atmosphere of the Supernatural, like in endless night (which i also dislike), and like in endless night, she does this mostly through invoking scary Romani rituals (not called that) and endless wibbling about OooOoh is MAGIC REAL???? but then it isn't. the revealed motive and method here are both much worse then in endless night, and so is the narrator, whom i dislike enormously.
and then there were none fuck this book. everyone likes it but they're wrong because it's not good. premise is ludicrous eventual solution is even more ludicrous moral underpinning of the book is deeply irritating and i'm deducting points both for how hard it goes on the Oily Jew cameos relative to other christies and because of its history of having a really racist title. but fundamentally the problem with this book, as i've said before when explaining my theory of why basing glass onion on it was one of the fundamental problems with that film, is that this is not a mystery novel. it's a thriller. and her thrillers, as we just discussed, are all terrible and make no goddamn sense
