“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all, I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
Agatha Christie
THIS BOOK IS A MASTERLY DISPLAY OF THE ACUMEN OF A GENIUS!
I DID NOT THINK IT. RATHER I SAW IT!
They told me that she is the queen of crime and you must enter into her dominion once. I kept on saying, I don’t like much those crime thrillers. Their persuasion was strong. This time I abandoned my unwillingness and finally ventured on to her kingdom of thrill because one day I had to do this anyway as I had already listed at least three of her books in my want-to-read list.
I was told that she is an undisputed queen of crime; this is also written on the first page of this book while introducing her. It is also written that she is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. They also claim that this book is the world’s best-selling mystery book ever. If that is true, what a commercial success this is! Any author can envy her on this!
I never read her so far as I usually prefer to keep myself from hardcore crime mysteries. But interestingly, in the past few months, the four major books I have finished, all turned out to be crime-related. They all were murder mysteries. It may be a mere coincidence or I unconsciously timed these books from my shelf to finish one by one during this period. I read from the bouquet of Orhan Pamuk My Name Is Red, Margaret Atwood Alias Grace, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment respectively and finally this book from Agatha Christie.
Keeping aside the literary merit, I would just like to share very leisurely that while books from the other three authors took me weeks to complete. I finished this book by Agatha in just two sittings. That is quite an achievement for me or was it an achievement of Agatha Christie over me? I do not know!
One can object that this book was small so it had to take less time to finish. Very obvious! I will tell them that recently I also read Animal Farm (an odd 100-page tale) and that book took a greater amount of my time than this thriller of Agatha Christie. Am I giving an implicit mandate from my position after reading her for the first time that she is unputdownable? I don’t know!
This book is about the mystery woven around 10 people, all different, all unconnected. They were all called upon an island; the Soldier Island. Island too is unconnected from the mainland. They start dying one by one in a very systematic manner and panic prevails among them when they realized that someone among them is the killer. It’s quite amusing to turn those pages to know who is that culprit. I can say this is a technical thriller. You require focus and you cannot miss any sentence as there are hidden hints and leads but surely enough they could not be speculated by the reader anytime in between. I could quickly smell here the genius of this author. She is very sharp in the formulation of mystery through her characters and even sharper in the execution part.
After feeling utterly satisfied having finished the novel quickly, I think she deserves what she has gotten. This book has all ingredients for a crime thriller and detective story lover. I can now understand why she is so popular and why John Curran, who edited Agatha Christie Newsletter claimed her greatest exponent of the classical detective story. In his words, “her unique talent has crossed all boundaries of age, race, class, and geography. Her books have become an international pastime.”
I will try a few more books from her shelf before making a full-fledged personal ruling on her writing as a reader.
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