Quick Book Reviews Blog

Throughout her illustrious career Agatha Christie has delivered to us many unforgettable and moving classics in the crime mystery genre, but that happens to be a two-sided coin; though nearly everyone may be familiar with her popular works, her lesser-known efforts are overshadowed, and not for a lack of quality. It seems to me that Mrs. McGinty’s Dead is one of those novels, following Hercule Poirot as he leads an investigation inside a small village into the murder of an elderly cleaning lady who wouldn’t dare hurt a fly.

It seems that practically every famous detective and sleuth in literature must, at one point or another, solve a case from a long-forgotten past. I guess there is some kind of mysterious attraction to such topics; as time passes by, events get increasingly blurred and there are less and less ways of finding out the truth. However, such things never stood in the way of famous Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, especially not when he was solving the murder Amyas Crayle in Five Little Pigs , written by none other than Agatha Christie.

It seems that Agatha Christie has made a theme out of Hercule Poirot not being able to take a vacation if his life depended on it, with that being the case once again in what is perhaps one of her lesser known novels, Peril at End House . In it, the world’s most notorious Belgian detective tries to take a holiday on the Cornish Riviera, but his plans soon come to an end as he meets Nicky Buckley, a woman who had far too many seemingly accidental brushes with death recently.

While our beloved crime fighters seek to go on vacation once in a while, we, the readers, know all too well that crime doesn’t take vacations, as can be plainly seen in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile . In this murder mystery of hers, our favorite Belgian investigator, Hercule Poirot, attempts to escape from his seemingly murder-filled life in England in favor of an excursion into Egypt.

Those of you who know of Agatha Christie are probably acquainted with some of her more famous novels, such as And Then There Were None , formerly known as Ten Little Indians (with the original title using language considered racist by today’s standards), Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express . However, Agatha Christie had already started making giant waves in the world of literature with her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles .

I've already written a couple of reviews of Agatha Christie’s books, so I won’t go spend as much time as I did earlier telling how much of an impact she had on the murder mystery genre, single-handedly revolutionizing certain aspects of it and setting the bar higher than ever before. While it may be true that some of her novels were groundbreaking, it also has to be noted that on many occasions she preferred to stick to the rules she knew best, and in my opinion it kind of shows in Murder on the Orient Express .

Agatha Christie is celebrated around the world as being one of the best and most influential contemporary writers, having left quite a noticeable mark on the world of murder mysteries, introducing many new concepts and raising the bar for writers of the future. While many of her novels are indeed widely celebrated, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd may very well be the one which really put her in the spotlight.