Agatha Christie - Death on the Nile (1937)

This is the 15th book in the Hercule Poirot mysteries and the second book featuring Colonel Race. It's one of my favourite of Christie's mysteries and one of the saddest.

The very poor Simon Doyle meets the equally poor Jacqueline de Bellefort, they fall passionately in love, get engaged and Jackie introduces him to her very wealthy best friend Linnet Ridgeway - who promptly steals Simon away.

Enter Egypt, three months later, on a cruise up the Nile. The newly wed Simon and Linnet are on their unhappy honeymoon as they're pursued by a vengeful Jackie. Poirot, also on the cruise, watches the drama uneasily as he suspects things are not quite what they seem. With Linnet's murder, the theft of pearls, the appearance of Colonel Race on the trail of a foreign agent, and far too many suspects who wanted Linnet dead - Poirot finds a very confusing case that taxes his little grey cells.

I'm always saddened by Linnet's death. She was spoiled and used to getting her own way, but she was only 20 years old and to kill someone so young for money is just so meaningless. Money is an imaginary concept, without worth. Linnet shouldn't have been murdered for it, especially not with the justification that she had betrayed a friend and stolen her fiance as the slim reason behind it all. People mature, they grow out of their feckless youth. Linnet would never have the chance.

I'm still quite fond of Colonel Race. He doesn't have Poirot's skill at puzzling out the truth, but he's such a comforting character. I've liked watching him develop through Christie's novels.

Dorothy L. Sayers - Lord Peter Wimsey Mysteries (1923 - 1937)

I am addicted to Lord peter Wimsey mysteries. No matter what else I am reading I have one of Sayer's books on my nightstand for last-thing-before-sleep reading. Today it is 'Have His Carcase', which is amusing - because they don't. They've lost the body!

Wimsey is a fun lovable character. He's traumatised by the horrors of WW1 and it has brought out his sense of the absurd - or whimsey, which is also the family motto. It's how he seems to deal with everything, he's rarely serious and this often drives people to throttling him. I'm not sure it would be a Wimsey book if someone hadn't had a go at him, but he isn't bothered by it. Wimsey seems to accept it as just their way of dealing with his absurdity and the upsetting situations they're all currently in - being that he's generally throttled by one of the people suspected of murder, so far none of them have been the murderer. Just ordinary men at the end of their tether. I think it's how he finds the murderer too. Wimsey expects the murderer to be calm and to put up with more than average, so they're not suspected.

These novels are very much stuck in the era they were written in and it would probably make it difficult for a person without any knowledge of the 1920/30s to read them. Locations, attitudes, products, poetry, plays, stage actresses - they stop the books from having a timeless quality (like Agatha Christie's novels) and give them so much else. The way the stories make me look up words that the dictionary now tells me are archaic or names of people long forgotten is so much part of the allure of the novel. I feel involved in Wimsey's mysteries, much deeper than I would if I was reading a contemporary novel with nothing that I really needed to think about or explore.

Truly worth reading.