Customer Reviews

After the Funeral

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

After the Funeral is a Hercule Poirot novel that follows a somewhat different structure from most. First, as the title suggests, the story only begins after the funeral of a wealthy man. When the relatives gather at the house afterwards, his sister blurts out that he must have been murdered even though he was known to be terminally ill and no foul play was suspected. When that same sister is brutally murdered the very next day, however, there can be little doubt that something sinister is afoot and this is where Hercule Poirot is called upon. Still, we don't see as much of him as we usually do. The suspects are scattered about England and a number of the interrogations are conducted by other people and reported back to Poirot. In the end, of course, Poirot gathers all the interested parties together and reveals the solution.

Normally, I find that any Poirot novel suffers greatly when the Belgian is used sparingly. So I was pleasantly surprised in this instance that the other characters were sufficiently interesting to carry the load. The cast is pretty varied and I definitely found it interesting to see how they interacted with each other in the aftermath of these murders. The story generally moves along at a good pace though it slowed down a touch toward the end. The razor sharp humor that Poirot provides when portrayed at his best is largely absent here but the book doesn't suffer too badly.

This is nowhere near the best Hercule Poirot novel but it certainly is a solid effort. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to first time readers, as they would do be better served to start with one of the very best such as the The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mysteries) or Death on the Nile: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mysteries). But established Christie fans could do far worse than to pick up After the Funeral. It's got a strong cast and an interesting story that make it well worth reading.

Agatha does it again! Without wishing to give anything away, she has the reader looking in the wrong direction from page one right up to the end. How many times have we Christie fans fooled ourselves into thinking we know "whodunnit," only to find out that, dammit, she's pulled the wool over our eyes again! This one is pure pleasure; the characters are more eccentric than usual and therefore quite funny at times, and the puzzle (and its solution) is as amazing as any she ever came up with.

It's no surprise that Agatha Christie is one of the most widely sold authors in the world. Unlike many other detective novels, "After the Funeral" kept me guessing down to the end. Ms. Christie's choice of murderer and motive turned out to be quite clever. All of her characters are richly drawn and well rounded. I loved this book and can't wait to read another.

This is classic Christie---the country house, the discreet servants, and Hercule Poirot gathers them all in the library to expose the culprit. As usual, Dame Agatha has her way with us, sending us off in the wrong direction, maddeningly obscure clues, and a thoroughly suspicious bunch of characters.

Roger Abernethie's heirs are gathered to hear the will when flighty sister Cora drops the bombshell, "He Was murdered, wasn't he?" The next day Cora is found axed to death in her little cottage. We have a raft of suspects and Ms. Christie is careful not to give any of them a satisfactory alibi.

"After the Funeral" is vintage Christie. She was at the height of her powers (1953). The characterizations were surprisingly deft (usually not her strong suit.) Uncle Timothy, the malingerer, was overdone, but George, the clever ne'er do well had some great malicious lines. She has a marvelous sketch of a private detective, Mr. Goby who was "--small and spare and shrunken. He had always been refreshingly nondescript in appearance and he was now so nondescript as practically not to be there at all. Mr. Goby was not looking at Mr. Poirot because Mr. Goby never looked at anybody----he emphasized his last point by nodding significantly at the sofa."

This slyly humorous well done mystery was a pleasure to read. Did I figure out ahead of time whodunit? Don't even ask.
-sweetmolly-Amazon Reviewer

I had probably read "After the Funeral" before, but I often use whodunits as bedtime escape fiction reading and forget the details not long after finishing them. So I was happy to pay a few bucks to read this one on my Kindle.

I agree with the reviewers who think this is neither the best nor the worst of the Poirot novels. I enjoyed the way the British class system played into the plot, and appreciated Christie's way with the different characters in the extended family at the heart of the book.

My Kindle edition of "After the Funeral" came with extra content. I didn't find this mentioned on the product description page, so it was a pleasant surprise.

The first bonus item - an "E-book extra" is an annotated list of all of Christie's Poirot novels and stories. I found it very helpful.

The other extra was an essay by Charles Osborne which was adapted, somewhat awkwardly I thought, from his book The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie.

The book displays nicely on the Kindle; I no longer take this for granted after looking at a poorly formatted nonfiction book that displayed much more white space than words and being grateful I'd only acquired the sample and hadn't paid for the thing.

What "improvements" have been made for the Bantam edition? There are already major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins (AFTER THE FUNERAL) and Dodd Mead editions of this novel. There are further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. There are further additions still in the Signet, Berkley, and Black Dog & Leventhal editions. For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

What "improvements" have been made for the Black Dog & Leventhal edition? There are already major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins and Dodd Mead (FUNERALS ARE FATAL) editions of this novel. There are further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. There are further additions still in the Signet, Bantam, and Berkley editions. For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

This is not, by any stretch of imagination, one of Agatha Christie's best books. Only one aspect of _After the Funeral_ deserves high praise: the plot and denouement are clever -- so clever and memorable, in fact, that it's difficult to try and enjoy reading this book for a second time (as I tried), because apart from the clever plot, there is not much to enjoy here, unfortunately. And that is very much unlike in Agatha Christie's finest novels, which *are* re-readable because their only value isn't in the whodunnit.

Ms. Christie must have been in a very gloomy mood when writing _After the Funeral_. In fact, the title says it all, about the novel's atmosphere. This is a post-World War II novel, and everyone seems dejected. There is an unpleasant air of plaintive nostalgia permeating the novel; incessant complaints (from *many* different characters) about how the world is deteriorating. In fact, you can't help feeling, while reading this novel, that it must have been written by an author who herself wasn't among the youngest. (Christie was 62.) And that is, of course, always a bad sign. Although the novel attempts to depict young characters, the prose isn't youthful at all, and the attempts at humour are rather strained.

Agatha Christie's idealism seems to have vanished. In Christie's best books from the 30s and 40s, there were always at least a few characters depicted in a positive manner who helped retain the reader's interest. Here in _After the Funeral_, all the characters are disagreeable, unpleasant, and/or silly persons; the *only* person depicted more kindly than not, is Helen -- symptomatically, one of the oldest characters in the cast. Poirot is portrayed rather perfunctorily as well (only appearing for the first time 28% into the book); not much wisdom or many witty observations coming from him here.

In short, _After the Funeral_ seems to me to indicate a decline in the quality of Christie's writing; it unpleasantly reminded me of such utter failures among Christie's late novels as _Third Girl_ and _Elephants Can Remember_; while those two are execrable and next to unreadable, _After the Funeral_ at least definitely is readable; it just seems to signal that the author is "over the hill" now, and that is always sad to realize.

Funerals are Fatal by Agatha Christie is my favorite Christie, even though it is one of her lesser-known works. However, it was my first Christie and as such, will always hold a special place in my heart for introducing me to the genius doyenne of mysteries.

The plot revolves around the death of the wealthy Richard Abernethie, a death that no one though was particularly suspicious until Richard's somewhat dotty sister, Cora blurts out the question at the funeral, "It was murder, wasn't it?"

This is a Poirot mystery and I remember when I read it the first time I was completely confident that I knew who the murdered was, only to find out at the end of the book that Christie had led me down the garden path by cleverly planting false clues, and I was completely wrong about who the murderer was. The best thing is, she had made those false clues so subtle, so unobvious, while at the same time planting other extremely obvious clothes toward yet another suspect. Here I had been patting myself on the back for not following the red herring and figuring out who the real killer, and instead I had fallen for a second, more subtle red herring.

Several years later I read the book again, and I'll be darned if I didn't fall for the exact same trap the second time I read it. That is how much of a genius Agatha Christie was in developing her plot. She could lay false leads upon false leads and make it so subtle that the reader is convinced that s/he's out thought the author.

So this is my favorite Christie book. Even if she did fool me twice with it!

The Abernethie family left me cold at first, but before long I was enjoying this 1953 novel thoroughly. Christie shrewdly paints a portrait of two cousins of very different sorts, Susan Banks, the charming, shrewd, business type, and Rosamund Shane, the sultry, ditzy actress, and we watch the two of them square off regarding their men and in battle for a green malachite table from their Uncle Richard's estate. Both girls are convinced that the table should rightfully belong to them.

I enjoyed hearing Hercule Poirot compare the events of AFTER THE FUNERAL to those of LORD EDGWARE DIES, a long ago case of Poirot's from the 30s. That clue should have given readers with long memories good reason to suspect that the solution of this case had something to do with a dazzling impersonation.

The strange behavior of Gregory Banks, the nutty pharmacist husband of Susan, the man who brags about how he was stricken people down with his prescriptions, make you think almost immediately that he is the killer.

Everyone's a wee bit suspicious but with Greg, Agatha Christie really lays it on thick.

The best scenes are those with Susan, who could have been the heroine of a Christie play (in 1953, when this novel was written, Christie was square in the center of her theatrical triumphs). Both the scenes at Cora's house when Miss Gilchrist receieves the mysterious slice of wedding cake, and then later on at Enderby Hall when Susan and Rosamund fight over the malachite table, could have jumped right out from one of the best 50s plays.

Weren't you surprised to hear that in 1953, if you had two thousand pounds, you could buy a Vermeer? Now the figure must be infinitesimally larger. Perhaps 20,000,000 pounds?

No longer do we have to read this novel under its ersatz American title, which always reminded me of a title by A A Fair--"Funerals Are Fatal."

All in all, a nail biting thrill ride of terror and chicanery.