Customer Reviews

Black Coffee (Hercule Poirot Mysteries)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

Like a personal friend, our favorite authors have a voice we instinctively identify. We continue to read their books because we want to hear that voice again. Sadly, many of the voices we love are gone forever, and that includes Agatha Christie's. I found Black Coffee made me sad; it contained all the elements of a Christie -- the people, the place, the puzzle -- but it just wasn't right. I found myself mentally correcting the narrative to make it more "Christie-ish," the way I remember her.

I won't read The Unexpected Guest, just as I didn't continue to read Robert Goldsborough's game imitation of the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout. Rex's voice, too, is gone forever.

Whether or not you'll enjoy this book depends on what you read a book for. If you find yourself reading phrases over a second time, savoring the way the author used precisely the right words to speak right to you, you won't like this book. If you like a neat little puzzle, especially in the lightweight style of the drawing-room mysteries of the '30s and '40s, Black Coffee will satisfy you, though like others, I did wonder why the author chose to focus in on the murderer's hand at that crucial moment. Mrs. Christie would be appalled.

This is the 1st book of the 3 Osborne adaptations of Agatha Christie plays into novel form. I think it's the lowest of the 3 in quality. The 2nd was "The Unexpected Guest," and the 3rd was "Spider's Web." All 3 read more like plays than novels--so if you are expecting the normal Christie novel, you may very well be disappointed. However, if you have read the novels, this is a nice addition to your list of Christie's and a rare opportunity to envision her plays. True, the plays could just as easily have been bound and published. But, Osborne has apparently done little, if anything, to detract from the plays themselves. So, IMHO, he has done a service both to Christie and to the mystery reading public by publishing these works. As for the content, this particular work is rather straight-forward, lacking some of Christie's usual twists and turns, cleverness, etc. It is the only one of the 3 plays that includes one of her 3 usual "detectives" (Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and Tommy & Tuppence). This play is a Poirot adventure, but it's not anywhere near one of the best. It is, however, a Christie. If you've read all the others, it's one more to read. So, do your best to enjoy what may be your final opportunity.

What a daunting task it must be to adapt a play by Agatha Christie and be successful at it! Agatha Christie herself took to writing plays because she disliked the way one of her novels had been adapted for the stage. Charles Osborne, a Christie biographer and renowned theatre and opera expert, does a comendable job in this novelization of the play "Black Coffee".

Hardly anything new is added to the story, except for a slight lengthening of the time frame and an early chapter to introduce Hercule Poirot. Osborne is true to the original text, using the lines Christie wrote as the dialogue between his characters, enhancing their conversations a little at certain places. The only other additions are seen through his descriptions, mostly taken from stage directions, but some creativity is granted in how characters say certain things and their physical descriptions.

For any Agatha Christie fan, it is a pleasure to have another of her 'novels' to read. Osborne tries very hard to match the rhythm and flow of Christie's writing, and does well overall, with only a few patches that sound stilted. It is obvious that some other reviewers haven't read the original Christie text to enjoy this story as it was originally meant to be enjoyed - performed on the stage, where secrets are not kept from the audience. But since copies of the play can be a little difficult to come by, Osborne's adaptation is a close second in enjoyment.

The book, as the preface admits, is a redaction by a modern author of an original play written by Christie early in her career. Even at the time, theatrical producers were disinclined to put it on stage. That it acheived the success it did was probably more due to Christie's popularity as an author than to the chracter of the work. I've enjoyed the Miss Marples and Poirot mysteries for years and was pleased that so many of them were turned into films for television, but the books were turned into drama by people who do that well.

Unfortunately doing the reverse, and putting the play Black Coffee into prose form didn't help it any. Essentially what was probably stage direction and author's notes has been turned into descriptive naration between character's lines to give it the form of a novel. These descriptions of place, person, and time have little of Christie's usual sense of them, and the dialogue, while it is hers, is trite, seeming at this late date just a little silly. I think had Christie made an effort to reclaim the play as a novel she might have been able to salvage it, but that didn't happen here.

I found this book very intriguing! I was first hooked on Agatha Christie books last year when we read And Then There Were None in my language arts class. The latter still remains my favorite Agatha Christie mystery, but I found Black Coffee up there with the best (along with Murder on the Orient Express and Cat Among the Pigeons). The only fault that I have discovered in mostly all of Christie's novels is the fact that most of them have a rather slow beginning (except, for the most part, And Then There Were None, although this too was a bit slow). Yet Black Coffee held my interest from the very start. I did not find the murderer very obvious, since I kept changing my opinion of who the murderer was. Although Charles Osborne did a very wonderful job of writing the novel and keeping as close to the script of the play, it was not a true work of Agatha Christie. Therefore, I could not award this book a five. (Yet I thoroughly enjoyed the overuse of dialogue.) I still remain a major fan of Hercule Poirot mysteries, and Black Coffee was one of the best. Hercule is brilliant, and it certainly showed in this particular novel.

p.s. - After blabbing on and on about the wonderful Agatha Christie mysteries to my twelve-year-old cousin (whom I'm very close in relationship to), I've managed to get her hooked on the Agatha Christie novels. Hurray for me! Now I have a close friend to converse over with these wonderful books! We also exchange our Agatha Christie books with each other now, and recommend ones that we've borrowed from the library or another friend. I strongly recommended Black Coffee to her. She, too, has not read any Miss Marple mysteries yet, and is thoroughly interested in Hercule Poirot's cases. Ms. Christie has quite a brilliant mind, and we praise her for that.

I have read almost all of Christie's books and was thrilled to be able to read a new one but I was sadly dissapointed. The story is told in a very dry narrative manner and its characters fail to stir any excitement or interest. I definetly think this does better as a play than a book.

Osborne didn't even come close to acheiving Christie's style. The dialouge was stilted, and the thought and sentence patterns felt so...wrong. Accordingly, Christie's characters do not ring true here. I have read other works where a living writer has tried to imitate another writer's style, and most of them succeeded on a much higher level than this. I admit, though, that I probably would have enjoyed the book more if I could have stopped myself from subconsciously comparing it to Christie's masterpieces.

Well, if you are hung up so completely that this is a Agatha Christie novel,you will hate this novel and will suddenly grow dust upon your body and your mind will cloud over and become stuffy and shallow. However, if you can allow your brain to comprehend that this is based on Christi's play and her characters, but written by Charles Osborne, (who obviously cannot write completely in Christie's tone)you may find yourself enjoying this mystery. Imagine that!!
Most of these negative reviews are written by stuffy minded individuals that could not get past the fact that Christi's name is on this book-they expected Osborne to be the reincarnated version of Christie, though he is not, he is still a very good mystery writer.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it to be similar to Christie's writing style. It was fun to read her kind of mystery again and I chose to look at it that way. I did not choose to get so wrapped up in the fact that Osborne WAS NOT Christie, but that Osborne chose to attempt a fun version of Christie's work.
Read this, open your mind and shake off the dust....Christie is NOT back..but Osborne shines... regardless!

BLACK COFFEE the novel suffers from Charles Osborne's timidity in adapting Agatha Christie stage dialogue into a prose fiction equivalent. Wearily the reader sits through every blessed thing that was said on stage (or so it seems) plus every stage direction, for most of which Osborne fails to achieve any sort of actual verbal equivalence, so that we never can figure out what exactly the characters are doing in that room at Abbot's Cleve. On the other hand, the one chapter where Osborne just went crazy and wrote the whole thing from scratch (chapter one, set in Poirot's tidy flat in London) doesn't work either, so it's not exactly a problem inherent in novelization, he's just not that good a writer perhaps.

However he did get better, and the other two books he wrote are less painful than this one.

In BLACK COFFEE, for example, the whole plot turns on a vase filled with spills used to help the fire in the huge fireplace, and whereas we would have seen the vase instantly on stage, and watched characters playing with the spills throughout the entire play, here we have no idea that they are present, much less what they are, until Poirot points them out to his sidekick, Hastings, in the play's penultimate moments. Fair play? I think not. We're being toyed with by a man who doesn't care if we have all the information or not, he's just slugging it out doggedly till the play's last scene.

Strange chronology too! We forget that Hastings wasn't in on every adventure of Poirot's, and that when she turned to BLACK COFFEE in 1930, she was bringing him back after an absence of several years. Osborne's odd interjections suggest that this story takes place sometime after the events of LORD EDGWARE DIES, which of course came later, in the mid-1930s... I wonder why, it's puzzling. I'll have to go to my copy of the actual play to see if Christie had that pervy scene of Hastings (a married man, of course, though Bella is off in the Argentine) spying on glamorous flapper Barbara Amory as she lies sunbathing on what she thinks is a private, enclosed garden spot.

Frankly I couldn't believe my eyes when I read this. There, plainly, in print, the murderer was given away in the first 50 pages of the book! Maybe I wasn't supposed to figure it out, but the murderer's actions were described quite plainly. I was disappointed. But then I thought: Maybe it had to be this way because it was a novel adapted from a play. In the play, obviously, the murderer's actions would be described so the actors could act - it was up to the audience to pick up on it. And I was the audience, and I DID pick up on it. But honestly, a die-hard Christie fan like myself HAS to read this book because so many beloved characters are there: Poirot, Hastings, Inspector Japp, etc. So reading the book is like going back to old friends that you thought you bid adieu. The 3 books Osborne adapted as novels are like the "lost Agatha Christie novels".