Customer Reviews

The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia

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

 

 

If you are a Christie fan you must have this book. Once you start dipping you will not stop and once you start to cross-reference you'll end up being late for work. This dedicated addition to the Christie files is just great. It contains not only references to just about every character that ever appeared in a book by Agatha christe but has film references, T.V. references. (Will somebody please help me find the now lost "Agatha Christie Hour" programmes) as well as theatrical references.

If you buy only one non-fiction Chritie reference book you will not be dissapointed with Matthew Bunson's brilliant hommage as no better critique could you find than a dedicated fan who would go to this much trouble. Thanks, Matthew, hope you sell loads

Let me start out by saying I have not read every page in this homage to the great Ms. Christie. Instead, over the past few couple of weeks I have looked up the detailed descriptions of items of interest to me like the list of television shows, stage performances, and movies created from one of Ms. Christie's works. That is the beauty of thisencyclopedia. Fans of the author and readers of mysteries can easily pick and choose their personal preferences. Besides the above, Matthew Bunson provides a detailed synopsis of each novel and short story, and a brief description of each character (I cannot argue if it is not complete) that ever appeared in one of these works.

THE COMPLETE CHRISTIE: AN AGATHA CHRISTIE ENCYCLOPEDIA is a fun piece of work that will provide much enjoyment to fans of Ms. Christie. Perhaps the only drawback to this wonderful book is a lack of a table of contents tied to the wonderful listings in the appendices that would enable casual fans to do even more specific digging.

Harriet Klausner

A very straight-forward guide to the characters and stories of Agatha Christie. One of the best things about this book is that it does not spoil any of the mysteries. Plots are briefly recapped and characters lightly sketched, but the endings are never revealed. One or two character entries might provide clues as to "who done it," but other than that, this is a great book.

I must confess that I am writing this without having finished every page of this work. I commend any author for attempting to sort out and cross-reference every character and piece of writing, along with film and TV adaptations, of as prolific an author as Agatha Christie. But I have two complaints. The first is that, so far in my reading, there have been a great many silly errors throughout, ranging from wholly incorrect names to the misidentification of a character's position in a novel (in one example, a person is listed as a victim when in reality that person is the killer!), to incorrect details in plot. For a long-standing fan of Dame Agatha's work, the relatively large amount of errors suggests sloppy research and makes the author's methods suspect.

The other point that strikes me is that I am not sure who the author considers his intended audience for this book. The entries of the novels are particularly light in terms of fact or discussion. They tend to describe the beginnings of the stories in great detail and then end quickly with "And then Poirot solves the case. The notes following these synopses are often quite brief, with a casual mention of of trivia ("This novel demonstrates Christie's knowledge of poisons) or a recounting of an anecdote well-known to real Christie fans, such as an explanation for why a particular book was dedicated to a particular person. I suppose these stories would be of most interest to new readers of Christie, although why they would be reading this book rather than the novels and stories themselves is puzzling to me. For a person such as myself who has made a study of Christie's work and read each book many times with pleasure, he or she should be warned that Bunson's work doesn't offer much insight into Christie's mind, style, much less any new "fun facts" about our favorite novels.

When the author moves from the section on novels to the one on characters, the errors become deeper, not just ones of fact but of, I assume, perception. Here's an example: Maude Abernethie, a character from "After the Funeral," one of my favorite Christie novels: "An imperious member of the ... family....She is the very dominant wife of Timothy Abernethie, and uses her position to keep her husband under her control. It thus comes as a terrible blow to her when she breaks her ankle and is forced to employ the cook and housekeeper, Mrs. Gilchrist, thereby losing a little control over her husband." I don't see how anyone could interpret Maude as a dominant character. She is completely under the thumb of her hypochondriacal husband and does everything she can to protect his interests. HE controls HER. And to add a little period to the mistakes, the author has married off MISS Gilchrist! I know I sound picky, but a true fan of Christie has a right to expect accuracy, if not enlightenment.

I can't ask for a book to be something it's not, but I long for a book that really analyzes Christie's work. I know it's usually considered forbidden to reveal endings, (I wouldn't mind this at all, since I know all the solutions!), but a look at Christie's observations of British society through an analysis of her characters and plots would be fascinating to me. Even an encyclopedia that delves a bit more into a plot or a character than this work does would have been more enjoyable for this big time Christie fan to read.

I found this book an excellent source of information about the writings of Agatha Christie. A short essay covers each of the works including short stories. There is also a large section covering the characters from each of the books and stories. In addition there is a section on movies, plays and TV productions of the various stories. Some of the plots are given away a bit if you read up on the characters, etc. before you read the book. Read the book first and find out more about it from this resource afterwards. I find this an extra tool to bring more enjoyment from the writings of Agatha Christie.

There is a lot the Agatha Christie fan will like about this work. I particularly like the plot summaries, and I suspect many other readers will as well. These provide just enough of the plot to set the stage for, or recall the core of the story if previously read, without giving away the stories' solutions. This was not an easy task.

However, not infrequently the summaries contain factual errors. As but one example, in the summary of "Hercule Poirot's Christmas', the author provides the location for this story as Gossington Hall when the location is actually Gorston Hall. The author also mentions this title was reprinted in paperback as "A Holiday for Murder'. Although published with this title in paperback," it was also reprinted with this title in hardcover in 1983, as one of the volumes in "The Agatha Christie Mystery Collection". Although "The Complete Christie" has a copyright date of 2000, no hardbound edition of "A Holiday for Murder" is mentioned. There are a number of similar inadvertent errors and oversights throughout the work.

Fortunately, the majority of errors will be obvious to Christie fans, and there is enough new information so fans will find this book worth reading and referencing. The plot summaries take up over 1/3 of the book with "The Characters" section, a brief description of the characters in Christie's stories, taking up about 1/2 of the book. The remaining major section of the book is devoted to "Film, Television, Stage, and Actors" associated with the adaptation of Christie's works. This last section contains the greatest density of black and white pictures from various adaptations, although there are pictures sparsely scattered elsewhere in this work.

Bottom line: Really 3 1/2 stars. Containing lots of interesting details, and a work I still reference. With more careful editing and fact checking before release, it would easily have earned five stars. Even with its problems still a worthwhile purchase for the Christie enthusiast.