Customer Reviews

Everyman's Guide to the Mysteries of Agatha Christie

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I bought this book thinking that it would be a guide to all the little minutiae in Christie mysteries. Instead , I got lists of dedications, automobiles, first names, and other inconsequential details. The author seems obsessed with how reprehensible the heroes in the mysteries are, and how hypocritical he beleives Agatha Christie to be about her characters' attitudes about crime. He is especially livid about Rowley Cloade in Taken at the Flood. He drags him in at every opportunity, and pontificates on and on about him. The book assumes that you have all of the books at your fingertips, and can access them to understand what is being said. He has a chapter about how all the drawings in the books have errors, but he doesn't really tell you what the errors are. He doesn't seem to like Agatha Christie very much, and I found the book confusing, and far too full of the author(Prendergast), with not nearly enough of the subject (Chrisite's books). I would not recommend it to anyone.

This is a self-published book, and is in great need of an editor, who would have ensured that the READER is not faced on EVERY page with capital letters used for EMPHASIS, and would have corrected errors of punctuation such as unclosed parenthetical comma pairs (of the pattern 'the man, who wore a hat went outdoors').

However I was most disappointed at the sloppy research - Ronuk, in a list of names, is described as 'probably a household cleaner', when anybody in the UK over the age of about 50 could have told the author what it was - and a Googling comes up with plenty of relevant hits.

Mr Pendergast also seems not to know (for example) that policemen lived and worked (and still do, in rural areas) in police houses in the UK, otherwise he wouldn't have made a crack about having a kitchen in a police station.

And there are many other examples of this sort of thing.

I'm only part way through the book, and am already wondering whether I want to put in the time to finish it; this is a great shame, because I feel the book would have been so much better had the author found a proper publisher to work with.

Judging by the sample very little research even such obvious sources as Who's Who or professional directories and not much thought either. Tabloid. Save your money and hope that one day there will be a serious study of Christie.

If you love Agatha Christie you will love this book. It was written with painstaking attention to detail and pure love of the subject. The author (who just happened to be my Dad) had a great deal of fun writing this book. He truly loved all of her work and just enjoyed poking a little fun at all of the little inconsistencies in the minute details. It gave him great pleasure to be able to publish this book and I am so glad it was published before his death in 2009. I miss you Dad!