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The Pale Horse

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The Pale Horse is the name of an organization whose business is murder, akin to the Mafia or other nefarious gangster-style groups. In the novel, a young historian-writer named Mark Easterbrook hears about the organization and attempts to uncover the instigators.

The story unfolds in bits and pieces: the murder of a parish priest, a list of names of people already dead or marked for death, a pub converted into a home for three unusual women, and a local fete to raise money to restore the church tower all figure prominently in the story.

We are also reintroduced to some characters from previous works: Mrs. Ariadne Oliver makes an appearance, this time without Poirot; Rhoda and Major Despard from "Cards on the Table" provide the entry for Mark Easterbrook as he is Rhoda's cousin; and Rev. and Mrs. Dane Calthrop from "The Moving Finger" also appear.

The title for this novel is said to have been taken from Revelations 6:8 "And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."

This 1961 novel is not a part of any of Christie's more famous series (Poirot, Miss Marple or Tommy and Tuppence) but does include some "old friends" from other books: the Dane Calthrops (THE MOVING FINGER), Rhoda and Major Despard (THE CARD ON THE TABLE) and Ariadne Oliver, the famous mystery writer who has appeared in several Poirot stories. The PALE HORSE is one of the novels that is as much romance and mystery.

The story is told by Mark Easterbrook, a writer who had taken up residence in the Chelsea district of London while working on his latest book on Mogul culture. He stopped into a coffee shop for a quick meal and witnessed an argument between two young women that ended with one pulling out a handful of hair from the other. The unfortunate woman's unusual name - Thomasina Tuckerton - stuck with Easterbrook. He was surprised when he saw it a week later, in the obituaries.

Easterbrook went on about his life, meeting with his friend, Ariadne Oliver, traveling to the country to visit his cousin, and going out with his long-time girlfriend Hermia Redcliffe. Meanwhile the police begin to investigate the murder of a priest who was killed on his way home from hearing a last confession. They found a list of names stuffed into the priest's shoe, including the name of the police inspector. The two threads of the story meet and continue to weave throughout London, out to the country, on to Birmingham and returning to London. On the way the path leads to witchcraft, deathrays, and murder for hire.

The mystery here appears to be more a how-it-was-done than a who- done-it although Christie has once again lead us down the garden path to a surprise finish.

Nothing is more stupid, unanimous, superstitious, and pointless, than the universal habit of running down Agatha Christie as a writer. Even fellow crime writers who ought to acknowledge their debt to one of the absolute masters of the genre, are in the habit, when looking for any kind of literary respectability, to start by pooh-poohing her (thus Ruth Rendell, P.D.James, et caetera).
In point of fact, whatever a great writer is, Agatha Christie was one. Some of her stories are forgettable, many formulaic: but she has written at least a dozen, probably more, that count as classics of the language. The fact is that her kind of excellence runs absolutely counter to modern concerns. She can write stylish prose if she really wants to; she can create vivid and fascinating characters if she really wants to; but most of the time she is not too concerned with either of these things. Her characters are simple and reducible to a few primary types - like those of Homer. Her plots are what she really lavishes attention on (this book has a wonderful vignette of an author singularly like Dame Agatha herself, cudgelling her brains in despair to make some sense of a character's silly but necessary actions), and they are superlative. Properly read, they both express human values and generate great emotion; her denouements are never purely revelations of past events, but always insights into the minds of murderers, accomplices, and victims, into the logic of their situations, into the pressures that drive human beings. It has been said that her stories exist only for the sake of the denouement; if this is true at all, it is meaningless, since denouements do not exist by themselves but are a function of everything that has gone on before, and only work if the whole work has been carefully crafted. Christie, of course, approaches storytelling not as an opportunity for self-expression, but as a skill to be learned and used: she is not out to impress her cleverness on us - indeed, she does not think she is very clever - but to make us like her stories; and so, even poor Christie stories are never less than carefully crafted.
But in this book, written in the autumn of her life, she tries something different, which in some ways goes beyond anything she had done elsewhere (with the possible exception of her first out-and-out masterpiece, EVIL UNDER THE SUN). It is a book about the reality of evil, about evil in real human life, about the kind of people who would in fact make a living by hurting and destroying others - and of the forces that drive them. Her conclusion is bleak, sensible, and probably quite true: evil is a matter of inadequacy, of small men feeling their smallness. There is "no demonic majesty, no black and evil splendour"; those are almost a consoling disguise which decent ordinary people prefer to place on the reality of evil, petty, mean and indecent as it is, to escape the vision of its depressing and familiar ordinariness. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the moral reflection of an author so often accused of being shallow and unintelligent; and not many philosophers have done better.

A priest is murdered immediately after hearing a dying woman's confession--and investigators soon discover a list of names concealed in his shoe. The people on that list all have something very, very unpleasant in common: they are dead.

From this beginning, Agatha Christie weaves an unusual tale that mixes murder-for-hire and black magic in a most unexpected way. The result is a novel with a good vs. evil edge so powerful that many readers will find it more than a little creepy. THE PALE HORSE is also memorable for its unusual characterizations, most particularly in the opposing figures of Mrs. Dane-Calthrop, a vicar's wife who fights on the side of angels, and Thyzra Grey, a woman who claims to possess dangerous mystical powers. As usual, Christie works her story toward a surprising conclusion--but on this occasion she offers a few shudders as well. Unique in the Christie cannon and strongly recommended.

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 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.

First of all, I have to say that this was not like Agatha Christie's usual writing style, but, never the less, it was fantastic!! I won't make this review very long because I don't want to give away the plot, but any true Christie fan should read this. and also, moe811, Mrs. Oliver appears as a main character in Cards on the Table, which I'm currently reading.

Father Gorman attends to one of his parishioners who, with her dying breath, asks for forgiveness and gives him a list of names with a wish that the evil be "Stopped ... it must be stopped ... You will see?" When Father Gorman was found murdered later that night, the police suspect that the murderer failed to find the crumpled list of names stuffed in Gorman's shoe and that the list was likely the reason he had been murdered. This list of names and a series of serendipitous events, happenstance conversations and fortuitous meetings put Mark Easterbrook, Dame Agatha Christie's ever-present amateur sleuth, onto the trail of a gang of ruthless murders for hire. But Easterbrook is terrified to discover that the murders seem to be committed by a coven of three odd witches dispatching their victims for a fee with a malevolent brew of witchcraft, psychic arts, black magic and the mere power of suggestion.

"The Pale Horse" retains many of the characteristics of Agatha Christie's earliest cozy mysteries - country fêtes and bazaars, afternoon tea, parish vicars and their long-suffering wives and the obligatory parlour room confrontation with the suspects. Agatha Christie even allows herself a cameo appearance in the novel in the person of twittering author Ariadne Oliver. But "The Pale Horse" also has a much more modern flavour as an aging Dame Christie brings her craft into London of the early sixties - Soho, Chelsea coffee bars, discussions of avant garde productions of Shakespearean plays in ways the bard would never have imagined, a more graphic approach to violence and brutality and a somewhat grudging if critical acceptance of the popular culture of London's younger people.

But the ending, whether you think of it as vintage mystery or new age police procedural, is classic Agatha Christie - a beautiful blind-side twist that no reader will see coming until it's right on top of you!

Highly recommended and thoroughly entertaining!

Paul Weiss

I have been a Christie fan for over two years, since I was twelve, and I found this to be a nice little diversion from Hercule Poirot's little gray cells and Miss Marple's village parallels. I must say that though I was able to guess the mastermind behind it all, I was not able to guess the method. This is easily one of Dame Agatha's most original plots (including THE MOVING FINGER, also featuring the Dane Calthrops), a story of two young people, who, in setting out to identify the murderer of a well-liked Catholic priest who learned something from a dying woman, find much more than they bargained for...and each other. I wonder why it's never been made into a movie??... ;-)

"The Pale Horse," written in the 1960s when Dame Agatha' work was increasingly spotty in quality, is a return to form. While she does not entirely suppress her annoyance and dismay at what she viewed as the decline in popular culture--chiefly expressed as criticism of badly dressed, dirty-looking girls, and excessively tough or elegant boys who spent too much time in coffee bars--it is better-humored than in other books, and doesn't spoil the fun.

A well-loved priest is found dead in the street--was it a random crime or was Father Gorman intentionally killed? The list of names found in his shoe seems to point to the latter--the people on the list have one unhappy thing in common. Police doctor Corrigan by chance involves his friend Mark Easterbrook, a young historian of the Mogul period who, also by chance, has a tangential connection to the case already. And chance again brings Easterbrook to visit in Much Deeping, where he encounters the three rather odd women who live in the former inn known as the Pale Horse. These women are connected to the crimes--but how? To find out, Mark and his friend Ginger embark on a masquerade that may result in her death.

This book is a lark--and the presence of Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, Agatha Christie's delightful alter ego, tells us that things are not altogether serious. But, as always, Christie is also sounding the theme of evil in the world, and she has rarely established more successfully an eerie atmosphere of malice than that she has achieved here. (Down-to-earth Mrs. Dane Calthrop, the local vicar's wife, voices this theme in the way that Jane Marple might have done a generation earlier.) The means of procuring the deaths is a shocking contrast to all this--and to those who think it fanciful: bear in mind that, sadly, after the book was published, a real-life crime was carried out in Britain on the same basis.

Sixties London, Chelsea coffee bars, rural villages, seances, brooding mystery, abrupt brutality--and Dame Agatha at full tilt--you'll enjoy this!

Christie has, in the past, used occultic themes in some short stories, or as a side element in a full length. This time, however, she chose to flesh that out and use it at the heart of one of her mysteries.

"The Pale Horse" is a good read for several reasons. She uses several characters that have appeared in other novels, but none of them are named Poirot or Marple. This forces her to flesh out other characters since she can't rely on either of them to carry the story. While one doesn't read Christie to get intimate with characters (as opposed to Martha Grimes), it's nice to get a better look at some characters.

The story revolves around a society where people mysteriously kill people without leaving a trace. It is "advertised" as killing through supernatural powers controled by three witches. As a result it seems impossible to prove... and even more possible to convict without getting laughed out of court.

The solution is good (and I only guessed the mastermind through a semi-lucky guess), however, the best part is the explaination mid-way through the book about how the payment for the murder happens. That was bloody ingenious. The solicitor and the person wanting to hire the murder make a bet. If the person to be killed dies before a certain date, the person wanting the murder pays X amount of money. If the person to be killed doesn't, then the solicitor pays up the money.

It's all in all a satisfying read and will probably keep you guessing throughout the book.