All the clues were there, and I really should have noticed the most important one. Agatha Christie didn't cheat, she just made it look like she did. Peril at End House starts with Nick Buckley stumbling across Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings just as (another) attempt is made on her life. She's brushed them all off, but Poirot is anxious that someone is trying to kill her to inherit the ramshackle End House, illogical as that seems. He asks her to invite her cousin Maggie to visit for a few days and when Maggie dies, was it a case of mistaken identity? And who killed her - a potential inheritor or one of Nick's questionable friends? I'd somehow skipped Peril at End House in favor of an nth reading of one of my favorites, and I'm glad. Nearly 40 years after first reading Christie, she can still surprise me.
Saturday, May 7, 2022
Vanity Dies Hard
I shouldn't be so surprised that the first half or so of Ruth Rendell's novels feel so old. Vanity Dies Hard was written 56 years ago, putting it only a year or two closer to today than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was when I read it in high school. But by the time I discovered her, Agatha Christie was dead and Rendell was only halfway through her career when I picked up her first Barbara Vine novel 30 years ago.
Rendell was a psychological novelist, with motivations more important at times than the actual mystery. But science and society evolve, making Vanity Dies Hard hard to review today. The plot is simple - wealthy but drab Alice Whittaker married a younger man at 37, and after her friend disappears, she believes she's being poisoned by someone. Well, it doesn't take a detective to discover why a 37-year-old newlywed might suddenly feel "unwell" so despite Rendell's talent for creepiness, I never though Alice was truly in danger. I was intrigued by the fate of her glamorous friend Nesta, though, but less so than I was by questions about the framework. Why was Andrew Fleming essentially forced to quit his job and join the family firm when he married Alice? Why was Alice's first assumption poison and not pregnancy? How desperately dull life was for affluent women for whom there was no expectation of even becoming educated just for the sake of knowledge. And how accurate is this portrayal of mid-1960s small town England?