Where Crime, Horror, and Science Fiction Meet – Discussing new discoveries, old mysteries, creepy tales, and dark storytelling
I just finished reading Curtain, Poirot’s last case. (I promise I won’t give away the end.) And recently I’d also read Sleeping Murder, which is Marple’s last case. In both cases the books were written years (decades) before they were published. Also in both cases the sleuths are still sharp, still the same old human-observers,…
So many of the Hercule Poirot novels (and Miss Marple too!)depend upon the setting to contain the story. Often, Christie puts her characters in a small village, brings them into a closed suite of rooms, or, most legendarily, puts them on a train. Let’s look at the pros and cons of this closed-circuit kind of…
In An Appointment With Death, Hercule Poirot is on vacation in Jordan. He is called into a case involving the death of a woman in the historic city of Petra. This sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Christie’s sleuth on the case. Unfortunately, in the actual narration of the story, Poirot shows up just in time…
I have trouble keeping track of the various eye colors of my characters through one book. In my last completed draft of a book, I caught at least three variations of eye color of my main character’s eyes. Apparently I just couldn’t decide. So, as I read through Christie’s body of work, my main thought…
In both of Christie’s series – Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple – the opening books are narrated by characters who fall away fairly quickly in the series, never to be heard from in the same way again: John Hastings as Poirot’s bumbling sidekick in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and Vicar Leonard Clement in Murder…
In her career, Agatha Christie came up with, not one, but two iconic characters: Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. Today we’ll look at Poirot, seeing why he’s a good focal point for a mystery series. “In her Autobiography Christie gives a detailed account of the genesis of the The Mysterious Affair at Styles. By…
Read more Meditating on What Makes Poirot a Good Series Character
During a critique session, years ago, one of our group members submitted a first-chapter of a novel she was working on. Members of the group had taken her pages home, read it over for the month, marked it up, and then we all came back to discuss–which is our M.O. Rarely is it the case…
Read more The Solution to the Pop-Up Character Syndrome in Mysteries
Other Worlds, and This 