Reviewing “The Clocks” by Agatha Christie

It started out with such promise. 

A young typist with a shadowy past is assigned to go to 19 Wilbraham Crescent. Said typist, Sheila Webb, goes to said address…and finds a corpse surrounded by clocks. Just as she has discovered the dead man, a blind woman comes in—the real owner of the house, Miss Pebmarsh. Sheila goes hysterical and runs out into the street, bumping into marine biologist Colin Lamb—who, luckily, is actually a British spy who has friends in the police force, and thus can instantly become a first-person narrator.

Third-person narrative takes turns with Colin as he joins Detective Inspector Hardcastle on the routine rounds of interviewing all the possible suspects, most of them neighbors who are Rather Suspicious. Somewhere along the line Christie remembered that she meant this to be a Hercule Poirot novel, so she has Colin also coincidentally be old friends with the famous detective. Colin visits Poirot at his home, where Poirot is going bonkers from boredom. After a rather awkward diatribe of various mystery writers, Colin finally gives Poirot the Cliffs Notes of what has happened so far. Poirot proceeds to stay in his flat for almost the entirety of the book, only showing up at the end as a Belgian ex Machina to solve the crime without doing any legwork.

Unnerving Short Stories by Rudyard Kipling

I have known for a long time that there are two basic views of Rudyard Kipling:

1.      Rudyard Kipling the author of The Jungle Book and Just So Stories…thus, a children’s author.

2.      Rudyard Kipling, author of The White Man’s Burden…thus, a racist.

The Kipling I met when reading the collection Rudyard Kipling’s Tales of Horror & Fantasy (edited by Stephen Jones) was bits of both, yet neither.

While I prefer novels where I can really settle into a world and get to know the people that live there, I have recently begun to appreciate one aspect of short stories: collections of one author can showcase the broad spectrum of their talents, and thus reveal more of themselves.

Reviewing "God So Loved the World" by Elizabeth Goudge

“The life of Our Lord is like a great symphony. It has three movements, with a silence between each when we are left wondering what is happening. The first movement is the music of his babyhood and boyhood, the second of his ministry and suffering and death, and the third of his resurrection.”

~ Elizabeth Goudge, God So Loved the World, Chapter 4 , page 39

My reading habits do not naturally gravitate towards books that are retellings of true historical events. If truth is stranger than fiction, it is also more important and meaningful. What fictionalizations do accomplish, however, is making something come alive in our imaginations, so that historical events are not just some facts laid out in dry terms in an encyclopedia or textbook, but instead were real actions involving real people with feelings, hopes, dreams, fears, and failings.

Writing about Biblical events is an even more perilous undertaking. Even watching a VeggieTales interpretation of a Bible story can lead one into a misconception…and not just that David and Goliath were not, in fact, an asparagus and pickle (respectively). So if I avoid fictionalizations of history, that goes double, usually, for Biblical fictionalizations.