Word: poirot
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Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader's Companion. "Perpetrated" by Dilys Winn (Workman Publishing; 522 pages; $14.95 hardcover, $7.95 paper). For devotees of mysteries, thrillers and spy stories, this is the unputdownable reference work and ultimate argument settler. How many of those "little gray cells" did Hercule Poirot have? (One trillion.) Nero Wolfe's actual weight? (One-seventh of a ton.) Which British poet laureate and which U.S. President wrote murder stories? (C. Day Lewis and Abraham Lincoln.) With 150 contributions about crime writers, cops, critics, scientists, ex-spies, a stoolie, a butler who didn...
...large-spirited woman, she is notably grudging to the man who got her to Buckingham Palace-Hercule Poirot. There is little about him in the book, and what she does write is rilled with ennui and regret that she did not make him younger, handsomer, more dashing. Finally, however, she is gracious. "As life goes on, it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented," she writes. "Presumably you have learned literary humility. If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that...
Agatha Christie said that if she had ever imagined, as a young woman, that she would spend 50 years writing thrillers, she would never have made Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple so old. Perhaps, but several of the elderly detectives prove to be the hardiest. The latest ancient to carry a series on his frail back is an Amsterdam police commissioner, or commissaris. He wears waistcoats and a watch chain; he has rheumatism, unfailing gaiety and humor, but no name. The Japanese Corpse is the fifth mystery he has appeared in, and he gives every promise of providing an annuity...
...book. Credible plots are not necessarily the stuff of which good mysteries are made; anyone who believes otherwise should take a long look at the marvelously improbable tales of Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. What distinguishes Cussler's attempt from a genuinely good mystery a la Holmes or Poirot is the author's singular inability to create any distinctively human characters. Cussler's figures are worse than wooden: the neurotic physicist, dashing American agent, villainous Russian spy and confused but loving heroine are all solid concrete stereotypes that wouldn't even pass muster in a remake of "The Adventures...
Some of the books currently appearing on most-in-demand lists are "Curtain," by Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot's last cast), "Roots," by Alex Haley, a black historic document, and "Life after Life," by Raymond Moody Jr., M.D., a book that contains case histories of people whom doctors have declared clinically dead but who lived and recovered...