Meg Hafdahl; Kelly Florence The Science of Agatha Christie The Truth Behind Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and More Iconic Characters from the Queen of Crime Skyhorse Publishing September 2023.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof for review.

This book appears to have been written for a particular type of audience with strong connections to the form of the podcasts which the authors produce. It includes boxed sections of print which at times repeat the information in the text, but do not necessarily add to the ease with which it is read. Sometimes they are just intrusive, as are the homilies and mini lectures that also appear with minimal application to the main text. I found this quite unappealing. The subtitle, The Truth Behind Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, And More Iconic Characters From the Queen of Crime, is only partially covered in this book, which moves beyond Christie and her work to interviews with and material that, while interesting, do not add a great deal to knowledge about Christie. However, I also believe that the book deserves a review that provides readers, for whom these features would not be a negative, with some understanding of the novels covered, and some of the features this work illuminates.

The chapters are based around one of Agatha Christie’s novels: The Mysterious Affair at Styles; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; The Seven Dials Mystery; The Sittaford Mystery; Murder on the Orient Express; The Murder at the Vicarage; Death on the Nile; And Then There Were None; Murder in Retrospect (Five Little Pigs) Crooked House; A Murder is Announced; They Do It with Mirrors; The Mousetrap; The Pale Horse, The Clocks; By the Pricking of My Thumbs; Hollowe’en Party; Elephants Can Remember; Curtain; and Sleeping Murder.
Curtain and Sleeping Murder are well chosen as they are the last books written featuring Christie’s two major continuing characters, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Both were written well in advance of their publication. The work on Curtain deciphers Christie’s relationship with Poirot well, bringing out the financial necessity of his appearances well beyond Christie’s patience with him. The authors also include David Suchet’s feelings about the man he portrayed – an occasion on which it is an excellent use of the way in which they often stray from the main theme. Perhaps the further straying – reference to a contemporary novel and research into Christie ephemera – will appeal to some readers. However, I felt such material added little to analysis of the science of Christie’s novels. So, too, is the detail about arthritis, well beyond portraying the conditions under which in elderly Poirot laboured in this, his last case.

Elephants Can Remember also strays from the analysis of the work. Linking Christie’s possible mental decline to the novel. There is some material here that will interest some readers – information on vocabulary used and changing vocabulary over time, aging and mental capacity. I felt this was more relevant to a biography than looking at Christie’s novels to really understand how they worked. Her wonderful use of red herrings, the way in which The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express and Then There Were None worked to introduce the reader to different perspectives on murder and writing but it, Christie’s knowledge of poisons (so well introduced into Sad Cypress) deserved more analysis.

This is where other readers and I may well part company on the value of this book. I would have liked to stay more closely with the novels, would have appreciated more emphasis on Christie’s skill with poison used for murders, her characterisation – what do we think about the way in which people are often mistaken for others? Not seen? Demonstrate their weaknesses and strengths? – the way in which each novel is so carefully crafted to ensure that the end result could be no other? Other readers will enjoy the discursive nature of the book, with its asides and interviews with people loosely linked to Christie and her work. I hope that I have served both well in covering what I believe to be the strengths and weaknesses of The Science of Agatha Christie The Truth Behind Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, and More Iconic Characters from the Queen of Crime.

As a big Agatha Christie fan, I was really excited to take a look at this.

It didn't take long to read at all, but it felt like a celebration of Agatha Christie, and it was a very interesting read. A book like this would be welcome on my shelf alongside my Agatha Christie collection. I think it would also be an interesting read for someone interested in Agatha's work or introducing themselves to it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a free copy to review.

It's clear that a lot of time and research went into this book, but it's definitely not what I expected. It's very academic and kind of textbook-y. I was also expecting this book to tackle the "how"s and "why"s of Christie's stories; for example, how did the forensics behind a case work, why did the killer choose this poison, etc. However, this book focuses more on the background information behind Christie's work. For example, it talks about the history behind the Orient Express and its first journey. This is still interesting but it's more tangential than I expected.

I'm not sure that a casual fan of Agatha Christie would appreciate the work that went into this book, but it would definitely appeal to a devoted fan or someone interested in literary history in general. There were interesting interview excerpts from Christie that many may not have seen before. I think it's well-researched and well-written, just not my personal taste.

I’m a huge Agatha Christie fan so I was really excited for this. However, it wasn’t really what it seemed based on the title. I was expecting more like the recent Science of Murder book about Christie where it dove into various poisons, forensics, etc. seen in the books. Instead, each chapter was based around a singular book. Each chapter was kind of a recap and then a brief dive into the scientific things within this book. Some were just short paragraphs instead of a deeper analysis that I was expecting. There were also interviews, some I found relevant and some not.

I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.

This was a well-written book with a surprising topic, but it was very interesting! I liked how the authors used some of the lesser known Christie books, such as The Clocks and The Seven Dials Mystery, and how they provided book summary in case you hadn't read it yet. After that, they explained the particulars that they were getting ready to delve further into and the science behind those scenes. Finally, they gave you a list of books to read for each chapter at the end of the book if you want to investigate more.

An Attractive Proposition…
An attractive proposition and beautifully packaged in terms of the cover art. As a Christie aficionado, this immediately has bags of appeal. It is also a fun and interesting read, as the authors delve into the novels and short stories of the Queen of Crime. The delving could be deeper, however, and the science more…..well, scientific. Furthermore, something that is unfortunately unforgivable, is the constant placement of spoilers for Christie’s plots and denouements with absolutely no warnings whatsoever - even suggesting the reading of a certain novel, at one point, for the complete and utter surprise that the denouement will bring and then a few sentences later giving the whole plot and finale away in one devastating fell swoop. Whilst this did not affect this reader’s enjoyment of Christie, having already read through the whole canon several times, it is still wholly unacceptable.

This book has me on the fence. On one side, I would like to like it. It had all the major point of being good - investigating the Queen of Mystery, understanding her life and what made her write such iconic books. But the execution of the book was awful. Not only were there no pre-disclaimers about upcoming spoiler alerts (until at least chapter 3 or 4 I think?) I was not expecting to have the books bullet pointed back to me. Sure you saved me reading the whole book by summarizing it in a few pages, but it wasn't worth it. I also felt like each chapter was a high school book report with the perfect amount of P.E.E included (point, evidence, explanation).

I didn't hate the way that it was written, and by that I mean the podcast feel to it. That was fine, but I never listened to the author's podcast before (didn't even know there was one until reading other people's reviews). The thing I did hate was the random photo, usually unrelated, the random little boxes of "facts" absolutely not related to anything, the interviews with people to promote their own books, and the aggressive amount of exclamation marks!!

As you can see, lots wrong with this but it had the potential to be good. I also know I got an ARC, but there were a fair few grammatical errors (mostly the lack of capitalizing proper nouns) which got annoying as well. 1.5 stars rounded up, DNF @ 47%

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Although I have read all of Ms. Christie's novels, I sadly didn't love this book. Some of the issue is that I feel that it was misrepresented. There is very little "science" in this book, so that word probably should not be in the title. I am also unfamiliar with the authors or their podcast, Horor Rewind. Perhaps if I had listened to them prior to reading this book I would have understood their style and that would have helped me in reading this book, which I felt was a bit haphazard and disjointed, jumping from one random topic to the next with little, if any, transition. The layout of the book is strange as well, with random boxes of information and pictures with captions that have little to do with the Christie novel that they are supposedly dissecting. For instance, there is an entire passage about ringworms because a dog in one of the novels has ringworms so we get a random tangent on the history of ringworms. What, I ask, do ringworms have to do with an Agatha Christie mystery? If the ringworms were pivotal to the plot or in some way related to the method of murder, I could understand it but, as I said, I read all of the books and do not even recall the dog that they were talking about (and no, it wasn't Bob from Dumb Witness). As other reviewers have noted, the expert interviews were also head scratching. Many of them had nothing to do with Agatha Christie's novels, plays, tv series or movies so I really don't know what they brought to the table other than telling us about their job, such as costume designer, and their favorite Agatha Christie novel. They were irrelevant and should have been omitted. Finally, this book contains many spoilers of Christie's novels without amble warning. I have read them all so it didn't matter much to me but other reviewers have noted that the ending of some of the novels were spoiled for them. I am sad to say that I spent much of this book skimming, searching for the "truth behind Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and more iconic characters from the Queen of Crime" and was left wanting. The book quotes liberally from Agatha's own autobiography so I would suggest reading that book instead.

I have loved Agatha Christie since I was 9 years old and that was 47 years ago. I have read all of her books, plays, autobiographies, biographies and any article I could get my hands on.

She remains to this day as the Grand Dame of Murder Mystery. She created the unreliable narrator, the best and finest detective (apart from his earlier predecessor Sherlock Holmes) in Hercule Poirot, and countless other characters that we have come to know and love or hate. I found this book to be extremely interesting I love the quotations I love how she came up with her story lines, I love that she was ahead of her time, writing at a level even higher than other murder mystery authors of her day.

I wish that there had been more background and less talking to experts. But all in all, an excellent book and a phenomenal resource to add to my collection. Bravo!

This book reads like listening to a podcast. It includes many different, disparate facts that sometimes are only tangentially related to Agatha Christie’s mysteries, but that are informative and fun. There are interviews with professionals that illustrate a point and add very interesting details. But the meat of this volume is all the varied information about Dame Agatha’s life, some of it in her own words. The authors analyze a few of Christie’s novels (they would need many, many pages to include them all) adding historical background, the author’s own experiences and fun scientific facts about the plots. Spoiler alert, pretty much everything in the mysteries is at least feasible. Beware, though, that most of the chapters spoil the plot of the whodunits. I’ve read most of the books analyzed here, but not all, so I had to skip these parts. It would have been useful to have warnings when discussing all these details (there is one about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and not all of the books are spoiled, but now I know how Curtain ends, even if I’ve been waiting to read it). That said, I loved this book. I can tell that Hafdahl and Florence love the Queen of Crime as much as I do and that love is evident in this tribute to one of the most successful writers in history.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, #NetGalley/#Skyhorse Publishing!

My thanks to Net Galley and Skyhorse for this fascinating and unique read.

Having been a reader of Christie for decades, seen all of the Masterpiece adaptations and all the movies, this was a must.

I loved how the authors dedicated a chapter for certain stories then pointed out the analysis of various plot points Christie uses in her narratives.

My ONLY negative comment, I could have done with less interviews from experts. Still, highly recommend.

Essentially is a podcast that has been written down.

The overuse of exclamation points really annoyed me. Like I'm five and need enthusiasm injecting into my reads.

I felt that splitting this book down by Christie Book wasn't the best move. It should have been chapters by theme and then thread the books into the theme. Instead, it jumped about in a jarring manner. I'd be reading about escaped convicts and suddenly the history of glasses. Some of these links, glasses included were so tenuous.
There should have been a chapter on gunshots, forensics, poisons etc.

I love the idea of this book. A proper look at the poisonings, the forensics etc. But this is not that book. It was way too light entertainment, snippets of facts that are quite shallow in content instead of a detailed explanations.

Sorry, just wasn't for me.