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| (Grab a copy of Orient at your local bookstore, or Amazon!) |
"What else can I tell you that you won't believe? That I saw the killer's face the night I left? I did. I held a flare into the darkness and saw a face so familiar that anyone might pass it on the sidewalk and not blink an eye. They might even say hello." -Orient, p. 6
Clearly we are in the zone this year, reading a book a week in order to meet the goals of our project. Being bookish, of course, we often wish we had more time in the day to take in additional tomes, and the Memorial Day holiday weekend afforded us a bit of said coveted time for bonus reading! We had a long list of potential candidates, but when we learned of author Christopher Bollen's Agatha Christie fandom, we knew his 2015 mystery/thriller Orient was the book for us!
Twitter revealed Bollen as a fellow fan, and led us to this super fun Daily Beast article accounting his pilgrimage to Greenway House, Agatha's home in Torquay (the article is really a great read and offers us lots of fun tidbits about the Queen of Crime). We got even more excited about reading his tale of crime after identifying with this description of his own childhood:
"My only recreation during sixth and seventh grade was reading Christie. I craved her murders. I envisioned myself strolling through the village of St. Mary Mead or attending an archaeology dig in Mesopotamia alongside Poirot and a number of suspicious, well-tailored aristocrats."
We second that emotion! Bollen explains that he got his start as a grade-school writer, crafting Christie-inspired tales of crime with lots of murders and female murderers, but drifted away from detective stories as he grew up, favoring more "literary" literature. Eventually, as we all do, he circled back to his childhood interests and decided to try his hand at mystery writing, taking inspiration not only from Agatha's clever, puzzling mysteries, but also her deft depiction of place and characters.
Though the name of the town where he set his book (inspired by a real life town on the North Fork of Long Island) coincidentally echoes one of Agatha's most well-known books, Bollen writes "I liked that my Orient held a quiet acknowledgement of the master."
Thusly, we present our Year of Agatha review of Orient, an NPR Best Book of the Year!
The Sum of It:
We enter the story through a mysterious prologue, a message to readers from the main character at the end of the story, the first of many ably executed Christie call-backs in the book. The character, Mills Chevern (an adopted name), hooks you with his own background, but also with statements such as:
"It is hard for me to picture those first days without seeing the madness that was to follow. I realize now that the deaths in Orient would have happened whether I made my way east or not. They were like matchsticks in a book waiting neatly to be ripped and burned."
UH, YEAH! TELL US MORE.
Mills, a teenager who grew up in foster care in California and made his way to New York City, gets taken in by Paul, a friendly architect with "the head of a lion," who by way of helping Mills get clean takes Mills out to his summer house in the small coastal town where Paul grew up, Orient. Mills finds himself dropped right in the middle of some standard suburban-style strife, old-timers who resent newcomers disrupting idyllic village life, battles between members of the village historical board on how best to preserve their place, some desperate housewife action, husbands looking to prove their virility, and rebellious teens. Mills finds that Orient has also become home to some cosmopolitan artists hoping to find their creativity stoked by the pastoral setting.
Mills finds himself a bit of a polarizing figure in town, a scraggly young stranger who arrives just before a series of local murders rocks the village, paired with the periodic washing up on the shore of creepy mutant animals, presumably the bi-products of a government laboratory on a nearby island. Even so, he has a few friends in town, his benefactor, Paul, Beth, a native of Orient who has returned from a stint in New York with her artist husband, and the handsome, angsty teen next door, Tommy (who is maybe not so much a friend as a fascination #crushing #hearteyes). From the time the first dead body turns up in the bay, all eyes are on the poor guy who just wants to help Paul clean out his house and form something like a normal life.
The tension in the tale builds like music, starting slow, then gathering like dark storm clouds rolling in from the ocean. You can almost hear the Jaws theme getting faster and scarier as the pages turn, which explains why it was 1:42 a.m. when Emily finished the book and sent a photo of her totally surprised/impressed face to Audrey.
The YOA Treatment:
This was a delicious, compelling mystery with some major Agatha elements. We got fooled by some totally classic red herrings, and Bollen's keenly crafted depiction of the tensions in village life definitely remind us of a heightened version of the tea and scandal found in St. Mary Mead. In particular, one of the twists amid the reveal of the killer is SUCH an Agatha move, which we obviously can't tell you about here because you should for sure read this book, but it's just an added little element to help explain the motive of the killer that adds a hint of spice and a little more depth to the story.
The setting of the book comes alive, perhaps particularly so due to recent consumption of similarly set tales, including Showtime's The Affair, set in Montauk, the Harrison Ford/Greg Kinnear version of Sabrina #ontheNorthShoreofLongIsland (David did a GAP AD), and of course F. Scott's perfect tale of West Egg, The Great Gatsby. It simultaneously made us want to visit a Long Island seaside village and NEVER visit such a village because #MURDER.
As an aside, one of the more interesting descriptive elements in the book which eventually made us chuckle was Bollen's choice of words in describing everyone's skin tones. At one point we started asking ourselves, is everyone in this town supposed to be an alien, or has dear Bollen developed a sort of color-blindness specific to skin? There are at least eight different instances of totally alive people being described with skin in tones of blue, green, and grey; "her skin as gray-green as algae," "light hair and skin-color, that of a mildewed paperback novel," "his complexion was a shade of yellow-green," "the pewter pallor of her skin," and even someone, an alive someone, described as having cheeks the color of blueberries #ghostpeople #reversesixthsense? Certainly lent a distinct tone to all the people in town!
While we feel like Agatha has had an inspirational effect on most mystery writers today, whether in her ability to create a Rubik's-style puzzle in each element of the story or her talent for really persuasive red herrings, we really enjoyed reading a totally new thriller bold in its embrace of Agatha's influence. We recommend fitting this into your library as well.
-E. & A.
Adding it to my list 👍🏻
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