An Affair to Remember: Sparkling Cyanide | 1944

(image from here)

"Rosemary, that's for remembrance." - Sparkling Cyanide, p. 37

We have heartily enjoyed spending the month of July reading along with our friends @maidensofmurder over on Instagram! Thank you so much again, Maidens, for this opportunity to enjoy Agatha Christie together!

The Sum of It:
Our story begins with a group of party guests somewhat guiltily remembering a dinner they all attended nearly a year before...one that ended rather deadly...

Rosemary Barton and her older husband, George, had invited a group of pals for a night out on the town. Everyone seemed to be having a great time getting their drinking and dancing on, until Rosemary took a sip of her champagne and promptly dropped dead. The whisper going around was that Rosemary was depressed after a bout of the flu, and so she probably decided a nice evening out with her friends and loved ones was the perfect time to kill herself. Husband George and Sister Iris, obvi pretty torn up, accept the suicide theory, especially when Iris finds a letter Rosemary wrote to her on-the-side Mystery Boyfriend, showing that old Rosemary would not be too happy about the idea of said boyfriend breaking things off.

HOWEVER, things take a turn when George receives an anonymous letter suggesting that Rosemary didn't commit suicide, and that one of their dinner guests actually killed her! What better way to get to the bottom of his wife's death than to throw ANOTHER dinner party at the same restaurant with the same dinner guests and set a trap to catch the killer! Things go horribly wrong yet again when at awkward dinner number two, GEORGE drops dead in the exact same manner as Rosemary! #shockedface #didntseethatcoming. Did he know too much? Was he on the right track of the killer? Was he actually the intended victim the first time around!?

Colonel Race is brought on to the scene to try and puzzle out who keeps killing Bartons. Throw into the mix a lot of rigamarole with inheriting large sums of money, a politically power-hungry couple with some serious secrets, a baddie cousin in the Argentine, and a secretary in love with her boss, and you have one delicious #MYSTERY.

The YOA Treatment:
Overall, we enjoyed this book. It's always a bit of a bummer to read an Agatha book without Poirot or Miss Marple, but Colonel Race does a very decent, albeit rather forgettable, job of solving the crime with the help of Iris's boyfriend, Anthony Browne. Both of us were actually (FOR ONCE!) able to spot the culprit early on due to some pretty hefty page time dedicated to a certain character's feelings. Emily was on the right track from the start with motive, although Audrey had a little harder time working it all out.

One interesting note in this book is the way it builds on Agatha's status as a MAJOR ROMANTIC.  So many of the characters are found to be in different stages of falling in love: love at first sight, realizing you loved someone all along, infatuation, pining quietly, etc. Romance often plays some part in Agatha's novels, but this one particularly showcases it in nearly every character. It's understandable why Agatha took time off in her career from writing crime novels to write a short series of romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott.

We discuss more of our #SPOILERS Sparking Cyanide thoughts and feelings over on the @maidensofmurder account, so if you've read this one, be sure to head over and join in!

-A. & E.

Agatha's First Drafts

(image from here)

The YOA Treatment:
Although we have a bit of a love/hate relationship with short stories (#trueconfessions), we have enjoyed getting to know more about Agatha Christie's writing process by seeing how her sprightly, easy-to-read style and enthralling plots fit into both short story and novel form.  Many times we have seen Agatha almost doing a trial run of plot ideas in a short format, which she then fleshes out into a full-length novel. Some notable examples are "Triangle at Rhodes"/Evil Under the Sun, "The Case of the Caretaker"/Endless Night, and, most pertinent to this month, "Yellow Iris"/Sparkling Cyanide (also known as Remembered Death).

Emily recently read "Yellow Iris" in The Regatta Mystery collection and obvi the inspiration is clear, from the settings to the style of murder to the characters... with one notable exception: NO POIROT IN CYANIDE! Another familiar mystery solver, Colonel Race, who is a friend of Poirot's, gets to be on the case in Sparkling Cyanide, while good ol' Hercule solves the mystery in "Yellow Iris." We aren't sure exactly why Agatha ditched Poirot for the novel version of this whodunnit, but we do know that she found him infuriating and regularly wished she wasn't stuck with him, so maybe she wrote Sparkling Cyanide during one of their tiffs!

We have so enjoyed reading Sparkling Cyanide this month with the Maidens of Murder! Be sure to head over to their Instagram (@maidensofmurder) tomorrow to for a discussion of the book! We'll also be posting our recap here on the blog over the weekend.

Happy reading!

-A. & E.

Don't You Know That You're Toxic? | Agatha & Poison

This is an actual photo of Agatha in her WWI nurse outfit from the Agatha Christie Archive! We found it in this really interesting article from The Telegraph about how WWI influenced Agatha and her writing. Give it a read!

It's no secret (certainly not from those of you who've read a few books) that poison is one of Agatha's favorite weapons. She gets pretty creative with it at times, sometimes it's a mysterious tribal potion on the tip of a tiny tiny dart, sometimes it's mixed in with some coffee, and sometimes it's dissolved in a nice champagne cocktail #SparklingCyanide. As a part of our month with the #MaidensofMurder, we wanted to do a post looking into Agatha's interest and expertise in poisons as a murder weapon #ladieschoice #accordingtomostfictionaldetectives

The article we referenced in the photo caption notes that Agatha's work as a WWI nurse was pretty grim stuff, despite her own "stiff upper lip" attitude anytime she writes about it. She experienced quite a bit of grisly wounds and surgeries as she was caring for the soldiers who came through her hospital. As the article points out, despite this firsthand experience, she seems to prefer writing about the "clean method of poisoning." In fact, Agatha's first murder was a poisoning, in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. She got the idea to write a detective story while she was working in the dispensary at her town's wartime hospital. In her own words:

"It was while I was working in the dispensary that I first conceived the idea of writing a detective story. The idea had remained in my mind since [my sister] Madge's earlier challenge--and my present work seemed to offer a favourable opportunity...I began considering what kind of  detective story I could write. Since I was surrounded by poisons, perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method I selected."

She goes on to explain how terrifying working in the dispensary was at first, and how cautious and nervous she and her fellow amateurs were, but also points out what she learned during that time:

"After working in a hospital with several doctors one realizes how medicine, like everything else in this world, is very much a matter of fashion: that, and the personal idiosyncrasy of every medical practitioner."

This understanding of the idiosyncrasies of medicine and the physicians who prescribe it inspired some of Agatha's craftiest murderers. We certainly know one creepy doctor gave her some material, which she also describes in the autobiography:

"One day, seeking perhaps to impress me, he took from his pocket a dark-coloured lump and showed it to me, saying, "Know what this is?" "No," I said. "It's curare," he said. "Know about curare?" 

I said I had read about it. 

"Interesting stuff," he said, "very interesting. Taken by the mouth it does you no harm at all. Enter the bloodstream, it paralyzes and kills you. It's what they use for arrow poison. Do you know why I carry it in my pocket?"

"No," I said, "I haven't the slightest idea." It seemed to me an extremely foolish thing to do, but I didn't add that.

"Well you know," he said thoughtfully, "it makes me feel powerful." [#terrifiedeyesemoji]

She goes on to talk about how she had often wondered about him after she finished working with him, saying "He struck me, in spite of his cherubic appearance, as possibly rather a dangerous man [#noshit]. His memory remained with me so long that it was still there waiting when I first conceived the idea of my book The Pale Horse--and that must have been, I suppose, nearly fifty years later."

Here's hoping that guy never murdered anybody. But thanks to him, and to Agatha's wartime pharmacy experience, her imagination created a lot of our favorite mysteries, including Sparkling Cyanide, this month's #MaidensofMurder read! Our month of maidening continues next week with a post about the short story that led to Sparkling Cyanide, leading up to our review of the book itself!

- A. & E.

We Become Guest #MaidensofMurder | Sparkling Cocktail Recipe (Cyanide Not Included!)

Hello dear readers!

We are SO very excited and honored to be guest Maidens this month with our Instagram friends over at @maidensofmurder! The Maidens have been reading several Agatha Christie books each month, and we are joining them for their July read of Sparkling Cyanide. In honor of this read, we are going to be featuring a Sparkling Cyanide-themed post each Thursday this month and will have our recap of this read on the blog in a few weeks, as well as a discussion of the book over on Instagram.

Though Agatha herself preferred to sip a bit of cream over cocktails, a nice bubbly drink seems like the perfect place to hide a little poison (if you're an Agatha murderer, that is) so in honor of this weapon of choice from our featured July read, we give you a little cocktail recipe to sip as you (hopefully!) read along with the Maidens this month!

(image from Style Me Pretty)

Blackberry Thyme Champagne Cocktail
(recipe from Style Me Pretty Living)

Ingredients:
FOR THE BLACKBERRY SYRUP:
1/3 cup blackberries, plus 8 more for garnish
1/3 cup water
1/3 cup sugar
FOR THE COCKTAIL:
1 bottle Prosecco or champagne
FOR THE GARNISH:
4 sprigs of fresh thyme

Instructions:
1. In a small saucepan, bring the blackberries, water, and sugar to a boil. Turn to low and let simmer for 10 minutes. Strain blackberries and let syrup cool.

2. Add 2 tbsp. of syrup to the bottom of 4 glasses. Top with champagne and add in a sprig of thyme and 2 blackberries.

3. Make sure none of your friends are murderers then hand out drinks ;)

Happy sipping and reading!

-A. & E.