Bonus Read: Christopher Bollen's Orient | 2015

(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. 

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Isn't it Romantic: The Man in the Brown Suit | 1924

"I would put all my eggs in one basket. 'First class,' I said. I was now definitely committed to the adventure." - The Man in the Brown Suit, p. 46

Ok, guys, first of all this was a new Agatha story for me, and it's now in my top five. There's something fresh and sprightly about these early stories where the main character (in this case, narrator) is a plucky young girl whose curiosity and yen for romance and adventure gets the better of any sense of practicality. Agatha does such a nice job of creating these clever girls who remind me of no one so much as Clara Oswald from Doctor Who: the smartest, most charming, and cutest girl in the room but no one can help but like her anyway #soufflegirl. More on that later. FIRST:

The Sum of It All: 
PROLOGUE: This book begins with two fake Russians in the dressing room of a Paris theater. The lady reveals not only that she's actually South African (and apparently quite the master of accents), but also that she has figured out a way to double-cross the criminal mastermind who employs them both; the nameless but frightful "Colonel." The double cross involves two different sets of raw South African diamonds, one of which was used to frame two young men for theft, and simultaneously utilized by the lady as insurance against the "Colonel." In reality the two Cambridge grads youthfully trekking through the wilds of South Africa had discovered a new diamond mine, but after betrayal by this faux-Russian hussy, were arrested, disgraced, and evidently killed in WWI.

THE STORY: Next we meet our story's narrator, Anne Beddingfeld, who has to the point of the story's action grown up in a little village in the English country tending to the practical aspects of life for her eccentric father, a professor and "one of England's greatest living experts on Paleolithic man." Her life had been pretty quiet and filled mainly with bearded, elderly professors, Anne's desire for romance and adventure fulfilled only by regular cinematic installments of a serial drama, "The Perils of Pamela," whom Anne describes as always falling out of airplanes and climbing sky scrapers "without turning a hair." Anne's father passes away and suddenly she realizes her life is her own and wouldn't she like to do something with it. In London, she witnesses a man on a tube platform make eye contact with someone behind her who struck so much fear in the man's heart that he stepped back and fell to his death on the live track. When a strange man claims to be a doctor, declares the man dead, then hurries off, dropping a stolen slip of paper cryptically printed with "1 7 . 1 2 2 Kilmorden Castle", Anne realizes the slip of paper she collects on the platform is her ticket to adventure.

Anne's determination to figure out what scared the dead man, what the cryptic message meant, and who killed a mysterious foreign lady in an estate let to rent on the Thames known as Mill House all put her on a ship bound to South Africa. Aboard the ship the intrigue compounds as Anne befriends a delightful socialite, a mysterious Secret Service man, a crochety old English millionaire (who I was troubled/pleased to realize is me in another life), and a reckless, handsome, kind of angry stranger. She also interacts with some ship's stewards, a potential crossdresser, and a man with the face of an undertaker.

ONCE AGAIN this summary is cut short before we even get to the middle because that's where the surprises and suspicions start but suffice it to say Anne and her new socialite friend, Suzanne Blair, decide to solve the mystery on their own, travel to the jungles of South Africa, buy a bunch of carved wooden animals, see a magnificent waterfall, get kidnapped more than once, and Anne falls recklessly, dramatically, in love with a man who insists he is trouble and she is too good for him and tells her she MUST go back to England and then literally the next day after rescuing her from NEARLY CERTAIN DEATH exclaims "My God! Anne, if you ever marry anyone else but me, I'll wring his neck!" (They spend some time arguing/falling in love Cary Grant/Katherine Hepburn-in-Bringing-Up-Baby-style on an island surrounded by crocodiles before actually running for their lives: " 'There speaks a foolish school girl.' 'I'm not a foolish schoolgirl,' I cried indignantly. 'I'm a woman.' 'God help me, so you are,' he muttered..." It's adorable.) And ONCE AGAIN there are some surprises at the end that had me exclaiming aloud with surprise even though I was SURE I had this one alllll figured out, dadgum, Agatha!

Actual Agatha Christie surfing in Honolulu (from here)

The YOA Treatment:
AGATHA IRL: I could write for days about this one. It really is so great. For one thing, this is a story that draws quite a bit from Agatha's actual life. One of the main characters is based on a friend and employer of her first husband, Archie (#teamMax). She and Archie traveled with this man, Mr. Belcher, for a year around the world on trade missions, a seminal experience in Agatha's life, and she dedicated the book to him. In the course of the journey, Mr. Belcher gave Agatha the idea for the story, and insisted on having a primary character modeled after himself.

The travels with Mr. Belcher, in addition to sparking the story's genesis and a main character, also provided a good bit of the setting, with Agatha lending Anne some of her own first impressions of South Africa, including a terrible sea-sickness to begin the journey (from which she was certain she should never recover #deckchairs), the beauty of the flat Table Mountain upon entering the bay at Capetown, and the fascinating geography of the African continent. Agatha even lent Anne another of her singular experiences from this round-the-world trip: the glorious victory of successfully riding an ocean wave on a surfboard. Agatha and Archie were said to be some of the first English to surf in Honolulu, and Agatha preserved this proud memory in Anne's South African experience.

STYLE: As with another favorite Agatha story (Endless Night, way down the line from here) this book offers first person, and potentially unreliable, narrators, an aspect that I think makes these stories predecessors for popular current crime mysteries like The Girl on the Train. That grabs me immediately, especially if the narrator is charming, which Anne and the second narrator are. Another thing about this book that I think has been imitated over and over, but more recently in the Showtime series The Affair, is the telling of the same story from more than one perspective, which provides a really intriguing path through the action and gives the mind a bit more to do.

LADIES: I also must once again praise Agatha's ability to write these delightfully strong female characters. As we've noted before, and as we'll see in a number of other books, Agatha tends to write a lady who can keep her composure and take charge of a situation with grace and a sense of humor, as opposed to some wilting damsel in distress. Anne has a few options for a confidant once she realizes she might be in a little over her head, and considers them all before selecting a female compatriot. Somewhere along the way, Anne realizes that in addition to the excitement of solving a mystery, she has another reason to get to the bottom of things: proving the innocence of a man she can't help but trust. Nevertheless, Anne insists nearly all the way through the adventure, til she is sure who else is on their side and who is not so that a team may be formed, that she and her socialite pal will be the ones making clever deductions and calling the shots, even when her friend gets cold feet and wants to bring a strong, silent fella in on the action:

"I objected vigorously to this unsporting proposal. I recognized in it the disastrous effects of matrimony. How often have I not heard a perfectly intelligent female say, in the tone of one clinching an argument, "Edgar says--" And all the time you are perfectly aware that Edgar is a perfect fool. Suzanne, by reason of her married state, was yearning to lean upon some man or other."

She and Suzanne sort out the friends and foes and hatch an ingenious plan, ultimately banding together with the fellas they trust at the very last minute. Throughout, Anne faces terrifying situations with pluck and quick wits, and Suzanne uses her own charm and smarts to put plans in motion and persuade enemies to act as friends without their even realizing it.

Though Anne decides she doesn't really need a man to help her solve a mystery, or generally, she accidentally finds one she can't live without and then realizes that her own love story is more than quite inextricably linked with her adventure -- more than a little autobiographical of the early years of Agatha's own marriage.

-E.

(image from here)