Post by Salzmank on Mar 19, 2018 18:54:35 GMT
At the risk of bumping this old thread yet again, I recently finished N or M?, which I’d put off for a while after reading it was mediocre. I thought it was great: Tommy & Tuppence are tons of fun—a little older but none the worse for wear—and I still find them Christie’s best sleuths.
This isn’t (despite what the back-cover said) really a thriller, at least no more than Murder is Easy was; it’s a detective story disguised as a spy novel, much like early Le Carré (Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, even partly Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), in which the question is “who is the mole?”
Great surprise culprit—I guessed the trick that AC was going for early on but got cleverly sidetracked into applying that trick towards the wrong suspect, an excellent misdirection technique. The writing and dialogue are cheery and fun to read—a sharp contrast to the last Christie-esque book I read, Sophie Hannah’s execrable “authorized continuation,” The Monogram Murders. N or M? would probably go on my top 10 Christies list, which will now have to be revised yet again:
Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Pale Horse, Five Little Pigs, and Endless Night all stay (in more or less their same positions), but the other four all get bumped, for better or worse. The new four would probably be (7) The Seven Dials Mystery, (8) Towards Zero, (9) N or M?, and (10) The Sittaford Mystery.
This isn’t (despite what the back-cover said) really a thriller, at least no more than Murder is Easy was; it’s a detective story disguised as a spy novel, much like early Le Carré (Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, even partly Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), in which the question is “who is the mole?”
Great surprise culprit—I guessed the trick that AC was going for early on but got cleverly sidetracked into applying that trick towards the wrong suspect, an excellent misdirection technique. The writing and dialogue are cheery and fun to read—a sharp contrast to the last Christie-esque book I read, Sophie Hannah’s execrable “authorized continuation,” The Monogram Murders. N or M? would probably go on my top 10 Christies list, which will now have to be revised yet again:
Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Pale Horse, Five Little Pigs, and Endless Night all stay (in more or less their same positions), but the other four all get bumped, for better or worse. The new four would probably be (7) The Seven Dials Mystery, (8) Towards Zero, (9) N or M?, and (10) The Sittaford Mystery.