I never know the answers to any of them and it makes me look such a fool. What made you first think of taking up writing? How many books have you written? How much money do you make.
Or bemoaning the fate of authors when confronted by enthusiastic interviewers or readers: … Say what you like, it’s not natural for five or six people to be on the spot when B is murdered and all to have a motive for killing B-unless, that is, B is absolutely madly unpleasant and in that case nobody will mind whether he’s been killed or not…’ It’s the covering up that’s so difficult. ‘The murder part is quite easy and simple. More significantly there’s Ariadne Oliver, (often used by Christie to satirize her own experiences of as a writer) explaining to Mark the problem of devising a realistic crime plot: What did they matter? Why did I want to write about them?
Mogul architecture, Mogul Emperors, the Mogul way of life - and all the fascinating problems it raised, became suddenly as dust and ashes. one of those sudden revulsions that all writers know. So here we have Mark, who is supposed to be writing a book about Mogul architecture, beset by doubts of whether this is really what the world needs: Just as enjoyable was the periodic intrusion of Christie’s authorial voice to mock (gently) writers of academic texts and the problems of being a writer. Still it made The Pale Horse fun to read because once that sorcery business is out of the picture, the rest is a straight forward narrative of clues that lead you a merry dance until the final revelation. I’m not sure how Mark Easterbrook managed to keep a straight face when all this hocus-pocus was going on, I certainly couldn’t. If it was meant to be chilling it failed. There are no fenny snakes or newts’ eyes but we do get invocations and a visitation from the spirit world and a cockerel’s fresh blood dripped into a fiery cauldron. It’s not until Mark attends a seance that we see any of them in action. Christie’s idea is to make them a trio of slightly eccentric women who talk about spells and magic while dolling out tea in an English village. The plot is a bit jumbled initially with more of a flavour of a “howdunnit” rather than a “whodunnit” There’s a hotchpotch of characters, some of whom provide a romance interest, some who drop hints and others who might or might not be the murderer.Į get a hint of this early in the novel when a character muses about how best to portray the witches in a production of Macbeth. With the aid of “Ginger” Corrigan, a girl he meets at the fete, he sets out to discover whether there’s a “murder on demand” organisation at work. Mark begins to suspect the two remaining names are people who might be about to die. Another was a girl he’d seen get into a fight at a Chelsea coffee shop. Most of them turn out to be recently deceased, including Mark’s godmother. In Much Deeping Mark also discovers that a Roman Catholic priest was murdered shortly after hearing the last confession of a parishioner. Afterwards Mark gets the impression she might have been describing a service she’s willing to perform. When he meets one of them, Thyrza Grey, the conversation turns to a discussion about the ability to kill at a distance. Invited to a fete in the village of Much Deeping he hears about an ancient inn called The Pale Horse, now converted into a house inhabited by three women with a knowledge of magic and the dark arts. The ‘detective’ work in this novel is undertaken by Mark Easterbrook, a man who is more of an expert on Mogul architecture than death and murder but falls into the latter as a result of a string of coincidences.
AGATHA CHRISTIE PALE HORSE SERIES
The Pale Horse doesn’t really fit into the Ariadne Oliver series however because she’s relegated to a very minor role in the background. It features two of Christie’s regular sleuths: Inspector Lejeuen and the novelist detective Ariadne Oliver. This one has overtones of black magic and the supernatural. Published in her later period, this is a murder mystery but not of the locked room or stately home variety. T he Pale Horse turned out to be much darker than anything else I’ve read by her but still good escapist fun. I thought I’d be safe with an Agatha Christie novel. Too hot to sleep but too tired to read anything complex, I hunted through my e-reader for a suitably undemanding novel.
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