usmanabdi

** spoiler alert ** Had I never read Agatha Christie's other works, I might well be giving Endless Night 5 stars--genuinely creepy atmosphere, a challenging narrative voice for her to carry off (that of a young working-class man), and a breathtaking twist at the end...what's not to love? Well, in my case, the trouble is that she's done the best elements of this novel before, and done them better earlier in her long career. She's taken one of her all-time most brilliant and shocking ideas (the narrator from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) plus the gypsy's curse *and* the exact motivation behind it from her Miss Marple story "The Case of the Caretaker", mixed them together with Henry James' The Wings of the Dove...and it all adds up to Endless Night. I know that Dame Agatha could not have expected her readers in 1967 to have a novel she wrote 40 years earlier AND one of her lesser-known short stories clearly in mind while reading Endless Night. She liked to take an idea and try it from different angles, and certainly she does a fine job of building suspense here. It's just that some ideas are too iconic to ever re-use, and she was her own toughest competition. 1967 Agatha Christie just cannot compete with 1926 Agatha Christie for ingenuity, although she could best any other mystery writer before or since! So although this novel is actually quite strong when taken by itself, I cannot help but see it as derivative and not as worth my while as its predecessors in the Christie canon.

2022-11-14 17:16