A touchstone of crime fiction: a literary analysis of "the Hollow" by Agatha Christie.

Hello again, agents. Thank you for attending today's briefing. Today, I thought we would pontificate over a great intriguing and timeless mystery that I think everyone should read at least once (if not multiple times). And this ministry is of course "the Hollow" by Agatha Christie, now I know, some agents out there might be thinking (why would I want to read this book or any of Agatha Christie's novels for that matter. They are sold." Yes I know, agents, Agatha Christie's novels are indeed very old. Most of them being published in the 20s 30s 40s and 50s, however, it is imperative to realize that almost all of Agatha Christie's novels are still in print, to this day and with the possible exception of the Bible, she has sold more copies of her books and any other author (Google it if you don't believe me). This in my mind, it makes Agatha Christie in must-read for anyone it considers themselves a true literary aficionado; especially agents of the clandestine life books.

What makes this particular Agatha Christie novel still intriguing to me is the structure of the mystery itself and down the famous detective Hercule Poirot negotiates the twists and turns of the mystery in the unique setting of a country estate weekend party, where everything is just a little too neat and tidy as if the entire thing has been staged for the benefit of the famous Belgian detective. To me this book is everything, and Agatha Christie novel, should be as well of inspiration for any budding author wanting to tackle the world of mystery and/or crime fiction...

The Hollow by Agatha Christie is a country house mystery in which Hercule Poirot comes across what he describes as “A set scene. A stage scene”; a murder scene specifically staged, he thinks at first, to deceive him.
Gerda and her husband John Christow, a Harley Street doctor was visiting Sir Henry and Lucy, Lady Angkatell at their house, The Hollow. John is an aggressive dominant personality. Also down for the weekend were Lucy’s cousins Midge, who works in a London dress shop, Henrietta, a sculptress, Edward, a rather pale character and David, a student.
Lucy is sure it will be a difficult weekend – Gerda always appears vacant and lost, completely dominated by John, who is having an affair with Henrietta. Edward is in love with Henrietta and Midge is in turn in love with Edward. David is too intellectual and Lucy herself is vague, charming and completely eccentric. As a distraction she has invited the “Crime man“, Poirot, whose weekend cottage is next door, to lunch on the Sunday. She describes Poirot’s house disparagingly as
… One of those funny new cottages – you know, beams that bump your head and a lot of new plumbing and quite the wrong kind of garden. London people like that sort of thing. (page 13)
As Poirot arrives and is taken through the garden to the swimming pool all the characters are there, with Gerda, revolver in hand, standing over the dying body of her husband, as his blood drips gently over the edge of the concrete into the pool. Poirot hears his final word “Henrietta”.
I found Lucy’s reaction amusing. It’s typical of her vague, almost detached nature. She says:
Of course, say what you like, a murder is an awkward thing – it upsets the servants and puts the general routine out – we were having ducks for lunch – fortunately they are quite nice eaten cold. (page 102)
Later she observes:
There would be something very gross, just after the death of a friend, in eating one’s favorite pudding. But caramel custard is so easy – slippery if you know what I mean – and then one leaves a little on one’s plate. (page 113)
This is now one of my favorite Agatha Christie books. She herself described it in her autobiography as “in some ways rather more of a novel than a detective story.” I agree, the characters are well drawn and the setting of both The Hollow and Ainswick, the larger country house Edward has inherited from his uncle, Lucy’s father are described with nostalgia. Agatha Christie also revealed that she thought she had ruined the book by the introduction of Poirot:
I had got used to having Poirot in my books and so naturally he had to come into this one, but he was all wrong there. He did his stuff all right, but how much better, I kept thinking, would the book have been without him. So when I came to sketch out the play, out went Poirot.(page 489-490)
Poirot has a small role, the investigation into John’s death is headed by Inspector Grange and it is a comment he makes that leads Poirot to discover the culprit. I’m used to having Poirot in her books too, so I didn’t find too much wrong with him being there.
It seems that everyone could have committed the murder and I swung from one to the other as I read, no doubt as Agatha Christie intended, but I did work it out before Poirot unveiled the killer.  As Poirot says:
That is why every clue looked promising and then petered out and ended in nothing. (page 249)

 

As always, agents please remember that "weeding is just recreation for intelligence." And also, keep adding to the world's literary conversation so that we can maintain the clandestine life books for the true literary aficionados.

A dark and intriguing fairy tale for those agents who still believe in the possibilities of magic: a literary analysis of "the book of lost things" By John Connolly.

Hello again, agents. Thank you for attending today's briefing. Today, we are going to discuss a very interesting book "the book of lost things" by John Connolly. This book is the sort of story that you would get if adults didn't stop believing in fairy tales as they grew older. This book is a unique psychological character study that takes place during World War II. The best way to describe this book is Alice in Wonderland, meets the Brothers Grimm with a little bit of the never-ending story thrown in for good measure. It will definitely take any agent reading it back to the days of bedtime stories and monsters under the bed or in the closet (but in a nostalgic way).

At the age of 12, the main character, David loses his mother to a fatal illness, and things are never the same for David. His mother used to challenge him stories of the ancient legends and mythology of your stories about gnomes and fairies and goblins and the green men like to borrow things when no one is looking. Stories like these books became a great comfort to David after his mother passed. Particularly because he was more or less left on his own as his father had to work long hours to support himself and David. David spent countless afternoons in the attic bedroom with his nose buried in one of his favorite stories. And then one day, something strange happened. The books began to talk as if they were trying to get daily detention or fill him in on a secret that only they knew the day the books began to talk, is the David David's life changed forever as he would enter a home in world filled with creatures that most people except for David have forgotten all about, unfortunately for David. The creatures do not forget about us...

Hopefully dear agents by the end of today's briefing, you will be inspired to pick up his book. And we visit, the world of fairy tales, where goblins and magic exist a place where good always times over evil and all things are possible if the dreamer is willing to believe hard enough.

Fugue state, formally Dissociative Fugue... usually involves unplanned travel or wandering, and is sometimes accompanied by the establishment of a new identity. Fugues are usually precipitated by a stressful episode.

In world war 2-era England, young David loses his mother after a lingering illness and begins to experience strange dissociative episodes, often involving the sounds of books whispering to him and usually ending with him falling into unconsciousness. Soon enough, his father finds a new wife named Rose - a nurse at his mother's hospice - and David finds himself with a stepmother and an infant half-brother. David is deeply unhappy with this development. After the new family moves out of London to Rose's country home in order to escape German bombers, David realizes a shadowy, crooked figure has sinister designs on him and his brother. One night, after a particularly bad argument with his folks, David hears his mother's voice calling him. following that voice, he crawls into a hole within a sunken garden - just as a German bomber also falls from the sky and crashes into that garden. He emerges into a sinister fantasyland. His quest: Find and Rescue His Mother. His nemesis: The Crooked Man.

John Connolly is best known as a respected writer of an excellent detective series. his strengths have been widely reported: gorgeously dark and lush descriptive skills, a sensitive portrayal of private eye Charlie Parker - an unusually tormented protagonist (tragic even for a genre noted for its sad, sad heroes), and a unsettling ability to mix the prosaic with the supernatural to startling effect. In this book, Connolly takes each of those gifts and streamlines them in a way that is appropriate for the reader of young adult or even children's literature - although this novel is very clearly an Adult Fairy Tale. The result is pleasingly distinctive. There are many scenes that are striking in their psychosocial nuance, their foreboding atmosphere, their ability to evoke that wonderfully shivery feeling of fearful anticipation. my favorite passage happens early on: David's daunting entry into the strange fantasy world... an eerie vignette that is a model of careful, suspenseful writing, featuring unearthly quiet, child-like flowers, a  taciturn Woodsman, the smoking remains of the German bomber, bleeding trees, a house in the woods with a Giger-like exterior, and a gathering of evil wolfish beings.

Dionysian imitatio, a literary method of imitation conceived as the practice of emulating, adaptating, reworking and enriching a source text by an earlier author.

Book of Lost Things is a book of mythopoeia templates - revisited, revised, regurgitated, remixed, and remained. We have an entire company of Big Bad Wolves, reconfigured as ambitious wolf-men, born of a grotesquely slutty Little Red Hood and sprung from the nightmares of a juvenile king... a perhaps not-so-Wicked Stepmother... a malevolent and terrifying Sleeping Beauty... Childe Roland, transformed as a brave gay soldier in search of his long-lost lover... trolls and harpies and a savage, hungry Beast... a young girl's spirit in a glass jar... and our villain, a gleeful child-thief, a striker of dark bargains, a Rumpelstiltskin, an old old devil: The Crooked Man.

the use of revisionism is, sadly, not always successful. a comic interlude with the socialist Seven Dwarves and an obese, monstrous Snow White is depressingly unfunny and a little desperate (at least to this reader). and a long part near the end, depicting various torture chambers and examples of The Crooked Man's terrible villainy seems to be merely an excuse for Connolly to indulge himself with a gloatingly vicious array of sadistic tableau. Both sequences were eye-rolling and sigh-inducing.

 However those are aberrations; despite them, Connolly more than succeeds in creating delightful and intriguing reinterpretations of figures from fairy and folk tale. Even better, David's character is a slow-burning but dynamic one, changing in bits and starts from boy to man with each new encounter. He is a realistically flawed protagonist as well as a brave and endearing little hero.

Memento mori, a Latin phrase translated as "Remember your mortality", "Remember you must die" or "Remember you will die"... it names a genre of artistic work which varies widely, but which all share the same purpose: to remind people of their own mortality.

the novel's extended endings were a brilliant surprise. To avoid spoilers, 1'll just say that i was entirely taken aback by the meaning of The Book of Lost Things itself. and - even more memorably, more intensely - the closing pages' no-nonsense illustration of the potential and/or inherent tragedy of human life in general... and the idea of that tragedy - no matter how intimate - somehow not really being that tragic at all - just simply a part of the greater cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

i hate to end a review with a TV show reference... but if you have ever seen the last 10 minutes or so of Six Feet Under's final episode - a wondrously sad, wistful, yet somehow uplifting experience - you will know exactly what I mean. The ending of this rather fantastic book is equally moving.

Remember agents "reading is just recreation for intelligence." Until next time; keep your nose to the page, and remember, every book has a life of its own, even if it's a clandestine one.

Guitar strings and murder, a literary analysis of: Emerald City by Chris Nickson.

Hello again, agents. Thank you for attending today's briefing. Today we are going to discuss an interesting book that has been out for a little while, but it seems to have flown under the radar and attracted little attention. "Emerald city" by Chris Nickson is a wonderful and richly detailed, noir mystery revolves around the 1988 underground music scene in Seattle. Mr. Nixon creates a world in which the reader is completely swallowed up by the atmosphere to the point where as the reader. You almost hear the music and smell the coffee and feel of the drizzle of the rain on your head, and on top of the rich descriptions of the city and its "sound" the mysterious death of the up-and-coming musician and his band. Provide enough twists and turns to keep the reader engaged from the first page to the last. I also got some serious J.A. Jance vibes, I got the distinct feeling that this is the sort of story that you would get if JP Beaumont and Rolling Stone had a love child. There was the same sort of gritty realism, but instead of a police perspective. The reader is presented with the opportunity to view the city of Seattle through the eyes of the avant-garde musicians and music junkies that provide the soundtrack to the Emerald City. This is definitely a must-read for any true Seattleite or lover of Seattle-based fiction...

Mention Seattle, to most people (particularly outsiders) and what comes to mind is Microsoft, Frasier and rain and coffee, or possibly microbreweries. However, Seattle is also the setting for Emerald City, a book by Chris Nickson.
It’s 1988 and Laura Benton is a music journalist at The Rocket, a publication at which the author also worked in the 1980s. It’s a male-dominated world where Laura feels she has to constantly prove herself in order to be taken seriously; When Craig Adler, songwriter and lead with local band "Snakeblood," dies of a heroine over dose on the eve of the big time, there’s no reason for anyone to be suspicious. But when Laura discovers that Craig had been clean for a year she suspects there may be more to the story than meets the eye. Then the threatening phone calls start, warning Laura to leave the story alone. But who is making the calls, and who has most to gain from Craig’s death?
Nickson successfully conveys the warmth he feels for the city and he obviously knows the Seattle music scene. But as with his historical fiction, the author weaves enough of his knowledge in to add authenticity without ramming it down the reader’s throat.
The reader will learn more about Seattle: usually their previous experience of Washington State music starts and ends with Nirvana. I liked Laura immensely, but cared less about her boyfriend who came across as whiny and needy, and from the stories the other characters related about the victim, he would have been someone, that definitely have changed the Seattle "sound" forever.
Seattle: Microsoft, Frasier and rain. After reading The Emerald City, you may now want to add music and the setting for some fine crime fiction to the list.


As always, agents, "reading is just recreation for intelligence"

Book Details:

·  Print Length: 190 pages

·  Publisher: Creative Content Limited (March 29, 2013)

·  Publication Date: March 29, 2013

·  Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC

·  Language: English

·  ASIN: B00C1PQ0S8

A fantastic science-fiction reimagining of the power of language: a literary analysis of "Amatka" by Karin tidbeck

Hello again, agents. And thank you for attending today's briefing, today we will be discussing "Amatka" a book by Karin Tidbeck. This story takes place in a sort of dystopian universe in which words have the power to manifest themselves as physical objects. In essence, the universe is entirely shaped by the power of spoken and written words. The old adage of the "pen being mightier than the sword" kept popping in and out of my head when I was reading this novel, it also reiterated the importance of having an understanding and appreciation for the power of words as they can be used for good or evil, they can help rebuild a society or break it down. This book has even caused me to revisit some of my favorite stories and analyze the power of their words. And I hope it does the same for you as well dear agents...

Karin Tidbeck has written a number of short-stories, her first English Language collection (firmly rooted in Weird Fiction), Jagannath, was nominated for the World Fantasy award and short-listed for the James Tiptree Junior award. It also received wide-spread critical acclaim. Amatka is her first novel length story.
Set in a world where the fabric of reality is shaped by language, Amatka tells the story of information assistant Vanja who is sent from her home city of Essre to the austere and wintry colony of Amatka to collect intelligence for the government. Vanja only intends a brief visit but while there falls in love with her housemate, Nina. People are acting oddly in this small town and are constantly monitored for signs of subversion. Then she stumbles upon a growing threat to the colony and a cover-up by its administration, a discovery that puts her at serious risk.
Amatka is quite different to anything I've read before. It leans heavily towards weird fiction and draws some parallels to China Meiville's work. It is however unique, with a strong and compelling voice, a dystopian fantasy where the nature of reality is shaped by the spoken and written word. The best way that objects are kept in working condition is to write the word on the object and to recite the word verbally. As the writing deteriorates so does the object, eventually if left un-described reverting to a pool of goo that can spread and damage other objects. The only exception to this rule appears to be items that are clearly trace-able to the world before, such as the paper used for labeling items, which is called "good paper".
As far as back-story is concerned we get small glimpses and nothing more. It's clear that most of these objects are left-over from a different time and world (perhaps our own). But it isn't clear how anything got to the present world where Amatka is based. This world is a grey one, devoid of sun or stars, a world where the population are strictly controlled. Failure to follow the rules leads to reconditioning.
This is very clever fiction, it asks some big questions about society and the repression of creativity to keep control, about social conditioning and the seeds of rebellion. The writing is clever, even more so when you realize the author has written the novel in both Swedish and English. The ending to the novel is superb, it's sudden and sharp and leaves more questions than it answers - it reminded me of the way Philip K Dick often ended his stories.
The bleak backdrop and simplistic tone also reminds me of PKD's writing, it belies the complexity of the story and the subtlety of its many messages. It's progressive, modern fiction at its very best. I loved the quirky weirdness, while the writing is hugely engaging.
A book to get lost in, highly recommended for lovers of modern fiction especially for those agents who truly understand and believe in the power of words to better humanity

Please remember agents that "reading is just recreation for intelligence"

·  Book title: Amatka

·  Author: Karin Tidbeck

·  Publisher: Vintage Books

·  ISBN: 978-1101973950

·  Published: June 2017

·  Pages: 320