Book Review: Murder Is Easy by Agatha Christie

 Book Review: Murder is Easy by Agatha Christie 

The brief: It's a great book, an intriguing mystery that keeps you guessing until you realize you've been looking in all the wrong directions, and I'd highly recommend it!

I've been a fan of Agatha Christie for a long time. That she was such a prolific author and somehow always created delicious mysteries that left you guessing is a huge inspiration to me as an author. It is very easy to understand why so many people enjoy her work and refer to her as the Queen of Mystery (or was it Queen of Crime?) - you'd be hard-pressed to find such finessed mysteries written with the same amount of skill and simplicity as Christie's. 

My copy of Murder is Easy.

Here's the blurb from the back of my copy of this book:

Luke Fitzwilliam does not believe Miss Pinkerton's wild allegation that a multiple murderer is at work in the quiet English village of Wychwood and that her local doctor is next in line.

But within hours, Miss Pinkerton has been killed in a hit-and-run car accident. Mere coincidence? Luke is inclined to think so - until he reads in The Times of the unexpected demise of Wychwood's Dr. Humbleby...

Murder is Easy has been on my shelf for a long time, and I admit that I generally used it as a book that I would read while traveling. My copy is relatively small and great for carrying around in a bag or purse, so what ended up happening was that I would start the book many times, and never actually get to the end! After a while, I had to put my foot down and finish reading this book!

Right off the bat, I have to say that the cast of characters in this book is lovely! I adore such a varied cast of personalities and characters - and love it all the more when as the reader you're placed in a position where you have to start considering many of them as possible suspects. 

Luke Fitzwilliam himself is an interesting and entertaining character, and one of my favourite interactions that he has takes place in the very first chapter and is completely non-spoiler-y, so I want to share it here with you!

"When the devil did that train go out?" he demanded of a gloomy-looking porter.
The latter replied:
"What train? There hasn't been no train since the 3.14."
"There was a train here just now. I got out of it. The boat express."
The porter replied austerely:
"The boat express don't stop anywhere till London."
"But it did," Luke assured him. "I got out of it."
"No stop anywhere till London," repeated the porter immovably.
"It stopped at this very platform and I got out of it, I tell you."
Faced by facts, the porter changed his ground.
"You didn't ought to have done," he said reproachfully. "It don't stop here."
"But it did."
"That 'twas signal, that was. Signal against it. It didn't what you'd call 'stop'."
"I'm not so good at these fine distinctions as you are," said Luke. "The point is, what do I do next?"
The porter, a man of slow ideas, repeated reproachfully: "You didn't ought to have got out."
"We'll admit that," said Luke. "The wrong is done, past all recall - weep we never so bitterly we can never bring back the dead past - Quoth the raven 'Nevermore' - The moving finger writes; and having writ moves on, etc., etc., and so on and so forth. What I'm trying to get at is, what do you, a man experienced in the service of the railway company, advise me to do now?"

The reason I like this interaction so much is because it gives us a really good look at Luke's personality. In what seems to be a frustrating encounter, he's not only shown to be calm and polite and patient, but also immovable in what he knows to be true. In other words, no matter how many times the porter tells him that something did not happen, he knows it happened, and he'll always hold firm to that knowledge! Since most of the book and his investigation are based on hearsay and what he can get out of the people of Wychwood, this, I feel, is a very important characteristic. 

I also really enjoy Luke's dry wit and sarcasm, and these are present throughout the story, though I think they get somewhat subtler as things get more serious. I suppose this might have been an active choice on the part of Christie - the pushing aside of certain things to make place for the mystery at hand - or simply the result of me, as the reader, getting increasingly submerged in this tricky mystery. 

One thing that definitely mystified me about his character is his age. He's apparently just back to England from someplace with tropical vegetation and hot sun, and retired (from what I guess is the army) on a pension. I suppose this would have made his age somewhat obvious to readers at the time, but I wonder if that places him at around 30-something, 40-something, or older. He speaks and acts like a relatively young man, though.

The little town of Wychwood is quiet, calm, and tranquil - on the surface. As Luke gets to know more about the inhabitants of the town, he realizes something turbulent and dangerous lies just below this surface, and quite a few of the townspeople are very aware of it. Of course, as soon as Luke gets there, he starts learning all sorts of things about the people who live there, and gossip is, after all, one of the main activities in small towns.

"Really, this killing business is almost too easy."

I Googled Luke after reading to see if I could find out more about him - and whether he has been in any other books as some of Christie's characters are often recurring - and stumbled upon some criticism of Murder Is Easy. Most of it to do with Luke (understandably, since the detective is often one of the most important characters in a mystery and usually drives the story).

One reviewer, Maurice Percy Ashley, wrote that in comparison to Hercule Poirot, "Luke Fitzwilliam, a retired policeman from the Mayang States is singularly lacking in 'little grey matter'." He went on to say that Luke "is less effective a detective than as a lover, which is not surprising since neither he nor the reader is provided with any clear clues pointing to the fantastically successful murderer. The love interest scarcely compensates for the paucity of detection and the characters verge on caricature; nor is Fitzwilliam able to recapture vividly enough the circumstances of the earlier murders.

Let's be honest - Luke is no Hercule, but I think that's rather the point. Not everyone is as intelligent as Hercule Poirot, which is the point of his character and the mysteries he investigates. If Christie wanted the main character to be just as intelligent and canny as Poirot, she probably would have made this a Poirot mystery and been done with it! But Luke is a retired policeman. He's just back in England. He has no idea what to do with himself. The man just knows something's off and wants to help stop more murders from happening. This is not a Poirot mystery, but it's a good mystery nonetheless.

As for the romance, it was believable until it wasn't, to me. It seemed to happen slowly, and then it was rushed together all at once in one chapter, culminating with another climax of the mystery itself, and it felt a bit too quick and incredible. I think the way that Christie writes dialogue can also make it a bit more difficult to ascertain the true emotions of characters - which, of course, lends itself extremely well to mystery writing. But I found myself suspecting Luke's love interest of being, perhaps, the murderer, or at least involved in some way with something suspicious. And maybe that's part of the thrill.

But I should also mention that that doesn't mean I didn't like the romance, or Luke as a romantic figure. He seems a genuine enough man, and he does at least have the nobility afforded him by being the brave, truth-seeking protagonist, and this is fiction after all, and I suppose anything can happen. I just feel that in her delightfully mysterious way, Christie wrote everyone - even the romantic interest herself - with some shades of suspicion. 

Overall, one thing I truly enjoyed about this book is that the female characters are truly the stars of the show, the love interest included. In fact, in this story, it is the women who seem to have the most "grey matter", as it were. They're the ones who have the correct suspicions, the ones who can be cunning and intelligent, and practically drive circles around the men in the story. Even in investigative instinct, the romantic interest completely leaves Luke Fitzwilliam in the dust, in my opinion, and one must wonder, if Luke had brought her up to speed earlier, how much quicker the whole case would have been solved and gotten over with, especially since one of the most important clues she received was one that Luke received towards the start of the book.

So, perhaps Luke is not an Hercule. But as I said before, this isn't a Poirot mystery - and I think it was never meant to be anything close. Seeing as how important the female characters in this book are, though, I would have been quite interested in reading the story through their perspectives a lot more often than we were able to, especially as I'd flagged the murderer quite a while before Luke even got close, only to discover that three other female characters had suspected the murderer for quite a long time before - two of them before Luke even came to town!