Very quick reread of another mystery, Agatha Christie’s
Murder in Mesopotamia (1936).
The main reason I want to talk about this here is because I’d wondered why Hollywood has never adapted it (the David Suchet
Poirot TV show did adapt it—not too well, unfortunately). On rereading, I can sorta see why, but I can also imagine filmmakers fixing some plot and character flaws and producing a good movie.
The book has an excellent, unusual victim (belle dame sans merci or sympathetic woman in man’s world, or both? We’re not sure even by the end), a great setting (archaeological dig), a good narrator (object lesson in letting the reader know the author disagrees with the character), and a well-conveyed atmosphere of unease building up to the murder.
All that, yet somehow the book never quite comes off. (I wonder if Christie were too attached to this material—it’s based on the expedition where she met her second husband.)
One reason for that is the mystery plot, which is clever but has a far too obvious murderer. Of course, I knew the murderer going in (this may be the first Christie novel I read, back in middle school, after discovering the short-story collection
Poirot Investigates), but I’ve reread other Christies (
Five Little Pigs and
Death on the Nile, notably) without thinking their killers stick out like bloodstained thumbs. (Spoilers below describe the killer but don’t name the character.)
Christie makes the Mesopotamia murderer so nice, so sweet, so kind, so understanding, so definitely-not-the-killer that I bet many readers will have this person pegged as the killer early on. That Poirot repeatedly clears this person of suspicion, because of an alibi, only increases the reader’s suspicion.
Figuring out the killer in a mystery is not necessarily a bad thing, but by this point in her career Christie should have known better than to write the character this way. Compare with the beautifully hidden (and ingeniously clued) culprit in another book I recently reread, J.K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Rowling, in a fantasy setting, beats Christie at her own game (even using some favorite Christiean tricks!), and it’s not even close.
That said,
Murder in Mesopotamia’s alibi is rather good (not up to
Death on the Nile’s standard, but what is?), and Christie plants clues as well as ever.
Everybody criticizes one element about the solution, which may be why Hollywood never adapted it. But actually that’s easily fixable. The plot stuff I criticize above presents more of a challenge, though I think ultimately that’s fixable as well.
The other problem is that the victim is out of the story so quickly. I liked and was interested in her, exactly for that duality I talk about above. She’s based on
Katharine Woolley, a trailblazer for women in archaeology, and I think my main problem with
Murder in Mesopotamia is that Woolley’s (glamorous, but sad and short) life seems more interesting than Christie’s fiction.
Murder in Mesopotamia could have been great, though. Something about it just doesn’t… I dunno, go far enough? Curious case—of writing, that is, rather than murder.