Mrs McGinty's Dead - Agatha Christie

Published in an omnibus edition: "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"; "They Do It With Mirrors" and "Mrs. McGinty's Dead" as part of the "Agatha Christie Crime Collection" by The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd.: London, 1969.
Originally published 1952.

Elise and I have watched some murder-mystery movies before (such as Knives Out and the Kenneth Branagh Murder on the Orient Express) but until now we have not read one together. I didn't know anything about the plot of Mrs McGinty's Dead when we began it, but selected it solely because it was the last remaining book in my Agatha Christie omnibus edition (until maybe someday I get another one). As a shared book, I'm not entirely sure whether this worked. We enjoyed it, but because we tend to take a while to read through a book together, we did find ourselves losing track of which character was which at different points. If we ever read another mystery together, I think we should make some notes as we go in order to help with this.

As for the book itself, Mrs McGinty's Dead is another intricate Poirot mystery, this one with a little more humour than most. Poirot is always mildly funny due to his peculiarities, but this book - choosing a third-person narration following Poirot himself rather than being 'told' by a colleague - amps up his behaviour to a more humorous level, and also introduces a secondary comic-relief character in the form of Ariadne Oliver, a crime-writer friend of Poirot loosely based on Agatha Christie herself, who is able to further poke fun at the idea of murder mysteries and Poirot in particular through commenting about her own unlikeable foreign detective.

Poirot is approached by a detective who has 'solved' the murder of a charwoman but believes that the person convicted of the crime is actually innocent. With this figure - a fairly unlikeable individual named James Bentley - on death row, Poirot agrees to go to the village where the crime took place and learn the identity of the real culprit. Of course, there are numerous suspects, and although many of the twists and turns were a surprise to us, I did manage to figure out one aspect of the story before Poirot revealed it.

Perhaps not the most memorable Poirot story, but still enjoyable enough, with the humour adding a fun extra level of enjoyment.

Completed, with Elise, 24 October 2022.



(Elise Books)

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