Cat Among the Pigeons - Agatha Christie
I wasn't intending on reading another Agatha Christie book for a while, simply because of having read one so recently, but a friend lent me this one, telling me that it was their favourite, so I thought I better check it out. To say a particular Agatha Christie book is your favourite is quite high praise! After all, Christie wrote over 50 books, including such famous examples as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I enjoy Christie's books (there is a reason she is called the 'Queen of Crime Fiction'), and particularly like the way that she - within her chosen genre of crime fiction - could play with styles, from dark thrillers (like And Then There Were None) to slightly lighter comical entries, like Partners in Crime.
Cat Among the Pigeons plays with style again, framing the book as a spy and espionage tale, but with the twist that the audience has a lot more information than the characters do for much of the story. We are told early on that diamonds from the (fictional) Middle Eastern kingdom of Ramat have been hidden away somewhere in the luggage of Joan Sutcliffe and her daughter Jennifer, leaving to return to England, and are given strong hints as the story progresses as to where the diamonds are hidden, even before most characters know to look for diamonds at all! We realise that Jennifer has them in her belongings, we realise that the private school she has gone to is facing trouble because of it, we even realise why some of the mysterious goings-on are going-on, way before Christie spells out the solution.
The other major difference from most Christie novels is that in this one, the detective (once again, Hercule Poirot) doesn't arrive on the scene until the last third of the book! Honestly, when I turned the page and saw his name, I was surprised, as I had assumed by then that it was one of Christie's Poirot-free works. Poirot leaps into action, and has the case solved relatively quickly, but it is an interesting twist to have the majority of the book given from the (third-person) perspectives of staff and students who are not experts at this kind of thing.
There are, of course, a few far-fetched elements and a few convenient coincidences to help propel the plot, but it is a satisfying solution, and one that I can understand being someone's favourite.
I quite enjoyed it myself.
Completed 12 October 2025.
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