When the season calls for merry murder mysteries

My “thriller winter” studying theme continues, and this week I made a decision to show to the “Queen of Crime” herself: Agatha Christie.

I requested my sister, a whodunit connoisseur, for her advice. She immediately urged “The Homicide of Roger Ackroyd,” a Poirot thriller that many take into account to be Christie’s masterpiece. Not solely is the plot suitably twisty and the setting suitably typical (richest man in a sleepy village discovered murdered inside a locked room of his fancy home), however the characterizations are sharply hilarious. And the ultimate reveal, which exploits the conventions of the thriller style to ship a genuinely unconventional denouement, is proof of Christie’s ability.

Subsequent up was her 1941 thriller, “Evil Below the Solar,” set in a glamorous seaside resort. It evokes the actual claustrophobia of many social novels, with the characters feeling surveilled and scrutinized as a result of they’re a part of the identical broader net of sophistication and society, even when they don’t really know one another. (Should you want a last-minute Christmas reward and have a spare $19 million, the island and resort that impressed the novel are on the market.)

Subsequent on my listing is “The Penguin E book of Homicide Mysteries,” which The Instances’s crime critic guarantees is stuffed with “neglected and underappreciated” gems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I even have my ordinary stack of political science and historical past books, however for the second, I’m going to go away them on my desk. I’ll be taking a break for the vacations, so The Interpreter will likely be off for the subsequent couple of weeks. And whereas I normally discover that form of studying partaking and enjoyable, I’m feeling extra of a necessity than ordinary to disconnect from the information and its historic antecedents. So a minimum of for the subsequent few days, I’ll be in fiction-only mode.

Completely satisfied New Yr to all of you, and thanks for studying, emailing, and in any other case being a part of the great Interpreter group. See you in January.

Reader responses: Books that you simply advocate

Shava Nerad, a reader in Arlington, Mass. recommends “When Victims Turn out to be Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda,” by Mahmood Mamdani:

I’m rereading this due to the dynamics of the Israel/Gaza battle. It’s an evaluation of the Rwandan genocide with plenty of ideas on human nature and dehumanizing neighbors. Laborious learn — however value it.