![]() ![]() This perhaps shows that I only dislike Christie’s prejudices when they differ from my own. Under the present government, a philandering, financially reckless, misogynist like Kettering, prone to lying and betrayal, would probably be made a Cabinet Minister. To be fair, Derek Kettering, the only English nobleman in the book, was an absolute horror. The foreigners in ‘The Mystery of the Blue Train’ were so cartoonish that they seemed straight off the pages of a Tin Tin comic strip. The text has English exceptionalism bred in the bone. The thin writing made me more irritated than usual by the way foreigners were depicted. It felt like a boilerplate text the was put in for a first draft to move the story along and was then never revisited. ![]() The dialogue was OK but the text is very lacklustre. Perhaps that goes some way towards explaining why parts of the book felt so thinly written and why the narrative was so unfocused.įor the first third of the book, the writing had patches where it was quite threadbare. ![]() I’m told that Christie didn’t like this book and that she wrote it while going through a divorce and while she was distracted by caring for her young daughter. I’m glad I didn’t because the second half of the book was entertaining but getting there was a slog. Had I not been reading ‘The Mystery Of The Blue Train’ as part of a monthly group read with the Appointment With Agathacommunity on GoodReads, I’d probably have abandoned it before I was halfway through. ![]()
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