Rating: 
Summary: Well written, but missing something...
Review: I have been a mystery lover for a long time, and knowing Christie's genius for a quality mystery, I hoped that THE PALE HORSE was a great book. But, it was rather mediocre. Though the idea of a list of names, seemingly unconnected, was found on a murdered man was quite surprising, it didn't turn out as well as I hoped. There were too little suspects, and the characters weren't very charismatic.
Rating: 
Summary: The Best of Christie
Review: I wish there were more Ariadne Oliver books. There are many plot twists and the murderer is difficult to figure out. A great book.
Rating: 
Summary: The 60's a la Christie
Review: It's the early sixties in what will soon be known as Swinging London. Mentions of Teddy boys, stove pipe pants and coffee bars help establish the ambience. I mention this, because some of Christies other forays into youth culture of the sixties (The Third Girl, for example) seem uninformed and inauthentic. This one is much more successful, probably because the narrator candidly describes himself as old-fashioned. Seemingly unrelated deaths are related, and the means is quite clever. Peripheral characters are drawn more vividly than the young male narrater, but the pacing is good. With so many mystery writers intent on writing Literature--which seems to demand a tome of 400 pages at minimum--it is refreshing to have such an enjoyable read in under 200. Yet even with an economy of means, Agatha Christie makes interesting general observations about the criminal mind and the nature of evil.
Rating:
Summary: The 60's a la Christie
Review: It's the early sixties in what will soon be known as Swinging London. Mentions of Teddy boys, stove pipe pants and coffee bars help establish the ambience. I mention this, because some of Christies other forays into youth culture of the sixties (The Third Girl, for example) seem uninformed and inauthentic. This one is much more successful, probably because the narrator candidly describes himself as old-fashioned. Seemingly unrelated deaths are related, and the means is quite clever. Peripheral characters are drawn more vividly than the young male narrater, but the pacing is good. With so many mystery writers intent on writing Literature--which seems to demand a tome of 400 pages at minimum--it is refreshing to have such an enjoyable read in under 200. Yet even with an economy of means, Agatha Christie makes interesting general observations about the criminal mind and the nature of evil.
Rating:
Summary: A meditation on detective stories and on evil
Review: Nothing is more stupid, unanimous, superstitious, and pointless, than the universal habit of running down Agatha Christie as a writer. Even fellow crime writers who ought to acknowledge their debt to one of the absolute masters of the genre, are in the habit, when looking for any kind of literary respectability, to start by pooh-poohing her (thus Ruth Rendell, P.D.James, et caetera).
In point of fact, whatever a great writer is, Agatha Christie was one. Some of her stories are forgettable, many formulaic: but she has written at least a dozen, probably more, that count as classics of the language. The fact is that her kind of excellence runs absolutely counter to modern concerns. She can write stylish prose if she really wants to; she can create vivid and fascinating characters if she really wants to; but most of the time she is not too concerned with either of these things. Her characters are simple and reducible to a few primary types - like those of Homer. Her plots are what she really lavishes attention on (this book has a wonderful vignette of an author singularly like Dame Agatha herself, cudgelling her brains in despair to make some sense of a character's silly but necessary actions), and they are superlative. Properly read, they both express human values and generate great emotion; her denouements are never purely revelations of past events, but always insights into the minds of murderers, accomplices, and victims, into the logic of their situations, into the pressures that drive human beings. It has been said that her stories exist only for the sake of the denouement; if this is true at all, it is meaningless, since denouements do not exist by themselves but are a function of everything that has gone on before, and only work if the whole work has been carefully crafted. Christie, of course, approaches storytelling not as an opportunity for self-expression, but as a skill to be learned and used: she is not out to impress her cleverness on us - indeed, she does not think she is very clever - but to make us like her stories; and so, even poor Christie stories are never less than carefully crafted.
But in this book, written in the autumn of her life, she tries something different, which in some ways goes beyond anything she had done elsewhere (with the possible exception of her first out-and-out masterpiece, EVIL UNDER THE SUN). It is a book about the reality of evil, about evil in real human life, about the kind of people who would in fact make a living by hurting and destroying others - and of the forces that drive them. Her conclusion is bleak, sensible, and probably quite true: evil is a matter of inadequacy, of small men feeling their smallness. There is "no demonic majesty, no black and evil splendour"; those are almost a consoling disguise which decent ordinary people prefer to place on the reality of evil, petty, mean and indecent as it is, to escape the vision of its depressing and familiar ordinariness. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the moral reflection of an author so often accused of being shallow and unintelligent; and not many philosophers have done better.
Rating:
Summary: A meditation on detective stories and on evil
Review: Nothing is more stupid, unanimous, superstitious, and pointless, than the universal habit of running down Agatha Christie as a writer. Even fellow crime writers who ought to acknowledge their debt to one of the absolute masters of the genre, are in the habit, when looking for any kind of literary respectability, to start by pooh-poohing her (thus Ruth Rendell, P.D.James, et caetera).
In point of fact, whatever a great writer is, Agatha Christie was one. Some of her stories are forgettable, many formulaic: but she has written at least a dozen, probably more, that count as classics of the language. The fact is that her kind of excellence runs absolutely counter to modern concerns. She can write stylish prose if she really wants to; she can create vivid and fascinating characters if she really wants to; but most of the time she is not too concerned with either of these things. Her characters are simple and reducible to a few primary types - like those of Homer. Her plots are what she really lavishes attention on (this book has a wonderful vignette of an author singularly like Dame Agatha herself, cudgelling her brains in despair to make some sense of a character's silly but necessary actions), and they are superlative. Properly read, they both express human values and generate great emotion; her denouements are never purely revelations of past events, but always insights into the minds of murderers, accomplices, and victims, into the logic of their situations, into the pressures that drive human beings. It has been said that her stories exist only for the sake of the denouement; if this is true at all, it is meaningless, since denouements do not exist by themselves but are a function of everything that has gone on before, and only work if the whole work has been carefully crafted. Christie, of course, approaches storytelling not as an opportunity for self-expression, but as a skill to be learned and used: she is not out to impress her cleverness on us - indeed, she does not think she is very clever - but to make us like her stories; and so, even poor Christie stories are never less than carefully crafted.
But in this book, written in the autumn of her life, she tries something different, which in some ways goes beyond anything she had done elsewhere (with the possible exception of her first out-and-out masterpiece, EVIL UNDER THE SUN). It is a book about the reality of evil, about evil in real human life, about the kind of people who would in fact make a living by hurting and destroying others - and of the forces that drive them. Her conclusion is bleak, sensible, and probably quite true: evil is a matter of inadequacy, of small men feeling their smallness. There is "no demonic majesty, no black and evil splendour"; those are almost a consoling disguise which decent ordinary people prefer to place on the reality of evil, petty, mean and indecent as it is, to escape the vision of its depressing and familiar ordinariness. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the moral reflection of an author so often accused of being shallow and unintelligent; and not many philosophers have done better.
Rating:
Summary: Christie Explores the Underworld
Review: The Pale Horse is the name of an organization whose business is murder, akin to the Mafia or other nefarious gangster-style groups. In the novel, a young historian-writer named Mark Easterbrook hears about the organization and attempts to uncover the instigators. The story unfolds in bits and pieces: the murder of a parish priest, a list of names of people already dead or marked for death, a pub converted into a home for three unusual women, and a local fete to raise money to restore the church tower all figure prominently in the story. We are also reintroduced to some characters from previous works: Mrs. Ariadne Oliver makes an appearance, this time without Poirot; Rhoda and Major Despard from "Cards on the Table" provide the entry for Mark Easterbrook as he is Rhoda's cousin; and Rev. and Mrs. Dane Calthrop from "The Moving Finger" also appear. The title for this novel is said to have been taken from Revelations 6:8 "And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
Rating:
Summary: Christie Explores the Underworld
Review: The Pale Horse is the name of an organization whose business is murder, akin to the Mafia or other nefarious gangster-style groups. In the novel, a young historian-writer named Mark Easterbrook hears about the organization and attempts to uncover the instigators. The story unfolds in bits and pieces: the murder of a parish priest, a list of names of people already dead or marked for death, a pub converted into a home for three unusual women, and a local fete to raise money to restore the church tower all figure prominently in the story. We are also reintroduced to some characters from previous works: Mrs. Ariadne Oliver makes an appearance, this time without Poirot; Rhoda and Major Despard from "Cards on the Table" provide the entry for Mark Easterbrook as he is Rhoda's cousin; and Rev. and Mrs. Dane Calthrop from "The Moving Finger" also appear. The title for this novel is said to have been taken from Revelations 6:8 "And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."
Rating:
Summary: An exceptional detective novel of unusual depth
Review: The previous review entirely misses the point. This is certainly not a typical Christie novel, and even expert whodunit readers are unlikely to guess the solution. Instead it weaves a complex web involving apparently unrelated deaths which appear to occur naturally yet very conveniently for certain parties. Certain parties who make use of providers of allegedly occult/supernatural forces. This Christie is also unique in that there are at least 3 reported instances around the world of people, having read the book, adopting the murder method used in Pale Horse in real life. Given the difficulties of detection there may be many more who got away with it. If you like the idea of a detective novel which requires an above-average i.q. you'll enjoy this book.
Rating:
Summary: A departure from the usual for Dame Agatha
Review: This 1961 novel is not a part of any of Christie's more famous series (Poirot, Miss Marple or Tommy and Tuppence) but does include some "old friends" from other books: the Dane Calthrops (THE MOVING FINGER), Rhoda and Major Despard (THE CARD ON THE TABLE) and Ariadne Oliver, the famous mystery writer who has appeared in several Poirot stories. The PALE HORSE is one of the novels that is as much romance and mystery. The story is told by Mark Easterbrook, a writer who had taken up residence in the Chelsea district of London while working on his latest book on Mogul culture. He stopped into a coffee shop for a quick meal and witnessed an argument between two young women that ended with one pulling out a handful of hair from the other. The unfortunate woman's unusual name - Thomasina Tuckerton - stuck with Easterbrook. He was surprised when he saw it a week later, in the obituaries. Easterbrook went on about his life, meeting with his friend, Ariadne Oliver, traveling to the country to visit his cousin, and going out with his long-time girlfriend Hermia Redcliffe. Meanwhile the police begin to investigate the murder of a priest who was killed on his way home from hearing a last confession. They found a list of names stuffed into the priest's shoe, including the name of the police inspector. The two threads of the story meet and continue to weave throughout London, out to the country, on to Birmingham and returning to London. On the way the path leads to witchcraft, deathrays, and murder for hire. The mystery here appears to be more a how-it-was-done than a who- done-it although Christie has once again lead us down the garden path to a surprise finish.
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