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Summary: An Unexpectedly Creepy Murder Mystery
Review: A priest is murdered immediately after hearing a dying woman's confession--and investigators soon discover a list of names concealed in his shoe. The people on that list all have something very, very unpleasant in common: they are dead.From this beginning, Agatha Christie weaves an unusual tale that mixes murder-for-hire and black magic in a most unexpected way. The result is a novel with a good vs. evil edge so powerful that many readers will find it more than a little creepy. THE PALE HORSE is also memorable for its unusual characterizations, most particularly in the opposing figures of Mrs. Dane-Calthrop, a vicar's wife who fights on the side of angels, and Thyzra Grey, a woman who claims to possess dangerous mystical powers. As usual, Christie works her story toward a surprising conclusion--but on this occasion she offers a few shudders as well. Unique in the Christie cannon and strongly recommended.
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Summary: diverting fun
Review: Another of Christie's romantic adventures pairing 2 people in a murder mystery who end up falling in love. Hints of black magic, some elderly women who may be witches and talks of death thru telepathy, may remind the reader of an old Scooby Doo episode, but this one has no meddling kids or a talking dog. One of Agatha's more entertaining cast of characters, however, includes the daffy novelist Adrien Oliver, who's been in several other stories, as well. She provides the amateur sleuths with a rather significant clue involving hair loss. Told in both first and third person narration to present an overall treatment of the mystery, the big twist is typical A.C., tho' if you've read enough of her stories, you might be able to guess the identity of the killer. It doesn't happen too often.
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Summary: ...
Review: Christie has, in the past, used occultic themes in some short stories, or as a side element in a full length. This time, however, she chose to flesh that out and use it at the heart of one of her mysteries.
"The Pale Horse" is a good read for several reasons. She uses several characters that have appeared in other novels, but none of them are named Poirot or Marple. This forces her to flesh out other characters since she can't rely on either of them to carry the story. While one doesn't read Christie to get intimate with characters (as opposed to Martha Grimes), it's nice to get a better look at some characters.
The story revolves around a society where people mysteriously kill people without leaving a trace. It is "advertised" as killing through supernatural powers controled by three witches. As a result it seems impossible to prove... and even more possible to convict without getting laughed out of court.
The solution is good (and I only guessed the mastermind through a semi-lucky guess), however, the best part is the explaination mid-way through the book about how the payment for the murder happens. That was bloody ingenious. The solicitor and the person wanting to hire the murder make a bet. If the person to be killed dies before a certain date, the person wanting the murder pays X amount of money. If the person to be killed doesn't, then the solicitor pays up the money.
It's all in all a satisfying read and will probably keep you guessing throughout the book.
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Summary: A Chilling mystery!
Review: First of all, I have to say that this was not like Agatha Christie's usual writing style, but, never the less, it was fantastic!! I won't make this review very long because I don't want to give away the plot, but any true Christie fan should read this. and also, moe811, Mrs. Oliver appears as a main character in Cards on the Table, which I'm currently reading.
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Summary: admirable!
Review: i am a great agatha christie fan and have read quite a lot of her mysteries. and i daresay this is one of her finest, true Agatha-style pieces. It was certainly hard to put down and it ended with her usual "unexpected person" ...but it was hard to guess along the way, partly because you only see as far as the "trappings".... Very admirable work, indeed.
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Summary: A nice diversion
Review: I have been a Christie fan for over two years, since I was twelve, and I found this to be a nice little diversion from Hercule Poirot's little gray cells and Miss Marple's village parallels. I must say that though I was able to guess the mastermind behind it all, I was not able to guess the method. This is easily one of Dame Agatha's most original plots (including THE MOVING FINGER, also featuring the Dane Calthrops), a story of two young people, who, in setting out to identify the murderer of a well-liked Catholic priest who learned something from a dying woman, find much more than they bargained for...and each other. I wonder why it's never been made into a movie??... ;-)
Rating:
Summary: A nice diversion
Review: I have been a Christie fan for over two years, since I was twelve, and I found this to be a nice little diversion from Hercule Poirot's little gray cells and Miss Marple's village parallels. I must say that though I was able to guess the mastermind behind it all, I was not able to guess the method. This is easily one of Dame Agatha's most original plots (including THE MOVING FINGER, also featuring the Dane Calthrops), a story of two young people, who, in setting out to identify the murderer of a well-liked Catholic priest who learned something from a dying woman, find much more than they bargained for...and each other. I wonder why it's never been made into a movie??... ;-)
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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.
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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.
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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."
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