The Pale Horse

I'm incredibly creeped out at the moment. I'm not sure if it's something I caught from the main character of the novel or if the conjuring in the middle was just too much, but I'm intensely glad that it's sunny right now. I should probably add that I am not one who gets scared for fun. But, after a few lower-rated Christies, this was one of her better works and I am suitably terrified and shocked that I following the red herrings.

It all begins when Mark, bored as most of her POV main characters are, gets tangled up in the murder of a kindly parish priest. He doesn't think much of it until, aided and abetted by the self-caricature she creates in Ariadne Oliver---who really wasn't featured as much as I would have wished, he runs into a show more historic tavern run by three local "witches" that claim they can eliminate surplus people through spectacular means.

I'm still shuddering at it all... I think that may have been one of the "closest calls" I've ever read. As the pages left to be read on the left started getting fewer and fewer I was starting to get a bit panicky and wonder how I would sleep tonight if the mystery wasn't solved; but Agatha came through. Highly appropriate in view of the upcoming Halloween weekend. show less

I watched the new adaptation on Prime. I've also seen the ITV's two versions, a not-good 1990s film and the weirdly contorted Agatha Christie's Marple version; and oddly enough the book was cheap on Kindle a few years ago, so I gave that a peruse when I saw this version was coming; I should, at this point, be able to teach a workshop in Christie Adaptations.

The new one is very, very pretty. Rufus Sewell, as Mark Easterbrook, is very, very pretty. Mark's flat, the village of Much Deeping, his Lagonda 3-litre drophead coupé, all of it, very, very pretty. Deviations from the novel include doing away with Ariadne Oliver (*barely* present in the book, anyway!) and the Dane Calthorps and the peculiar appendix that is the Ginger/lawyer show more subplot; the ending isn't even remotely like the novel's, and is quite...murky. I will say that the scene where Easterbrook puts together the clues that lead to the solution was hair-raising, pitch-perfect Christie (even though it's absolutely nowhere in the book).

The Agatha Christie's Marple version hewed more closely to the ending of the novel. It was actually very good, and the two-hour episode was darn good at creating the eerie atmosphere needed to sell the misdirection at the heart of the story.

The 1990s movie was flat, uninspired. The whole thing reeked of budget woes.

The book...a 1961 publication so squarely in Christie's best years...is delightfully twisty. The plot is not the point, as when is it ever in a Christie book; the plot makes her point: we destroy others to live, whether or not we know it, and leave a wake of carnage that only a change in perspective reveals. It is masterful, and beautifully hidden in plain sight.

Enjoy the read for what it is; then, without letting your inner book-snob turn you into a harsher critic than is called for, enjoy the new films. Yes, the text is changed; no, the story is not. The point is still very much the point and it's still turned around to stab you as well as the other victims. show less

The scholar Mark Easterbrook is taking a break in a Chelsea cafe when a fight breaks out between two young women, one of whom is seen pulling the other’s hair out by the roots. He thinks nothing of this until a couple of weeks later, when he reads the obituary of the second woman, who had seemed in perfect health when he witnessed the fight. Shortly after that, someone mentions “the pale horse” as an answer to how to remove unwanted people, and soon after *that* Mark happens to be visiting a country house and discovers that an old inn, known as the Pale Horse, has been converted into the dwelling of three middle-aged women, who might or might not be witches and who might or might not have the means of causing mysteriously show more ordinary-seeming deaths…. I came across this book after a critic mentioned it in response to someone who had suggested that Mrs. Christie only wrote cozies; this book was cited as anything *but* cozy and since it’s one of hers that I hadn’t read (or even heard of), I decided to give it a try. It is indeed not a cozy; it’s quite dark and full of weird pseudoscience mixed in with primitive “magic.” Although it is somewhat dated (having been published in 1961) with several attitudes toward women and non-Europeans that wouldn’t pass muster today, if one can ignore those aspects as simply being of their time and place, this is a quite entertaining read. And, of course, Mrs. Christie was a master plotter and story-teller; I didn’t guess the culprit until almost the very end! Recommended! show less

So many of Christie's books have become movies that you tend to forget the story as written. This book once again reminded me of what an exceptionally fine writer Christie was. I loved the scene in the beginning when the fight in the pub is going on and -

"The door from the street was pushed open and Authority, dressed in blue, stood on the threshold and uttered the regulation words majestically, "What's going on here?"

"Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human."

A priest takes a confession from a dying woman in a boarding house. How much of what he's just heard is true and how much is delirium. What he does know is that he must write down a list of names the woman has given him before he forgets them which he does at a small cafe. However, on his way home, he is murdered but the culprit does not find the list secreted in his shoe. This then becomes the only clue into his murder.

Mark Easterbrook is friends with the police pathologist working on the case, Jim Corrigan, and finds himself drawn into the mystery by a few mysterious coincidences. Moving from chic Chelsea coffee houses to an old inn known as The Pale Horse in the show more sleepy countryside outside of Bournemouth. The inn has closed and is now lived in by a trio of women akin to the witches in MacBeth who claim to have super-natural gifts. Easterbrook realises that something sinister is linked with the Pale Horse and suspects that there is a criminal mastermind behind the operation so along with a female friend sets out to try and unmask this murdering maniac. All appears to be failing until a chance remark suddenly sets everything into place with typical Agatha Christie twist and style.

The book was first published in the early 1960's and the reader clearly gets a feel for place and time. You can just imagine yourself sat in the chic coffee houses of Chelsea surrounded by their "cool" clientele but also the rural countryside where the vicarage becomes the centre of village life with their fetes etc.

Most of the characters are well developed and perhaps best of all there is no Marple or Poirot in sight. There is no flowery sequences and the plot line is taut throughout. I felt like a fish on a hook being methodically reeled in. What the three witches profess to be able to do initially sounds totally far-fetched yet as the action progresses you cannot help but wonder as to whether or not there really is any truth in it.

I did NOT guess the identity of the killer and was totally caught out by the final twist. Each time I thought that I had worked it out I was proved wrong which is as it should be. If I had one complaint it is that the end came a bit too quickly. Murder mysteries are not really my usual fayre but all the same I found this an enjoyable read and believe that any real fans of the genre will do so too. show less

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

If you've read Agatha Christie's Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (aka The Boomerang Clue), you may note that The Pale Horse is similar in structure. Both novels involve a dynamic duo of plucky young(ish) people investigating a situation they have deemed suspicious, both have a surprising twist reveal of the killer, and both end with the plucky young people deciding to get married. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as both stories are sufficiently different from each other that it does not feel repetitive.

This story is decidedly more sinister than Evans. The story begins with narrator Mark Easterbrook, historian and writer of some merit, witnessing a catfight in a Chelsea coffee bar. He notices that show more one of the girls, Thomasina, has her hair pulled out in handfuls in the altercation, and he is shocked by this, especially when she claims it did not hurt. He is even more surprised a week later when he reads her name in the paper and learns that she has died before coming of age, and since she was due to receive a substantial fortune at that time, someone profited handsomely by her death.

Meanwhile, a dying Catholic woman sends for a priest to read her the last rites and hear her confession. Evidently there is something particularly amiss in her confession, because the priest writes down a list of names that the dying woman mentions. He leaves after the woman dies, then he himself is killed on his way home. What did the woman confess? What was the priest silenced for?

Well! It is quite the story. The listed persons all died seemingly of natural causes, and all the deaths provided a benefit to someone. And there's a group of three women claiming that they have supernatural power, and that they can kill someone merely by activating that person's "death wish". The person will then get sick and die, seemingly because their body wants them to die. But Mark's not so sure about this. He has to investigate what's happening...

As you can see, this is quite the crackerjack plot. Black magic, amateur detectives, a cameo appearance by Christie caricature Ariadne Oliver? Bring it on. The story did suffer from some pacing issues, although that could have been me being impatient because I already knew how all the victims died; I was just waiting to see how it was inserted into the story. The ending definitely did not disappoint, with me doing a double-take at the end. "Wait, what?! How is HE the murderer??" And the suspense of not knowing when Ginger would be taken ill was quite agonizing at a couple of points -- I almost couldn't keep reading because I couldn't bear to see the plucky young amateur detectives getting hurt. But it was worth it. show less

Imagine: a Christie I hadn't read. Ever. But I've re-read enough Christie in my adult life to know that sometimes she works well, sometimes less so. Which would this be?

It turns out, a strange mix of classic Christie, modern Christie, Christie commentary and something unfinished that makes it a most odd kind of book.

It begins with Christie's traditional rather anonymous, milquetoast narrator, something along the lines of Roger Ackroyd. He is supposed to be working on his latest manuscript on Mogul architecture when he "had suffered from one of those sudden revulsions that all writers know.... --all the fascinating problems it raised, become suddenly as dust and ashes. What did they matter? Why did I want to write about them?" He takes show more a coffee in Chelsea, musing on the sinister noise of modern conveniences, when two of the 'off-beat' (and we chuckle a little at the naivete of the narrator) clientele get in a fighting match over a boy one has stolen from the other. I was struck by how present Christie seemed in his words, Mark's musing on writing, the lament of "contemporary noises," and dress styles of the new generation no doubt echoing her own.

Only a week later, Mark is reading the obituaries and realizes one of the young ladies who was in the fight has suddenly died, and will not be getting her kicks in Chelsea any longer. He feels sympathy, but then notes, "Yet after all, I reminded myself, how did I know that my view was the right one? Who was I to pronounce it a wasted life? Perhaps it was my life, my quiet scholarly life, immersed in books, shut off from the world, that was the wasted one. Life at second hand. Be honest now, was I getting kicks out of life?"

Really quite brilliant, both in hearing the author's experience and age coming through, and in justification for Mark's future actions. But not right away, of course. First he must pay a visit to his friend Ariadne Oliver. And once again, I heard Christie loud and clear: "Or, it might be someone wanting an interview--asking me all those embarrassing questions which are always the same every time. What made you first think of taking up writing? How many books have you written? How much money do you make. Etc. etc." Just as I was chuckling over that, she launches in the oddness of murder in real life compared to books:

"Say what you like, it's not natural for five or six people to be on the spot when B is murdered and all to have a motive for killing B-unless, that is, B is absolutely madly unpleasant and in that case nobody will mind whether he's been killed or not..."

'I see your problem,' I said. 'But if you've dealt with it successfully fifty-five times, you will manage to deal with it once again.'

'That's what I tell myself,' said Mrs. Oliver, 'over and over again, but every single time I can't believe it and so I'm in agony.'

Really, the beginning bit of the story feels so clearly Christie commentary, that though the murder came along by page twenty, I was enjoying the digression and insight. So I was all set to adore, the meta and the concrete blending so nicely, when it turns out that a large portion of the plot is the new-fangled notion of the psychology of the individual (echoes of Poirot) being convinced through a combination of psychology and superstitious belief that they are ill, soon becoming truly physically ill, only to finally die. That sort of pre-60s, recast 1900s mysticism. Yes, there is a séance.

Then she interjects herself again, in the form of a chemist who is very excited to be a witness to the murder, having practiced memorizing faces for just such an opportunity. Oh, Christie, you sly dog. I might have giggled when he came along.

The Pale Horse was, I believe, was close to her fifty-fifth book, and just lacked something for me in terms of plot translation. Add to that that the transitions between sections was particularly abrupt, it wasn't the charming, insightful read I first thought. The plot meandered for a bit, following the local coroner and detective, the coroner conveniently a friend of Mark's. There is more than a bit of atmospheric silliness at the end that completely failed to develop much of an atmosphere for me--had we been talking decades earlier, perhaps I could have taken it more seriously--but there were a solid couple of plot twists at the end that I appreciated. So, mark down as enjoyable, diverting; worthy of thoughts on a long career and social change, but not one to add to my own library.

Three-and-a-half stars, rounding up for authorial voice. show less