Witness for the Prosecution by Agatha Christie

17th July, 2009 1 Comment

A simple book review cannot be nearly as exciting as Marcelo’s rant about Harry Potter yesterday. However, there is housekeeping to do before next week’s series on love and books (let us know how books participate in your love life by answering our survey or sharing your own anecdotes of falling in love amongst the stacks…)

For my trip up to Boston last weekend, I wanted to bring enough reading material to last both there and back, but I also didn’t want to be lugging a heavy tome around (which was good thinking on my part seeing as I came back with triple the amount). There also happens to be this little problem of falling asleep within minutes of being in a moving vehicle. Well surprise, surprise–I managed to stay awake and come home with only 100 pages of an easy read left. Had daydreaming not gotten the best of me on the way home, I most likely would have finished.

My first book was appropriate for the spooky oriented tour–Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution. When I was younger, my mother had picked up a large collection of Christie’s work at a yard sale, each selling for $0.25 and providing plenty of reading material for us. I was a big fan of the Miss Marple stories (I think mom liked the Poirot). The copy I have was something my grandmother had purchased at a library sale and looked like it belonged with the slightly beat-up collection from my youth. Sadly, I can’t find a cover image of the exact book.

This particular printing is a collection of short stories and plays on the mysterious workings of the human brain whether it be plotting or deranged. Maybe it was reading her works when I was little, but Christie is just a superb mystery/psychological thriller writer. All the hints of solving the puzzle are there, but she takes you on multiple twists and turns of self doubt as you try to figure it all out before it’s all explained to you. She also does a lovely job of making you doubt your own sanity. “The extraordinary sanity of the insane is an interesting subject,” one character says as dinner party gets underway.

Christie was writing at a time when the field of psychology was learning new things about the workings of the human mind every day. These stories are about “who done it,” but even more so “why they done it.” She manages to tap into natural and plausible motives and highlights what was possibly the latest discovery of the irrational and unexplained actions. While the stories won’t keep you up at night, they will send the occasional shiver down your spine.

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