The Blue Geranium by Agatha Christie #AgathaChristieSS24

💙 We meet once again with Miss Marple in this short story we are reading for June. And as usual, she only appears as a secondary character; like a shadow in the room that no one noticed at first, but then it shines for just a few seconds, to be faded into the background again.

💙 Miss Marple was invited to a dinner party at the Bantrys only to even the number of the guests. It was first suggested by one of the guests, and even Mrs. Bantry was skeptical at first. But she was invited, attended the dinner, and solved the mystery that Colonel Bantry told the guests after dinner about his friend.

💙 George Pritchard's late wife was an invalid with difficult character - you know the type - who always fuss about her health and prone to have tantrums. Many nurses had come and gone, and the last one was Nurse Copling. Mrs. Pritchard was also fascinated by fortunetellers. One calls Zarida warned her to avoid blue flowers: "Beware of the full moon. The blue Primrose means warning, the blue Hollyhock means danger, the blue Geranium means death."

💙 Days later, during full moon, some primroses in the wallpaper pattern in Mrs. Pritchard's room turned blue over night. It made her afraid, though her husband thought it's just a childish joke. On the next full moon she went to sleep in her locked room in apprehension. The next day she found, as before, the Hollyhocks in the same wallpaper turned blue.

💙 You know the rest. The next full moon, Mrs. Pritchard - who had been resigned to her faith by that time - was found dead inside a locked room, with a faint smell of gas and some Geraniums in the wallpaper turned blue. It was Miss Marple who eventually offered the solution. All in all, it's a fun mystery to read; light and simple - I guessed it quite right though not the details.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

#MurderEveryMonday: Cover with Name of Job in the Title

Murder Every Monday was created by Kate @ Crossexamining Crime and @ArmchairSleuth. Put simply, the plan is for readers to take a photo of a crime fiction book (novel or short story collection) which meets a given week’s theme criteria and to then share it online, using the hashtag #MurderEveryMonday.

This week's theme is probably one of the easiest ones I've been doing so far, these are seven I could think of:

Cover with the name of a job in the title

Have your read any of them? Which cover(s) do you like most?

If you want to participate, here's the list of the weekly theme:

The Wheel Spins (1936) by Ethel Lina White #20booksofsummer24

🚄 Iris Carr is a spoiled English girl who is on holiday with her friends in Croatia. They are the type of noisy and selfish tourists that annoyed others. When her friends left the country, Irish stayed behind. Now she'd had enough with this foreign country, and can't wait to go back alone to England by train. At the station, however, she's knocked down by something or other, and is unconscious. Fortunately she's revived just in time to catch the train anyway. We never know what had struck Iris down at the station, was it really sunstroke as she thought, or other more sinister cause? She didn't know, and we don't know either.

🚄 Iris found herself sharing a compartment with a snobbish foreign lady - a baroness - and her compatriots. Fortunately there was another English lady, a plain looking spinster called Miss Froy, who had worked as governess in the baroness' house. She's the type that is chattering all the time. Irish found her irritating, but Miss Froy was very kind to her. As Iris' headache got worse, she took a pill and was asleep. When she woke up, Miss Froy was nowhere to be found - she's just vanished.

🚄 Iris experienced a nightmare since then, since neither passengers nor crews acknowledged that a spinster governess had ever boarded the train. Was Miss Froy only Iris' imagination or hallucination, due to her sunstroke? For if she does exist, where would she's been hiding on board a running train that long? Suicide was impossible because Miss Froy was the most cheerful person you might imagine, plus she's been longing to come home to her lovely parents and dog whom she missed so much. But if not voluntarily, it means something sinister - a lot sinister - was happening here.

🚄 Even the two English men Iris got acquainted with and were gentlemanly enough to try helping her, were at last skeptical too. Now it's up to Iris alone to solve the mystery and letting free Miss Froy from whoever's been capturing her and, no doubt, wanted to get rid of her. The question is, can Iris do that, what with her headache, self doubt, and psychological strain?

🚄 This is a psychological thriller, rather than mystery. And thus, if you are focusing in the denouement, you might be a bit disappointed. For until the end, I'm still in the dark to what or who really struck Iris at the station. Is it sunstroke as Iris thought? And what crime did Miss Froy had inadvertently witnessed to cause her enemy to get rid of her? No, in term of solving a mystery, the ending isn't satisfying at all. But as a psychological thriller, it was superb! I also loved the little back story of the Froys, a simple, loving, and happy family of an old father and mother, and a faithful dog. They reminded me a little of my parents. That's how I imagined their excitement were whenever I went abroad (very rarely, but still).

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Read for:

20 Books of Summer 2024

hosted by Cathy @ 746 Books

Death Comes As the End (1944) by Agatha Christie #20booksofsummer24

🐍 This was the only historical mystery story Agatha Christie had ever written. I remember from her autobiography, that she took her friend's challenge to write a mystery in Ancient Egypt (2000 BC), while the friend provided facts and knowledge of the daily household and cultural background. I have been wondering whether I could relate to it as much as her contemporary ones. But I am not disappointed, because this one could have just been any other Christie's mystery, except that the characters and setting are not of our time and background.

🐍 Also, its premise and characters reminded me a lot of Hercule Poirot's Christmas. It follows a family of a Ka Priest (someone who had authority to perform funerial rites to the deaths) in Thebes. Imhotep is a bit tyrannical widowed father to four siblings. The eldest son, Yahmose, is Alfred in Hercule Poirot's Christmas, an always obedient son; while Sobek, the second son, is the rebellious Harry. Renisenb is the only daughter, the most intelligent and stable of the children, while Ipy is the youngest and most passionate son. Then Yahmose's and Sobek's wives and children, together with Imhotep's old mother, and a family retainer called Henet, completed the household.

🐍 The family's rupture began with the arrival of Imhotep's young, proud, and very beautiful concubine, Nofret. Nofret is really the trigger, the seeds of dissatisfaction, and for one of them, silent evil, were already germinating there among themselves, unnoticed. Nofret's malice presence has just unleashed them. She was the first victim, of course, we know from the beginning it would come. Except for Imhotep, they all hated her. But then Yahmose's wife was murdered, and then somebody else. Someone within the family is a murderer, but which one?

🐍 If you are familiar with Christie's books, you'll recognize this trope of bottled up pressure snapped into murder which she used pretty often. And that's what I always love about her, the psychological effect of a murder. By choosing a large household as the setting, Christie played beautifully with the characters' psychology, which was the central point of this mystery, rather than the plot.

🐍 For me, this psychological element is the main attraction of this book. I couldn't relate very well with the setting, as it feels like it's just an unimportant accessories. The crime could have happened in the 20th century England all the same.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐1/2

Read for:

20 Books of Summer 2024

hosted by Cathy @ 746 Books

The Bookshop (1978) by Penelope Fitzgerald #20booksofsummer24

📚 Florence Green is a middle-aged widow lived in a small English seaside town of Hardborough, in the 1959. Alone in the world, Florence was forced to do something she knew she's capable of, in order to have a comfortable life. She was aspired to open a bookshop, something that the secluded town didn't have. She had formerly worked in a bookshop, so she knew enough how the business work, so, why not?

📚 Her first step was buying the premise, an abandoned damp place called the Old House. She had a difficult task of convincing the patronizing bank manager for a loan, but in the end she persisted and won. But that wasn't her only problem. The most influential lady of the town, a Mrs. Gamart, tried to persuade her to change her mind, as she had her own plan to use the Old House as an art centre. We all know why Mrs. Gamart did that - etty jealousy! If she, indeed, wanted to have an art centre, she could have proposed to use any other building, right? Why must an old damp haunted house be her only choice? And why now? It's simply that she's afraid that Florence would have become a more important figure in town than herself.

📚 At last Florence got to open her dream bookshop. Amidst all the obstacles - namely the 'rapper' (poltergeist) and some slow furnishing process, Florence was on business. She hired a local girl as helper. Her first - and in the end proved to be the only one - is a recluse who admired her brave action, and even suggested of starting a library. Her enemy, though, hasn't ended her subtle yet relentless campaign to defame the bookshop.

📚 In the end, the presence of a new bookshop and library, which the town needed very much, was nothing compared to the cheap small town politics, just because an arrogant woman couldn't endure being outshone by another woman. Florence should have been wiser in treating the lioness - customer is, nevertheless, always the king - she should have remedied what her staff has done to Mrs. Gamart. Though, I believe, the lioness would have won her cause anyway, whatever Florence done.

📚 My only regret is that Florence's only benevolent supporter's heroic action had gone unnoticed, especially by Florence. It would have meant a lot to her. All in all, this novella is a sad and thought provoking satire of the power of small town politics.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Read for:

20 Books of Summer 2024

hosted by Cathy @ 746 Books

Blitzcat (1989) by Robert Westall #ReadingtheMeow2024 #20booksofsummer24

🐈 Lord Gort is not the ordinary sort of a lord. In fact he's not even a human being. Lord Gort is a black ordinary pet cat, and he's actually a 'she'. At the start of WW2, her beloved human, a British wing-commander in the RAF left home to fight the Germans. Unable to cope with her mistress (whom she don't really like)and the noisy new baby at home, Lord Gort set out on a journey to track down her human.

🐈 Of course Lord Gort didn't really know where Geoffrey Wensley, her human, really was. She only used her instinct. She felt that he was moving away to the north, fir instance, then she would direct her way there. Her human kept moving to different directions all the time, and she'd always turn diligently the same way. Along the way, she met with many adventures, touched many people's lives, and experienced many degrees of the war. In short, through her eyes, we are brought to witness people's struggles as well as resilience against the war.

🐈 Lord Gort, by the way, was named after a British commander whose troops were trapped in Dunkirk, when she's a kitten. Her humans foolishly thought she's a tomcat. Her name caused a funny incident that opens the story nicely, a clever way to plunge us into the middle of war in a lighter way than it could have been.

🐈 As a domestic cat, Lord Gort depended on kind people to get food and shelter. So, for a time, she would stay with someone who cared for her. But when she sensed that her human was moving further away, she would just leave her current temporary person, to continue her journey. Unintentionally, the cat often brought luck or salvation to the people she had stayed with. Her acute sense of danger saved one woman from bombing, and inadvertently forced the other to get up from her fear.

🐈 When Lord Gort was staying with a rear-gunner in the RAF station, the gunner named Tommy believed that the black cat brought him luck, so that he always brought her whenever they flew away to shoot any German's airplane. I found it quite funny at first, because here in Indonesia, especially in Java island where I live, black cat is superstitiously believed to bring bad luck. I didn't realized that in some other Western countries, it's the opposite. Superstitious aside, I think Lord Gort the black cat is just an ordinary cat. She just happened to be at the right place at the right time when people need hope and distraction during the darkest times of war. I loved her nonchalant way of just leaving behind her temporary persons, and focusing to her one and only purpose.

🐈 On the whole, it's a wholesome read for me. It's not too bleak for a war story, as it's sprinkled with chuckle-worthy scenes here and there. And it's not overly sappy for a cat-themed story, for there's deeper emotion of human struggles and triumphs in it too. It's just the kind of cat story that I love and enjoy very much!

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Read for:

Reading the Meow 2024

hosted by Mallika @ Literary Potpourri

20 Books of Summer 2024
hosted by Cathy @ 746 Books

The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael by Agatha Christie #AgathaChristieSS24 #ReadingTheMeow2024

🐈 First of all, I don't know why I had thought this was an Hercule Poirot story, while it's not. It's another of the "no detective stories", but what a story it had been! It has an element of cat, so I included this to my #ReadingTheMeow2024.

🐈 Sir Arthur Carmichael is a twenty-three year old young man, an heir of his father's estate, who hasn't been well these last two weeks. In fact, his case so perplexed his doctor, that he invited his colleague Doctor Carstairs, a renown psychologist, to give his opinion. What the problem was, the doctor didn't tell his friend so that he would form his own impression after seeing the patient by himself.

🐈 Arriving to the estate, Carstairs saw a young girl, Arthur's fiancée in fact, with a grey Persian cat walking by her legs. But why did his friend grew pale when he mentioned the cat? And not just the doctor, the others at the house were automatically silent when he mentioned the grey cat, which he continually heard at night meowing or scratching at his door, but there's no one around when he opened it. And no one saw it either - or rather, there had been a grey cat in the house belonged to Arthur's step mother, but it's been dead two weeks ago!

🐈 But the doctor put it aside for the time being, and he soon got to the mysterious condition of the patient. The young man wasn't himself, and Carstairs noticed that his manner had become so similar to.... a cat! He behaves exactly like cat, even pounding over a mouse! So, there's a cat that no one but Carstairs saw, and there's a healthy young man who turned into cat. What mystery lies beneath it all

🐈 It's actually quite an interesting read, though not surprising, considering the era's fascination over occultism and superstition. Agatha Christie herself had elaborated these themes with the Mr. Quin stories. I quite enjoyed it, the solution of the "murder" might be unusual, but on the whole, it's quite entertaining.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐1/2

Read also for:

Reading the Meow 2024

hosted by Mallika @ Literary Potpourri