A review by sarahmatthews
Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

fast-paced

Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie

Read in Braille

HarperCollins 

Pub. 1941, 220pp  

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Well, January’s a depressing month at best and 2025 hasn’t started very positively, with so much happening around the world, so I chose this book as a bit of escapism.

It’s set on a fictional island holiday resort just off the Devon coast, connected by a causeway, where a group of guests at the Jolly Roger hotel are sunning themselves, gossiping and generally having a relaxed time. Poirot’s among them and of course he won’t get time to chill out for long! Within 72 hours there’s been a murder and he’s called on to investigate, alongside the police who have theories that reach far wider than the island. With only a few people at the guest house and most of them possessing some kind of motive (either fairly obvious or tied in with their past) and some very strong alibis to crack, there’s plenty to get those little grey cells working on.

I thought this was one of the best Christie’s I’ve read so far, with a lot of twists and turns to entertain the reader, and I was convinced at many points I knew who the culprit was. Of course I was wrong! So many red herrings to wrong foot you. I doubt if it’s possible to solve this one as a reader as some of the essential info needed wasn’t disclosed until the very end, but that doesn’t bother me one bit when I’m glued to the story and losing hours in another world like this; a world where the bad guys show themselves in the end and are punished.

There are some very Christie characters here, the beautiful femme fatale, the jealous husband, the stuffy old Major and the commic older tourist couple. 

They’re all very interested in Poirot’s methods    and here Poirot’s talking to a guest in the lounge on a rainy day:

“It is a little like your puzzle, Madam.One assembles the pieces. It is like a mosaic–many colours and patterns–and every strange-shaped little piece must be fitted into its own place.”… “And sometimes it is like that piece of your puzzle just now. One arranges very methodically the pieces of the puzzle –one sorts the colours–and then perhaps a piece of one colour that should fit in with–say, the fur rug, fits in instead in a black cat’s tail.”

there were a couple of plot points that were somewhat implausible (not least why the murderer decided to go ahead even though the famous detective Poirot was staying at the hotel!) and she has a habit of letting down her strongest female characters right at the end but this book cheered me up hugely. Towards the end there’s a very entertaining section where they all go on a picnic on Dartmoor, which did have a point to it but felt quite unusual, and I so enjoyed the last few pages where Poirot captivates the guests with a full description of how he solved the crime. A wonderful piece of twisty Golden Age detective fiction.