Mrs. McGinty’s Dead audiobook

Another cool Christie mystery.Superintendent Spence is not as well known as Inspector Japp, but he is another regular in Poirot's world. So when he comes to the retired detective and asks him to look into a case, Hercule agrees. Spence can't put his finger on it, but something just didn't sit right with him about the conviction of a man accused of murdering his elderly landlady. He doesn't want this dude's death on his conscience, but he has no proof that this man didn't do it. Unfortunately, the man himself is a thoroughly unlikeable character, who is of little to no help with his mopey personality and defeatist attitude.Don't worry, Poirot will sort it all out. But Spence isn't the only fan favorite who makes an appearance in this one.Ariadne Oliver also shows up in town, announcing her presence by accidentally hitting Hercule with a flying apple core. She helps her old friend suss out the killer, all while arguing with a playwright over his reboot of her famous Finnish detective for the stage. In one conversation, he wants to sex poor Sven up and add a bit of romance to the story.“Sven Hjerson never cared for women,” said Mrs. Oliver coldly.“But you can’t have him a pansy, darling! Not for this sort of play. I mean it’s not green bay trees or anything like that. It’s thrills and murders and clean open-air fun.”Take note, Kenneth Branagh!This is one of the more fun books as far as the dialogue goes, and a lot of that is due to Mrs. Oliver.The mystery is ok but I think Ariadne and her feelings towards her literary creation are the best part of this particular story. Because while Ariadne wasn't 100% Christie, she is a fun peek into how Agatha Christie somewhat felt about her life and her career as a writer. I've heard this story referenced before in her other mysteries, so I'm glad I was finally able to tick this one off the list. Would definitely recommend this one for fans.

Mrs. McGinty's Dead (Hercule Poirot #30), Agatha ChristieMrs. McGinty's Dead is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1952 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 3 March the same year. An old woman apparently struck dead by her lodger for thirty pounds that she kept under a floorboard. When, however, he is asked by the investigating officer to take another look at the case to stop an innocent man going to the gallows, he realises that things may not be as simple as they first appear to be.عنوان: مرگ خانم مگینتی؛ نویسنده: آگاتا کریستی؛ مترجم: مجتبی عبداللّه‌ نژاد؛ تهران؛ هرمس، دی 1388؛ شابک: 9789643636326؛داستان با قتل خانم مک‌گینتی یک سالمند در یک روستا آغاز می‌شود و مستاجر او محکوم می‌شود در صورتی که هرکول پوآرو اعتقاد دارد که کار وی نیست. پس از آن یکی دیگر از اهالی روستا به قتل می‌رسد و داستان به ماجراهای قدیمی مرتبط می‌شود... ا. شربیانی

I really enjoyed it! The barbs at Poirot that Christie laid out were a complete scream. Actually there's quite a bit of humour in this one. Also, Ariadne Oliver is my favourite and for the little she was here, I just adored her. She left abruptly and I was sad to see her go. I loved Poirot playing matchmaker for a couple who complement one another perfectly and would be happy together. It was novel because they weren't the usual and I was pulling for both to be happy at the end of the story. I wanted them to have a win.Btw, the mystery was fun to try and solve but is just about impossible to my mind. I think I must have seen an adaptation before because there's an instance with the murderer that seemed odd to me and made me suspect it was they but I couldn't figure out the why. A great whodunnit and howdunnit to pass a weekend.Recommended.Favourite quotes and passages:The barbs at Poirot were resplendent! I loved them as much as I adore him!:"His name, he noted with chagrin, made no particular impression on her. The younger generation, he could not but feel, were singularly lacking in knowledge of notable celebrities.""It is my weakness, it has always been my weakness, to desire to show off. That weakness, Hastings could never understand. But indeed it is very necessary for a man of my abilities to admire himself—and for that one needs stimulation from outside. I cannot, truly I cannot, sit in a chair all day reflecting how truly admirable I am. One needs the human touch. One needs—as they say nowadays—the stooge.”"He was the great, the unique Hercule Poirot, but he was also a very old man and his shoes were tight."Ariadne Oliver is a legend and I really need to watch that Sven Hjerson adaptation! Also, how has no one written cozies of them by now?! Those titles are begging for it! I'll happily read fan fiction.:Mrs. Oliver suddenly arrived out on the road, rather in the manner of a volcanic eruption.Sadly, Mrs. Oliver ran her hands through her windswept grey hair, causing it to look as though swept not by wind but by a tornado.“The Affair of the Second Goldfish,” she mused, “that’s quite a good one. The Cat it was Who Died—that’s where I made a blowpipe a foot long and it’s really six feet. Ridiculous that a blowpipe should be that size, but someone wrote from a museum to tell me so. Sometimes I think there are people who only read books in the hope of finding mistakes in them. What’s the other one of them? Oh! Death of a Débutante—that’s frightful tripe! I made sulphonal soluble in water and it isn’t, and the whole thing is wildly impossible from start to finish. At least eight people die before Sven Hjerson gets his brainwave.”“How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic manerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something—and people seem to like it—and then you go on—and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write and say how fond you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.”Maureen Summerhayes is the mistress of the Long Meadows and is trying to make a go of turning into a proper B&B type thing. Sadly and hilariously, she's a complete disaster at all things domestic. The woman leaves spinach in a colander on a chair in the sitting room and serves her guests beans she's bled all over in a preparatory mishap. She was a constant pain and truly a danger to health that plagued Poirot during his stay there and literally no one wanted to hear his quite legitimate laments. I couldn't stop laughing!“I didn’t get to that pudding in time. It had boiled dry. I think it’s really all right—just a little scorched perhaps. In case it tasted rather nasty I thought I would open a bottle of those raspberries I put up last summer. They seem to have a bit of mould on top but they say nowadays that that doesn’t matter. It’s really rather good for you—practically penicillin.”And just because they're great lines:“When people barely notice you’re alive, you’re not likely to have any enemies.”“It is you, mon ami? Attend, I pray. I have news for you. Splendid news. Somebody has tried to kill me. . . .”"Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.""The bereaved had never any doubt about their dear ones’ wishes and those wishes usually squared with their own inclinations."

Most of Christie's “classic” Poirot novels were written in the decades between the World Wars; that's the milieu readers (or, at least, this reader) typically associates him with. First published in 1952, this is one of the later entries in the canon. From the beginning of the Poirot books, it's been suggested that he's no longer young, and either semi-retired or thinking of retiring. By now, though, he actually is elderly (the author describes him at one point as “very old”) and really retired. (But “the little grey cells” haven't lost their acuity....)In the first pages, our hero struck me almost as a caricature of himself, compared to the portrayal in earlier novels. He's always liked his creature comforts, and he's always been super-vain; but to my knowledge he hasn't previously been depicted as practically living for his stomach, as he is here, and if I were Capt. Hastings (who's absent in this book) and were privy to his reflections about the relationship, he'd never see me again. (He misses his sidekick solely for the latter's utility as a “stooge” to admire his genius. :-( ) And when he receives a visit from a police acquaintance, Superintendent Spence, his early misapprehension of the man's purpose is so emotionally tone deaf and clueless as to be, in my estimation, totally unlike the usually perceptive and supremely tactful Poirot that I know.However, once Christie gets into the mystery aspect of the plot, she hits her stride, and Poirot is again himself. The previous November (it's now warm weather again), in the English provincial village of Broadhinny, an apparently inoffensive, widowed cleaning lady in her 60s was murdered in her cottage, her head bashed in with an unidentified weapon and her modest savings stolen from under a floorboard. (They were subsequently found hidden outside the dwelling.) Her unemployed, generally not well liked lodger, James Bentley, was arrested for the crime, on strong evidence developed by Spence, and has now been convicted and sentenced to hang. The problem is that Spence (who's nearing retirement age himself), based on a lifetime of experience with murderers, doesn't believe Bentley is the right psychological type to be guilty of this sort of crime, despite the strength of the case against him. He wants Poirot, as a favor, to look into the case with an eye to seeing whether someone else could be the real culprit. Respecting his psychological judgment, and caring about justice as much as Spence does (and being bored out of his skull with retirement!) Poirot takes on the task, though there's no money in it. This will be a challenging case, because Broadhinny is a mare's nest of secrets; and with an execution in the offing, time is of the essence.This is a very well-constructed, tightly-plotted mystery, which kept me guessing from the beginning. With some mystery reads, I'm able to guess the culprit well before the reveal. But here I couldn't; and while I had a tentative theory or two towards the end, the true identity and motivation of the killer was a total surprise. As is characteristic of this author, there is a finite pool of suspects; the murderer had to be a local resident who knew where Mrs. McGinty kept her money, and Broadhinney isn't a very populous place. Moreover, without Hastings as narrator, our main viewpoint character is Poirot himself, so we follow the development of the case and its clues largely through his eyes. Still, Dame Agatha provides enough plot complexity and red herrings that I suspect most readers will be as surprised by the denouement (explained in another characteristic Christie device, the gathering of all the main characters in one room for Poirot to conduct the Big Reveal) as I was. She tells her story with plenty of attention to developing realistic characters and insightfully exploring their relationships (as in many other Christie novels, there's a Cast of Characters preceding the text; but I skipped this, preferring to form my own impressions from the beginning), and sprinkles in some touches of humor. Partly compensating for Hasting's absence, another character who appears in several Poirot novels, his mystery-writing friend Ariadne Oliver, shows up about halfway in, though she's only a secondary character here. I'd encountered her previously in Dead Man's Folly, which I read as a kid, though that book was actually written later than this one. (Her character clearly incorporates something of Christie's own personality; and her “series character” Sven Hjerson, a 60-something eccentric Finnish expatriate detective, whose creator detests him but has come to be saddled with him because her fans like him, gives us a wryly humorous meta-fictional glimpse of Christie's own feelings about Poirot after 30+ years of writing about him.) In other reviews, I've noted that Christie usually doesn't convey much of a period feel in most of her books (that I've read). Here, however, it's a bit more marked; at least, I picked up an ambiance of post-war England, not yet fully recovered from World War II (there are still ration books, for instance), and beginning an era of economic decline and social-cultural unraveling, with malaise and a sense of worthwhile things being lost very much in the air.All in all, this was a very rewarding read of its type, and a solid addition to the Poirot corpus. No fan of traditional mysteries would be apt to be disappointed with it.

Another fine Christie mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the very end.The fact that this is the 30th Poirot book seems to be noticed as the Belgium detective reminisces of his time with Hastings while a returing character adds much fun to the second half of the novel.Yet again Christie spings an interesting hook as Poirot is informed by Superintendent Spence of his suspicions that convicted James Bentley might not be the real culprit of Mrs Mcgintys death, with days before his execution time is ticking for his name to be cleared.It soon becomes apparent that the true motive is much more than the £30 that was stolen.It's a fascinating mystery that is helped along by the various characters, not least Ariadne Oliver - the fictional crime writer in this series.Her quips of poor adaptations of her works and the struggles of writing a foreign detective is clearly from Christie herself.Not the strongest Poirot, but still a whole lot of fun.

As always, Christie comes through with a great mystery with the mind of Poirot. Excellent reading

What a superb and clever storyline!I had the double pleasure of re-reading this book while simultaneously listening to the audiobook narrated by Hugh Fraser (Captain Hastings of Poirot TV series), who did a terrific job.I first read this book during my teens and it was an edition translated into Portuguese, and I confess that I have forgotten about the story, so it felt as my first time. It was like finding a hidden treasure.The writing is so good!Here we have Poirot at his best.There is also a participation of Ariadne Oliver, a character that has appeared in 7 different books (including this one).As for the ending, of course I had no clue. What a twist!PS. I am grateful for recently reading “Horrid”, by Katrina Leo, because in it there are plenty references of Christie’s books and this one was the main character’s favourite. It triggered my love for Dame Christie and I hope that it will also motivate the young readers to discover Agatha Christie.

"Mrs. McGinty's dead. How did she die?Sticking her neck out, just like I."Dame Agatha's penchant to use children's rhymes as an underlying theme for mysteries, enhancing the creepy aspect of many of them, coming to the fore once again. (Really, I hope someone would do a monograph on this quirky aspect of her novels one day.)Mrs. McGinty was a charwoman - at the beginning of the story, she is dead, bludgeoned to death apparently by her lodger who has been convicted of the crime. But Superintendent Spence who is investigating the case thinks otherwise, even though the circumstantial evidence is substantial: and seeks the help of none other than Hercule Poirot.As Poirot investigates, it becomes evident that matters are not as simple as one thinks it is. It seems that Mrs. McGinty "stuck her neck out" and got it cut off...---------------------------------This was one of the most humorous books from Christie: the tone resembled that of Wodehouse at times. Poirot's experience in the horrible boarding house run by the Summerhayes, especially being forced to eat raspberries with mould on them and beans which have been bloodstained from his hostess's cut finger, was hilarious. So also Superintendent Spence's exasperation at Poirot's close-mouthed nature and cryptic remarks. I still remember once sentence which doubled me up. At the darkest hour in the investigation, when Spence remarks that the case is puzzling him to death, the Belgian sleuth says: "Ah, mon ami, it is simple, is it not?" Dame Agatha writes:After that remark there was nearly a third murder - the murder of Hercule Poirot by Superintendent Spence in Kilchester Police Headquarters.Not one of Agatha Christie's best, but worth a read.

It's Agatha Christie, and it's wonderful like always. Great story, beautifully written, with superb characters and the irresistible and quirky Hercule Poirot. Such a joy.