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One, Two, Buckle My Shoe / The Patriotic Murders - Agatha Christie (A Hercule Poirot Mystery)

O the good old days when my sis would leave her Agatha Christie collection in Hyderabad and I would get to read them all.....Sigh!!! A big thanx to my colleague Rakesh for letting me borrow this book from him. I had read this particular one years ago under the title "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe". So, it didn't really hit me when I grabbed this copy named "The Patriotic Murders". But the buckle drove the point home :D:D....Neverthless I continued to read it a second time over. You can never tire of a Hercule Poirot mystery if you have forgotten even a part of the mystery. I can't say the same about Miss Marple mysteries but I would read those again too if I had them. The egg-headed detective and his keen acumen are as refreshing as ever. Sometimes I wish I owned the entire collection! I have been told by (lazy) friends and relatives that they won't read my blog because my posts are spoilers if they haven't read the book. I find it extremely hard to write about mysteries without revealing much. Anyways, needless to say the ending was quite unexpected and the last few pages where Poirot explains how he arrived at the conclusions are as usual the best. Agatha Christie makes ample use nursery rhymes in a lot of her books and like this one I am sure a lot of the books have multiple names. What I do everytime I read Agatha Christies is, fix a person in the case as the culprit and read the book keeping that in mind. I might change my suspect during the course of the book if it becomes apparent that the suspected person could not have been possibly involved in the crime. The fun thing about this is that many a times there are atleast 2-3 likely people and this makes it perplexing enough to keep you entertained. Actually this is something you can do with every mystery. Not sure how many others have the same idea but I hope what I am saying makes sense. The day your suspect is the same as the one Hercule Poirot proved to be guilty, you can stop reading them! If I stick to this statement of mine, looks like I will read them forever. No complaints about that!!!!

posted by Smita @ 4:14 PM