Collections

This week's Booking Through Thursday is:

Do you prefer to read collections that are all of works by the same author? Or collections by different writers? Consistency or variety?

 I don't really enjoy short stories in general because they don't give me that sense of in-depth immersion that helps me to really enjoy a book. The only exception I've found so far is Michael Marshall Smith's collection of (very) short stories, What You Make It, some of which are only a couple of pages long, but all are so cleverly written that the ideas stay with you for quite a while.

Usually, the only collections I'd consider reading are either poetry collections (and I prefer those to be by the same poet or at least arranged around a consistent theme) or collections of stories about the same character, for instance Sherlock Holmes stories or The Complete Father Brown Stories. That way you still get a sense of continuity and depth as the short stories build upon each other, rather than starting fresh at the beginning of each new one.

For me getting just a few minutes' worth of a story feels unsatisfying - if it was a good idea I wish it'd been taken further and turned into a full novel.

Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie

Murder on the Orient Express seemed like apt reading material for the 6-hour train journey to my graduation ceremony at the weekend, although it did make me long for the lovely old-fashioned trains portrayed in the book, instead of the crowded, greasy and boiling hot ones I was stuck on at the time.

We begin with Hercule Poirot travelling back to London, after solving a case in Syria. He plans to break his journey for three days exploring Stamboul (or Istanbul, as we now know it), but receives an urgent telegraph to return home immediately. He bumps into a friend of his who happens to be a director of the railway company owning the Orient Express, who pulls some strings and gets him a last-minute berth in an unseasonably crowded train bound for London.

Once on the train, he meets a couple of his former travelling companions, who seem now to be avoiding one another, as well as making the acquaintance of the diverse range of other passengers on the carriage. After a day or two of travel, the train is halted by a snowdrift, and in the morning one of the passengers is discovered murdered. Trapped on a train with the murderer, and without the facility of telegramming for further information about his suspects, Poirot must puzzle out the identity of the culprit using his deductive powers alone.

As usual with Agatha Christie, the plot keeps you guessing throughout, and I felt rather smug at having spotted a pivotal clue at the time it happened. Naturally, the conclusion is rather contrived compared to modern, gritty detective dramas, but that’s one of the great things about Christie’s novels – you have the pleasant sensation of sitting safely outside the action, watching what’s going on and wondering about the solution.

Hercule Poirot’s warm, amiable character and strong sense of compassion and humour is also a nice contrast from other early detective fiction, for instance Sherlock Holmes’ cold intellectual logic. For Holmes each crime is simply a puzzle to be clinically solved and the culprit handed over to the authorities for justice, but Poirot sees each suspect as a human being, and uses this to his advantage when making his deductions.

Next up: Legend by David Gemmell