Trashy read

A few days ago, perhaps under the influence of something or other, I needed something light & trashy to read and my eye wandered to the bookcase full of Agatha. My hand wandered to the volume containing the yarn detailed at reference 1.

Which I have now read. Now with most Agatha stories, I start off thinking that this is pretty bad stuff, but then her knack for telling stories gets hold of me and more or less carries me through to the end, perhaps skipping the just odd page here and there. Not so on this occasion and I had to work at it to get through to the end.

I think my summing up would be that this a lower class, cut-price version of the sort of silly story that John Buchan - sometime Governor General of Canada - would knock out between his bureaucratic assignments. Say the 'The Three Hostages' of reference 2. 

We have various very evil revolutionaries. People hell bent on destroying us. Russian, German and Irish. People who would not hesitate to make use of the draft of a very dodgy treaty we thought of making in 1915. I associate to the now infamous Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 - although looking at things a hundred years later, it is not very clear how we could have done a better job of carving up the Turkish empire, an empire which had managed to contain, to shut up or otherwise accommodate all the various aspirations and ambitions of the Middle East for centuries. The problem for these revolutionaries being to get hold of the draft. And therein lies the story.

A committee of said revolutionaries, only known by their numbers, chaired by No.1. A device later used by Ian Fleming, and, I dare say, others. Another wheeze Agatha shares with Fleming is lots of flashy living, which in her case takes the form of a flashy car and extensive meals at places like the Ritz or Claridge's. Perhaps people wanted vicarious flashy in the 1920's just as much as they did in the 1950's.

A prototype of Captain Hastings. The dim but decent Englishman who keeps the story on the straight and narrow. Maybe not so hot with his brain, but not so bad with his fists should need arise.

A reprise of the artful dodger, the working-class street boy from the slums of Farringdon, Battersea or somewhere like that and who affords much aid to Sherlock Holmes.

What I took to be a discrete bit of anti-Semitism in the form of the very rich Julius Hersheimmer from New York. Shamefully for us, plenty of it about at the time of writing. But neither Bing nor Google are giving anything away on that front. 

A walk on part for Inspector Japp, who went on to much larger roles in the Poirot stories.

Much talk of a disaster scheduled for the 29th. I read in the month of my birthday, I but cannot now corroborate that. Wishful thinking. Projection. Who knows?

Unusually for me, I spotted the villain more or less on the first page that he appeared. For once my reading of the tea leaves was spot on.

PS 1: the snap from Abebooks above reminds me of the occasion when I lighted upon a very expensive copy of Dr. Zhivago in Abebooks and very nearly hit the buy button. After which I failed to persuade HSBC to reduce my credit limit to reduce the risk of accidents of that sort. See reference 3.

PS 2: Manor Collectables of Lincolnshire appear to have no independent existence outside of Abebooks. Presumably some freelancer operating out of his garden office.

References

Reference 1: The secret adversary - Agatha Christie - 1922.

Reference 2: The Three Hostages - John Buchan - 1924. 'The Three Hostages is the fourth of five Richard Hannay novels by the Scottish author John Buchan, first published in 1924 by Hodder & Stoughton, London'. The book where I first read of the once notorious Seven Dials district of London, now gentrified. Or at least commercialised.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/dr-z-part-4.html.