Beulah Maud Devaney’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
In your previous life you were a medical practitioner and accidentally killed a patient while drunk. Since then you have stopped drinking, changed your name to something with the same initials as your previous name, and moved within 5 miles of the original murder. You have also married the dead patient’s spouse.
You have received a letter from a recent murder victim. You read half of it before stopping to inform your guests and entire staff about the letter. You then wander off to read the rest in your study, next to your collection of antique blowpipes.
At dinner you decide to tell a lighthearted story about a gruesome murder. The murderer escaped but had an unusual physical defect by which you would be able to identify them anywhere. You refuse to disclose any more details but glance meaningfully around the table before heading up to bed.
You noticed something odd at dinner but can’t work out what it was. You informed the table of this and then wandered off to the summer house for a nap.
You drink quickly and often.
You began life as a homeless street urchin but, in a vulgar retaliation against your social position, you built your own business empire and now own all of New York.
You have a dazzling cousin with a boy’s name who wears short dresses and enjoys midnight swimming with your fiance. She appears to be in danger of being murdered. You have invited her to stay with you.
You are surrounded by foreigners.
You have a maid called Hilda, Tilda, Greeta, or Gretel who you are horrible to. She has ugly glasses and watchful eyes.
You suspect that a murder has been committed so you tell no one and invite the murderer to dinner.
You have a much younger husband. You met him on a cruise just two weeks after your husband died. Your family doesn’t like his paintings.
Your husband has died after drinking a poisoned cup of tea that only you and one other person could have prepared for him. You continue to doggedly drink tea and claim the whole thing is a misunderstanding.
You are a handsome woman.
You agreed to divorce your wife months ago, but she keeps sending detectives to ask you for a divorce and some of your personalized writing paper is missing.
You organize a big family gathering and use it to insult all your guests. You then whip out your will and alter it at the dinner table while everyone finishes their semolina pudding.
Your mousey little wife is extremely unattractive (those glasses! that schoolgirl bob!) but also bears a passing resemblance to the glamorous film star you are having an affair with.
Worried that your past is catching up with you, you have decided to fake your own death with the use of a dead tramp. But you forgot to disfigure his face, so his swarthy brow and jutting jaw are bound to reveal that he is no gentleman. Unlike you, the man digging a shallow grave in the middle of a golf course.
You receive a vaguely lewd poison pen letter and decide to have a bridge party to celebrate.
One of your neighbours accidentally donated a priceless work of art to the vicarage jumble sale. You brought it on a whim and are now drinking tea beneath it.
You are travelling to meet your young lover when you notice your estranged husband getting on the same train. You assume last night’s ugly scene (where you told him about Alfredo’s sensuous spirit) has been forgotten and he is taking a spontaneous business trip.
You insist on dropping hints to your guests about Bunny’s “frightfully interesting time during the war.” Bunny is glowering.
You are being blackmailed by a swarthy fellow. Rather than give in to his demands you make a speech about good old England and then turn your back to write a note to your tailor.
You habitually wear dark glasses, big hats, false teeth, bulky coats and speak with a unique yet easy to mimic accent. All of your friends, family and staff used to be on the stage.
Everything tastes horrible.
You are in the habit of sending famous detectives notes saying “for God’s sake, come!” and “oh please do make them stop” but claim no knowledge of these letters when the detectives arrive.
Everyone hates you.
Tags: agatha christie, beulah devaney, books, murder
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You have the slightest hint of a personal failing which may be expanded upon by an ironic method of murder, revealing your horrific backstory as rapidly as that knife reveals your viscera.
see and i was all set to make my own witty comment here, but this so perfect that i think i am in fact done.
“Lady Farquhar was infamous for walking from place to place with shoes on her feet, a habit she picked up during her dissolute youth in Portugal. The murderer had only to paint her insoles with thallium and wait a month for the poison to eke its way up to her heart.”
“What a ghastly and yet appropriate end! But who-”
“Who else but St. John Grosvenor, who made his fortune painting insoles in Australia? Who else indeed, I wonder?”
(Mr. Grosvenor had nothing to do with it, of course. Aubrey Carew is the true culprit, having learned to emulate the characteristic murder methods of others during his boyhood in Cyprus.)
Will you please write more of these? I’ve run out of actual Christies.
I can never tell, when reading a Certain Type of Novel, whether the English characters are meant to be parodies or not.
Marjorie Milbanks-Todd, Lady Farquhar’s niece and heir, was Aubrey Carew’s possibly unwilling fiancée. She broke off the engagement in a fit of feminine intuition two weeks after her aunt was murdered, but before Miss Morples solved the crime.
Your neighbour’s cat has a septic wound.
You are a tall, rich, glamorous film actress/lady race car driver/aerobatrix* who dominates every situation with expanses of white teeth, trailing clouds of cigarette smoke and marabou, and loud exclamations of how fabulous or horrible everything is.
*I may have just invented this word.
Aviatrix. The single greatest profession that has ever existed and will ever exist.
Yes, exactly – but I was looking for (and couldn’t find, therefore invented) a term for a female flyer whose specialty is stunt flying.
Barnstormina?
Nice.
Oooo, I thought an “aerobatrix” was one of those acrobats that do wingwalking and stunts on planes, usually when flying ludicrously high. like in “Flying down to Rio” or that once scene in “thoroughly modern Millie”
You suspect that a murder has been committed so you tell no one and invite the murderer to dinner.
Oh dear. I guess I have a dinner party to cancel!
We got LITERALLY five thousand “How To Tell If You Are In An Agatha Christie Novel” submissions, btw, many amazing. I started getting worried that we would run one that would have too much overlap with rejected ones, so we liked this and are running it and let there be no more.
And then there were none.
You seriously need more upvotes.
Ha! I’ve actually got one of these on my computer that I hadn’t got round to submitting to you. There IS a lot of overlap with the published one (mine’s far less witty though).
“You suspect that a murder has been committed so you tell no one and invite the murderer to dinner.”
Also the entire plot of the TV show Hannibal.
“This is my design.” – Agatha Christie
Shivering.
Alternately, the murderer invites you to dinner and you make symbolically fraught conversation while eating a meal that you once would have enjoyed more.
On that note, have you seen this? http://lecterings.tumblr.com/tagged/jokeseries
Yes I have, and it’s hilarious 🙂
If I got a vaguely lewd poison pen letter, damn straight I’d throw a bridge party. DAMN STRAGHT, I SAY!
Ha, this is awesome.
I love Agatha Christie. So much. I love her because I almost never guess whodunnit, and all other whodunnits — ALL OF THEM — are poor and bland and transparent in comparison.
Oh! Oh no! Lies!
Because John Dickson Carr! My god. Please tell me you know about the awesomeness that is Gideon Fell?!
Agatha Christie has completely destroyed my ability to trust anyone who a) is not belgian or b) does not drink damson gin. So far it has served me well, although I am concerned because “Increasing levels of paranoia about all strangers who are not themselves detectives, especially strangers with weird mustaches or convoluted pasts, is probably also a sign.
Another reason to move to Oostende…
You say, very loudly, at dinner, surrounded by people who look shifty, “Monsieur Poirot! I must tell you about something I have just remembered!” but instead of telling him, you go home alone to telephone someone and you leave all the lights off.
This everything I ever wanted from the internet. My life is complete.
You notice that the gardener is left-handed, the vicar is NOT left-handed, and the groundskeeper’s dog is actually mute. You wonder how this relates to the fact that Lord S—- always keeps the key to the library in the left-hand pocket of his dressing gown.
“and the groundskeeper’s dog is actually mute” – it will now be a source of constant regret that I didn’t find a way to include this line.
You are a glamorous woman whom everyone considers a maneater but who has never refused a husband or lover in anything.
You are a brash, wealthy lady of a certain age, with a background that could only be described as scandalous. Your hobbies include collecting rich friends, collecting young lovers, collecting Turkey carpets, and collecting unimaginably garish and valuable jewelry.
Crap, I have to change my wicked ways.
You’re visiting an old country house where one of the residents happened to run off years ago, and no one has heard a word from them since.
All wonderful. I think I’ve read most of these in at least two of her books.
One I’d add: You’re visiting an archeological dig/site, because you’ve been receiving threatening letters at home and just needed to get away.
You were brought up in a very wealthy house, where a lovely groundskeeper and his wife worked. You have a ravishingly beautiful sibling who is experimenting with aviators and playboys. You grow up to discover you’ve inherited the bulk of your family’s estate, and your sibling stumbles upon a photo of the groundskeeper and his wife and thinks you bear an uncanny resemblance to the two.
YOU GONNA DIE, LADY.
You’re a slightly dim-witted servant who noticed someone behaving uncharacteristically on the day of the first murder. You have been puzzling about it for a week but said nothing to anyone. You have just mentioned it to the person you observed, who then offers you a nice cup of tea.
You have also burned the poison pen letters.
Guys guys guys I came up with another, better one!
You are an shortsighted housemaid with buckteeth. Once you are murdered the male characters will spend the rest of the book debating whether you were pretty enough to have had a secret boyfriend.
You are an impossibly beautiful and talented actress with an inner radiance that makes you a fabulous star of the stage. You have had a succession of marriages to husbands of wildly different backgrounds (sheik, oil magnate, film star) but only truly loved one of them, who left you. Everyone thinks you’re dim-witted, a fact you exploit to commit murder and get away with it.
Someone loves you so much. So terribly much. You might say they love you beyond reason.
Also (this one burns me) you are a likable lesbian and as out of the closet as you can be for Britain in the fifties.
Which is to say that you live in a small country cottage with a “good friend,” you wear sensible trousers, and you are almost certainly alive at the end of the novel.
I cannot mention the title of the novel where one quite nice person is bumped off and her partner is left to mourn (and everyone in the village just acknowledges that she is ravaged by grief) without spoiling it, but I wish I had read the version of it you did!
The one where the less butch one gets strangled by the killer because she’d seen something without meaning to?
So, in fairness, you are the lucky 50% of the likable lesbians portrayed.
If you can call getting your gal murdered lucky, I suppose.
Also, don’t get me started on “Nemesis”. By which I mean, get me started on “Nemesis” for I have many angry thoughts about it.
I apologize for the glibness of my comments. I use arch cynicism to avoid just being angry all the time, and sometimes it becomes flippant and trivializing.
Oh, please don’t apologize (though it is very considerate of you and I do appreciate it)- I was being unnecessarily pedantic and snarky. And I certainly understand adopting different strategies to avoid being angry all the time! (I wish mine worked better.)
The apology functions largely as a reminder to myself to keep my jaded cynicism in check, because it’s not always helpful.
I want to read your “Nemesis” thoughts!
OK! So, spoilers for “Nemesis” (and incidental spoilers for “Laura” and “A Murder is Announced”) ahead, obvs. And there is a lot of rape culture in this novel so I will be discussing that.
So first it was one of the last novels Dame Agatha wrote and has a lot of “the times have changed, and not for the better!” stuff in it. To be fair the views expressed may be the characters’ rather than the author’s but there are some really horrible attitudes in it- like old guys making excuses for a young man, who’s been convicted of sexual assault, by saying “Oh, women lie about these things,” and then it gets worse and I don’t like to repeat it. Then there are two young women who’ve been murdered and only one of them is treated like the victim who’s worthy of being mourned- the other (who of course was the working class, “sexy” one) is literally killed so she can be a prop in the murderer’s scheme, and nobody expresses any sorrow that she’s dead. (She’s like Diane Redfern in “Laura” but posthumously slut-shamed.) Miss Marple herself is fairly aloof from all this, but it’s a pain to read.
Second, the murderer turns out to be a woman who loved her ward so much that she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her to a man, so she killed the younger woman when she found out she was planning to elope with a young man (the one the old guys were defending above). Then she killed another young woman and used her body to frame the man for murder. Then ten years later she kills someone else she thought might have guessed her secret. Then she tries to kill Miss Marple. Then she kills herself.
Now, the relationship between the the murderer and her ward is clearly not like other possessive mother/daughter-type relationships in Christie (the needy Rachel in “Ordeal by Innocence” or the controlling, abusive Mrs Boynton in “Appointment with Death”, for instance.) Everyone pretty much admits it’s a romantic relationship, with the younger woman hero-worshipping the older one and the older one admitting the younger one was all she cared for in the world. And then the younger woman falls in love with this man and, again, the consensus is “Naturally she wanted a normal life and she’d grown out of that schoolgirl phase she was in!” (Shades of Miss Climpson’s musings in “Unnatural Death”.) And the older woman can’t stand it. And then in the last chapter where they’re tying up loose ends Miss Marple is all, “Oh, the poor lost soul. I’m as sorry for her as I am for the woman she murdered.”
So you get Evil Killer Lesbian and Tragic Suicidal Lesbian and Love Between Women Is Just a Stop-Gap Till You Get the Real Thing- With a Man! all in the same story and it just bothers me so much. I don’t know why I’m so het up about a book written in 1970 (by someone who may have been struggling with the early stages of dementia: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/03/agat…
Maybe *because* Hinch and Murgatroyd in “A Murder Is Announced” twenty years earlier are so sympathetic, it feels like a betrayal: like when Dorothy L. Sayers, having written the three-dimensional Sir Reuben Levy, gives us the horrible stereotypes who come to claim the furniture in “Busman’s Honeymoon.”
(The BBC (not the ITV) adaptation is very good, by the way, and fixes a lot of the things I’ve been complaining about.)
I should really be going to bed as it is almost 3 in my time zone and I am not sure if I am expressing things clearly. Thanks for reading my rant if you have made it this far!
“Having a pash,” indeed. Although I can’t remember if that was Miss Climpson, or Diana Rigg’s character in that short-lived 1920s series, the one with Inspector Christmas.
You remind Miss Marple of someone in her village.
You viciously cry out “You little Belgian jackanapes!” when exposed as the blackmailer / already married lover / dead wife all along. Historical racial slurs against Belgians xoxoxo
English Detective stories were memorably summarized by someone or other as ‘Snobbery with Violence’.
Alan Bennett! Did you read Colin Watson’s book by that title? (Subtitle: ‘English crime stories and their audience’. There is also a Edwardian Mystery novel by Marion Chesney/ M.C. Beaton called that, which I haven’t read.
Gosh – I’d no idea it was someone so cool who said that! I’d only ever seen it quoted casually without attribution. I have not read Colin Watson’s book but it sounds good – thanks for telling me about it!
(I had heard of the Marion Chesney book but I’m quite suspicious of it as it seems to be trying to write a Golden Age detective novel in the 21st C and I’m dubious that anyone could do that with any success… what do you think?)
I don’t know anything about that writer except that she is very popular! I see why you might be dubious about modern attempts at that type of mystery. (The only advantage I can think of is perhaps being less likely to be hit with weapons-grade racial or ethnic slurs while dozily reading along about an afternoon in the country.) My sister mentioned the title because as you point out, it is a memorable description of the subgenre, both flavorful and economical. And yes, salutes to Alan Bennett!
That is a good point! While usually I have the standard ‘this is rather horrible but if I only read stuff that didn’t have offensive things in it then my reading life would be much poorer, etc’ response to that, it is still a nasty jolt. I once tried to read Margery Allingham’s The Fashion in Shrouds and that was too far, my God! I couldn’t cope with how horrendously racist Albert Campion is in it. There’s a certain comment he makes in there which pushed me over the edge and I was like ‘THAT’S IT!’ It doesn’t help that he and his sister are cold, nasty sophisticates in other ways too. And even that would be cope-able if it weren’t apparent that you’re supposed to like and admire them.
Sometimes, even the snobbery gets to me. Agatha Christie’s ‘The Listerdale Mystery’ for example. I think actually it’s not necessarily how nasty the comment is, but it’s more how much the author obviously wants you to agree with it. Still, I suppose it’s also annoying when things like Downton Abbey try to pretend that only really horrible people were anti-Semitic or homophobic or racist when actually it was a perfectly respectable thing to be at the time.
Marion Chesney also writes under the name M.C. Beaton. She claims to be a woman, but if she is, the we need a vacuum to suck all the internalized misogyny out of her. I sort of enjoy her books whilst as the same time squirming with disapproval. The only real way is to find out for yourself, which you can do with many of her books. the agatha raisin murder mysteries, the poor relative hotel series, the violence and snobbery series, the stagecoach series…. take your pick really, you can buy most of them for a penny on amazon. Just prepare yourself for a lot of “spanking she deserved”… “NO! NO NO NO!” she screamed. He silenced her with his mouth, roughly. That type of thing.
Oh god, MC Beaton! On my honeymoon, on the plane my darling husband was asleep so I got the full attention of dude beside me, who informed me that if I liked Sayers I’d love the Agatha Raisin series. I found one on playaway* in the library, called As The Pig Turns, which had sooo much misogyny in it, but more racism – the whole plot boils down to “This is obviously the murderer, he’s *Bulgarian*!”
*if you haven’t seen this, playaway is where you have an audiobook on its own little cartridge and all you have to do is plug in your earphones and make sure it has a battery in it. Very nice if you’re like me and keep forgetting how to download and transfer things like that.
ooh, I didn’t read this before I put a whole on her Snobbery with Violence book. Will look further and maybe remove the hold.
<cancels hold after reading further comments>
Placing hold on the Marion Chesney book…
Your death will allow a young couple to begin a romance, and the story of your murder will end with their wedding.
In Agatha Christie novels, you never exclaim. You “ejaculate.”
You could do both with style and grace
Although I’m a MAN, I thoroughly enjoyed your story. Nice. Agatha’s stories are so contrived, you did a great job imitating her style.
shut up shut up shut up nobody cares that you’re a man
Excuse me, I think you mistakenly used the word ‘contrived’ when you may have actually meant ‘splendiferous’.
Just a heads up.
You are about the same height, age, body type, sex and coloring as someone else someone needs to murder, so your corpse would be handy in providing a frame-up/alibi. But your death won’t be too much of a tragedy, because you are working class/sexually active.
God, why do they all do that? Pathological genre blindness, the lot of them.
ETA: in response to yeah_elle, because intensedebate dislikes my having actual conversations.
There are Jews around.
(I watched the series well before reading any of the books, and then when I finally read The Mysterious Affair at Styles I was all ‘wow, Poirot was … kinda racist!’ Guy couldn’t walk into a room without commenting on race or ethnicity.)
oh, oh, i have some:
1. you tell your sociopathic grandkid that she ain’t gonna go to the ballet school as long as you are the head of the household.
2. you, a poor yet pompous man from the lower classes, dare to jilt the colonel’s daughter who is broke, but had a glorious future mapped out for you.
3. you are an adenoidal housemaid who prefaces remarks with “blease, biss”, and thanks to your toothache, you know that Lady Hesketh-Dubois’ niece was polishing the edge of the panto-prop dagger with the contents of a bottle with a foreign-looking label at 3 in the morning.
4. you are a martyr to hypochondria, but instead of SSRIs, the doctor gives you cachets of funny-smelling powders. you take your frustrations out on your husband and the resident nurse. she is quiet yet observant.
5. you are about to change your will because the new medium has put you in touch with your dear, departed Daisy’s spirit. you announce this just after lunch, then retire to the library for a snooze.
You are a kind-hearted heiress who invites your poor but charming friend/cousin who looks like you to stay as long as she likes, and she not only likes to stay indefinitely, but likes your fiance too.
Everything tastes horrible.
Is anyone up for a discussion about just how much better the TV version of Five Little Pigs was than the book? It seriously floors me every time I watch it.
This is great! Have you seen the new website where you can vote for your favourite Agatha Christie story? It’s at http://www.worldsfavouritechristie.com but so hard to choose just one!