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Tag: Mystery

  • And Then There Were None

    Ten people, each invited under a different pretext by a host none of them has met, travel to a mansion on an island off the coast of Devon. They include a retired judge, a doctor, a former police officer, a young governess, a pious spinster, an ex-army general, a mercenary, a playboy and a married pair of servants. Their host never appears.

    After dinner on the first night, a gramophone record accuses each guest of having caused a death and escaped justice. Then the guests begin to die, in ways that echo a grim nursery rhyme framed in every bedroom, while china figurines vanish from the dining table one by one. Cut off from the mainland by a storm, the survivors realise the killer must be among them.

    Christie constructed the story with exceptional precision, building suspicion around every character and stripping away the comforts of a detective who arrives to explain everything. It is regarded as her masterpiece and one of the best-selling novels ever written, and its closed-circle formula has been imitated countless times in books, films and television.

    Book details

    AuthorAgatha Christie
    First published1939
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)272
    SettingSoldier Island, off the coast of Devon, England, late 1930s

    Themes

    • Guilt
    • Justice
    • Paranoia
    • Punishment
    • Isolation

    Who should read it

    Mystery lovers who want the classic locked-island puzzle that inspired a whole genre.

  • Murder on the Orient Express

    Hercule Poirot, the fastidious Belgian detective, boards the Orient Express in Istanbul, heading home after a case. The train is unusually full for winter. One passenger, an American businessman named Ratchett, asks Poirot to protect him from threats he has received; Poirot declines, finding the man distasteful. During the night the train is stopped by heavy snow in Yugoslavia.

    In the morning Ratchett is found dead in his compartment, stabbed repeatedly. With no way for anyone to have come or gone through the snow, the killer must be aboard. Poirot interviews a strikingly diverse set of passengers, from a Russian princess and a Hungarian count to an English colonel, a governess and a talkative American matron, and discovers a link to a notorious crime in the United States.

    Christie was inspired partly by the real Lindbergh kidnapping case and by her own experience of a train stranded by floods. The novel is a showcase for Poirot's method of sifting statements and psychology. Its solution is among the most famous in crime fiction, and it has been filmed several times, notably in 1974 and 2017.

    Book details

    AuthorAgatha Christie
    First published1934
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)256
    SettingThe Orient Express, snowbound in Yugoslavia, 1930s

    Themes

    • Justice versus law
    • Revenge
    • Deception
    • Morality
    • Logic

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a perfectly constructed puzzle and an introduction to Hercule Poirot.

  • The Name of the Rose

    In the winter of 1327, William of Baskerville, an English Franciscan with a sharp, empirical mind, arrives at a Benedictine abbey in the mountains of northern Italy, accompanied by Adso of Melk, a young Benedictine novice who narrates the story many years later. William has come to help prepare a tense theological debate between papal envoys and Franciscan representatives over the poverty of Christ.

    Soon after their arrival a young monk is found dead, and more deaths follow over seven days. The abbot asks William to investigate, and his inquiries lead toward the abbey's vast library, a forbidden maze of rooms guarded jealously by the monks, and toward a mysterious book that someone is willing to kill to protect. The Inquisition's arrival raises the stakes further.

    Eco, a semiotics professor, packs the novel with medieval philosophy, heresy, Latin quotations and debates about laughter and knowledge, while keeping a detective plot that nods to Sherlock Holmes. William Weaver's translation made it an international bestseller, it won Italy's Strega Prize, and it was filmed with Sean Connery in 1986.

    Book details

    AuthorUmberto Eco
    First published1980
    Original languageItalian
    Translated byWilliam Weaver
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)536
    SettingA Benedictine abbey in northern Italy, November 1327
    AwardsStrega Prize 1981

    Themes

    • Knowledge and censorship
    • Faith versus reason
    • Heresy
    • Power of the Church
    • Interpretation of signs

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy intellectual mysteries steeped in history, philosophy and medieval detail.

  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

    This collection gathers the first twelve Sherlock Holmes short stories, originally published in The Strand Magazine in 1891 and 1892. They made Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective a sensation and established the format of the detective short story: a visitor arrives at Baker Street with a puzzle, Holmes reads their life from small physical details, and an investigation follows.

    The cases range widely. A king fears exposure by a former lover in A Scandal in Bohemia, which introduces Irene Adler. A pawnbroker is paid to copy out an encyclopaedia in The Red-Headed League. Other stories involve a deadly speckled band in a Surrey manor house, a blue gemstone found in a Christmas goose, a vanished bridegroom and an engineer who loses his thumb.

    Narrated by the loyal Dr John Watson, the stories mix logical deduction with Victorian atmosphere: fog, gaslight, hansom cabs and country houses. Not every case ends with an arrest, and Holmes is sometimes outwitted, which keeps the collection lively. It remains the ideal starting point for new Holmes readers.

    Book details

    AuthorArthur Conan Doyle
    First published1892
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)307
    SettingLondon and the English countryside, 1880s-1890s

    Themes

    • Deduction
    • Justice
    • Friendship
    • Disguise
    • Victorian society

    Who should read it

    Mystery lovers and newcomers to Sherlock Holmes who want short, self-contained cases to read one at a time.

  • The Hound of the Baskervilles

    Dr James Mortimer arrives at Baker Street with an old manuscript describing a curse on the Baskerville family: a gigantic, hellish hound said to have hunted down a wicked ancestor in the seventeenth century. Sir Charles Baskerville has just been found dead in the grounds of his Devon estate, with the footprints of an enormous dog nearby, and the new heir, Sir Henry, is on his way from Canada.

    Holmes, claiming other business, sends Watson to Dartmoor to guard Sir Henry and report back. Watson finds a landscape of mists, ancient stone huts and treacherous bogs, an escaped convict at large, a butler and his wife behaving suspiciously, a naturalist and his sister living nearby, and an unexplained light on the moor at night.

    Serialised in 1901 and 1902, the novel brought Holmes back after Conan Doyle had killed him off, though it is set before his apparent death. It balances rational detection against an atmosphere of supernatural dread and is often considered the finest Holmes novel.

    Book details

    AuthorArthur Conan Doyle
    First published1902
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreMystery
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)256
    SettingDartmoor, Devon, and London, 1880s

    Themes

    • Reason versus superstition
    • Inheritance
    • Deception
    • Landscape
    • Family curse

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a full-length Sherlock Holmes mystery with a gothic atmosphere and a moorland setting.