What can I say? This is one of the most detective novels written by one of the best known detective story writers. It features Hercule Poirot - the illustrious old little man from Belgium with a great moustache, neat clothes and unbelievable grey cells that never fail him.
It's one of those detective novels where I couldn't guess who the murderer was until Poirot explained it. Sometimes I can guess it earlier and sometimes I can't. In this case I still felt a bit dumbfounded even after receiving the explanation: who can believe that a wife can meet her husband and not recognise him? Well, I know, fifteen years have passed. That's just fifteen though and not fifty. Well, their marriage lasted for just a few months. But that's months, not minutes.
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However, if we bring ourselves to credit that, the rest of the novel is perfect. The characters are drawn with mastery; you can close your eyes and see Louise Leidner smiling at you with that special smile, at once charming and ruthless, which only women of a singular kind ever possess. You can see Amy Leatheran, the honest, compassionate and hard-working young nurse eagerly helping Poirot in his investigation to chronicle it later on in her written narrative. You can see Miss Johnson, plain and elderly, but devoted, companion of Dr Leidner's - and you can't help feeling pity for her hopeless love and desperate jealousy, which is doomed to end nowhere.
Male characters are done in the same detailed manner, but - perhaps, because the author is a woman, or, perhaps, because I'm myself a woman - I cannot see their inner passions and visualise them as clearly as I can do with female characters. Their feelings seem somewhat hidden beneath a cloak; their characteristic features - like Bill Coleman's silly talkativeness or Carl Reiter's shyness - look a little exaggerated. The most alive of them all is, perhaps, Dr Reilly, who is not one of the important characters in the book, but adds a lot of charm to the episodes in which he participates with his dry, typically English humour, relaxing manner of speech and pleasant informality of ways. His daughter Sheila, who is surprisingly unlike her father in every way, adds a whiff of reality to the dreamy, fairy-tale-ish world of the novel: her rude, unpolished honesty won't endear her to the reader, but she still makes one respect her in the same way as we might respect an enemy. It definitely takes some courage to talk the way she does, though you might just say her father has spoiled her. There's a lot of truth in that, no doubt - and yet...
And, of course, there's Poirot, who never seems to change - clever, cheeky and courteous, still staging the final disclosure of all secrets as man might stage a play. He handles this case without his friend Captain Hastings. (Who needed to add him to the mix in the film? Amy Leatheran was just as good for the role!)
The environment, in which the events take place, teases my imagination. I have all the time had special feelings for antique relics, excavations and population who dedicate their lives to archaeology, so the fact that approximately everyone at the scene is an archaeologist has added to the charm of the book greatly. I've read it several times, and now I'm about to read it again.
"Murder in Mesopotamia" by Agatha Christie
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