The Secret Adversary

Even though my final verdict on Framley Parsonage by Anthony Trollope was a positive one, I thought that, rather than proceed immediately to book five in Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire series, I would go off in a different direction in my reading.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I thought something by Agatha Christie might be a good fit.

I had always been a fan of Ms. Christie's work, although it was in the form of movies and television series that I loved. I had particularly enjoyed the Miss Marple and Poirot series that were produced in Britain and later released on PBS in the U.S.. It was not, however, until 2014 that I came to read my first Agatha Christie novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It had become my habit, at that time, to read novels that were available as e-books - preferably free e-books. At the time that I had downloaded The Mysterious Affair at Styles from Project Gutenberg, it was the only Agatha Christie novel in the public domain and available as an e-book.

Since then, five additional books have become available at Project Gutenberg.

Having already read her first novel, I went on to her second - The Secret Adversary.

Of course, we don't expect a writer's second novel to be on the same level as her 50th (or even her 10th). The novel was published in 1922, and not being familiar with Christie's bio, I immediately assumed that the writing was that of someone in her mid 20's. It turns out that Christie was 32 at the time of the publication of The Secret Adversary.

Unfortunately, the novel does suffer slightly because of the large number of coincidences in the story. There are flaws in the writing, but it was still able to hold my interest until the end. The wikipedia article on the novels says  

"Reviews were generally positive on this adventure, which manages to keep the identity of the arch-criminal secret to the very end". 

I must confess, she managed to keep the identity of the arch-criminal a secret from me......I had totally picked the wrong person as the bad guy. It is for that reason that I give the novel a higher rating than I had expected to earlier on.