Oh, dear Agatha ~ I loved this book so much!
Ro and Grace and I just watched a season (there was only one, sadly) of Whodunnit on TV, about a group of strangers who gather at a mansion and one by one are killed off, until only one remains, and the killer himself/herself. It was a lot of fun to watch together - and no, we couldn't solve this either. So when I picked up my next Christie novel to find that Ms. Ariadne Oliver had constructed a Murder Hunt - similar enough, I would say, I was really excited.
I had actually jotted several references to quotes that I greatly enjoyed, but it was destroyed by flood (or a leaky water glass) and I lost the references. I do not have the time today to go back and look. One I remember and two more I came across after the flood. The first, Poirot's opinion on shorts:
Poirot nodded absently. He was reflecting, not for the first time, that seen from the back, shorts were becoming to very few of the female sex. He shut his eye in pain. Why, oh why, must young women array themselves thus? Those scarlet thighs were singularly unattractive!
Seems Ariadne Oliver's thoughts on Scotland Yard haven't changed in 20 years, when she had similar ideas in Cards on the Table:
"Oh, the police," said Mrs. Oliver. "Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard..."
But my favorite quote from this book, I honestly found full of truth and had a complete affinity with it (for it?):
Assessed correctly, each had its particular place in a particular universe. Assembled in their proper place in their particular universe, they not only made sense, they made a picture. In other words, Hercule Poirot was doing a jigsaw puzzle.
He looked down at where a rectangle still showed improbably shaped gaps. It was an occupation he found soothing and pleasant. It brought disorder into order. It had, he reflected, a certain resemblance to his own profession. There, too, one was faced with various improbably shaped and unlikely facts which, though seeing to bear no relationship to each other, yet did each have its properly balanced part in assembling the whole. His fingers deftly picked up an improbable piece of dark grey and fitted it into a blue sky. It was, he now perceived, part of an aeroplane.
"Yes," murmured Poirot to himself, "that is what one must do. The unlikely piece here, the improbable piece there, the oh-so-rational piece that is not what it seems; all of these have their appointed place, and once they are fitted in, eh bien! there is an end of the business! All is clear. All is - as they say nowadays - in the picture."
He fitted in, in rapid succession, a small piece of a minaret, another piece that looked as though it was part of a striped awning and was actually the backside of a cat, and a missing piece of sunset that had changed with Turneresque suddenness from orange to pink.
If I weren't headed to Colorado in the morning, with about a million things left to do to get ready, I'd probably get out a jigsaw puzzle. Maybe even listen to a Christie audio book as I work on it. That would be different.
~ me
