Endless Night, but I don't think it's supposed to be hard to solve. It strikes me as more of a psychological drama than a whodunnit.

(Spoilers for A Caribbean Mystery)



I heard your take on the Hillingdons and Dysons in a previous video, and it strikes me as so strange. Agatha Christie has so many books where there are two central couples with complex romantic dynamics with each other involved, and those are usually at the heart of the story, then it looks like none of them can have done it, and then we cycle past all of these peripheral characters and at the end it turns out it was about the core couple all along. Tim and Molly are the owners of the hotel everything takes place at - as such, they almost fall into the role of a framing device, as that would usually be the role of the hotel owner/boat owner/train owner in any of the other Christie novels set at a hotel/boat/train. As I was reading this novel for the first time I even chastised myself at one point for being distracted by the Kendalls when obviously the Hillingdons and Dysons were our main characters.

Now, as you say, you were doing this overview taking every novel on its own rather than taking into account whether you've read other novels before, and you're right that when Molly's suicidal tendencies pop up Tim becomes a lot more obvious. And of course Christie plays with her tropes and can sometimes make the obvious suspects innocent after all. (Which makes it harder to dismiss what you call 'non-viable suspects' since sometimes they can be killers.) And maybe I remember Tim and Molly being less important to the novel than they actually were since I was too focused on the intertwined couples. But it still sounds very counterintuitive to me to completely dismiss them as (obvious) suspects.

After a stressful week of math exams, this is a very nice treat.

Peril at End House blew my baby mind when I read it as a child, but ever since I read it, I am massively more suspicious of characters who are [redacted redacted]

We won’t get fooled again!

"I can't believe he still hasn't mentioned [translated title], everything was so obvious from the early first pages, I'm not sure how seriously I can take this if it's not even considered" and I check the original title and lo and behold, it's the very mentioned Sad Cypress 😂

It's hard for me to judge because I read most of these ages ago, and I'm not usually very intentional about trying to solve mysteries while I'm reading them. However, At Bertram's Hotel was one that I remember figuring out almost immediately, to the point where I hesitate to even call that murder a mystery.

Coincidentally, I listened to the audiobook for Lord Edgware Dies just last week and was also struck by how slow Poirot and Japp were to fix on Jane Wilkinson. Not only did the impersonator die under suspicious circumstances, but there's also the fact that Jane apparently lied about her husband not granting her a divorce, which should have had Poirot looking at her sideways from the start. (I guess he felt the same way, since he told Hastings he considered the case one of his failures...) It was so distracting that it almost made me want to lower my original rating.

One that I'd add to the list is The Sittaford Mystery - logistically there's only one viable suspect, and on top of that his behaviour is highly questionable from the start.

Love the video! Novels which would end up on list would've been;

3. Peril at End House (knew Who right away)
2. Death on the Nile (knew Who and Why, but not How)
1. Death Comes as the End (knew Who, Why and How)

Sad Cypress is a wonderful book, with marvellous characters. I think perhaps it's better read in that light than as mystery novel.

I love Daniel Green’s analysis. He does more that the Dame but he’s got some super interesting ways of thinking especially with the novels we all know and love. 2:50

"Lord Edgware Dies" is by far the easiest imo, totally ridiculous that anyone, esp. Poirot, would fall into that misdirection that easily... I had "Cards on the Table" as easy as well

Another interesting discourse — now you need to do the three or five hardest to solve.

"They Do it with Mirrors" fooled me, though it was also one of my first Christies.

This is wild! Pretty sure the only ones I solved were Murder in Mesopotamia, The Pale Horse, Death Comes as the End, Elephants Can Remember & Three Act Tragedy 🕵🏻‍♂️ Sometimes you just get a flash of inspiration, sometimes you get used to an author’s tropes…

I've read most of the Agatha Christie novels in childhood, age 12-13. "Sleeping murder" was the first one that I was able to solve, after reading 30 to 40 other novels. I felt very proud of myself at the time.

A couple of years ago I started reading through books that I somehow missed over the years, and I seem to find them all very easy to solve: The Hollow, The Moving Finger, They do it with mirrors, Three Act Tragedy, Murder is Easy.
I thought it's because I've gotten better at solving mysteries, but it seems that I've just left the easy ones for last.

The One I figured out by myself was The Sittaford Mystery - the motive was delivered practically on a silver tray.
Most of these I read as a young naive teenager and was absolutely floored by Peril at End House 😂

Oh yeah, this is an absurdly fun concept for a video. My predictions are Lord Edgware Dies, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (maybe this at #1?), Elephants Can Remember, and … maybe Death Comes as the End?

Will you be doing Hardest Christies to Solve too?

Edit: eyyyyy 😎

1. Elephants Can Remember
2. They Do It With Mirrors
3. Lord Edgware Dies
4. The Sittaford Mystery
5. Peril at End House

These were the books in which I solved the who and the how basically from the moment the murder happened. Though there are differences: With End House it may be, because I read it very late in my first Christie read through and at this stage came across some other of her books with similar solutions. And End House being the chronologically first one also had the simplest version of this trick. With the Sittaford Mystery, it just clicked for me, and I felt clever for solving it. With the top 3 I never felt clever but rather annoyed.

I never solved any of them!😅

I would have had Sleeping Murder much higher, I pegged that one from the first meeting with the killer.

I think Peril at End House should be in the top 5. It is Lord Edgewater all over again. I had everything figured out before the "poisoning".

Oh yeah... my personal "most difficult to solve" picks, in no particular order (and without spoilers):

1) "Murder on the Links". I never even considered the murderer a suspect, and yet they fit SO well when you think about it. This solution is so obscure that Christie has the killer do one incredibly-revealing thing that feels quite uncharacteristic in order to provide a clue to their identity. Again - why not just use the lead pipe? It fits in with the killer's Modus Operandi so well, and it's right there!

2) "A B C Murders". I got the meaning of a critical clue at the second murder. I picked up on a certain phrase by Hastings that turned out to be crucial. I even saw the stockings coming before they were "revealed". I got everything except the identity of the murderer... and I wasn't close.

3) "Mrs McGinty's Dead". I don't think I made a single correct deduction. This novel was more frustratingly obtuse than satisfyingly, though.

4) "Appointment with Death". Again, I picked up on three critical clues here, but just didn't put 'em together to come up with the correct solution. I think the second syringe was TOO obfuscating. But maybe, with that whole mess cleared up, the solution would have been a little too predictable?

5) "Murder of Roger Ackroyd". If you don't know what's going on, I find it really difficult to put together what's truly going on. Again, I read this one quite early on (which I'm thankful for - I was already spoiled for a few novels, but this isn't one of them) and I never got the point of a particular phone call. I correctly identified and interprited a few clues, but just didn't put them together. A fantastic case of the "obvious" killer being beautifully obscured.

6) "Sparkling Cyanide". This might be in the same category as "They Do It with Mirrors", "The Moving Finger", "Death comes as the End" and "Death on the Nile" in that, if you realise what's going on, there's only one possible killer. But despite some really good signposting by Christie, I never quite "got it".

7) "The Seven Dials Mystery". I just had to throw this one in there. It's genius. Might have the best "red herring" out of all of Christie's novels. The question of "Who is number seven?" is such an intriguing one, and yet there's so much misdirection on that point. In the meantime, the master criminal is casually hiding in plain sight, even planning a murder in full view of the reader (but in a way that you don't realise what they're doing until you know who they are.) Yeah, this one completely gulled me, and I love it.

...Six of these books are among my favorite Christies, which just shows you that I like to be fooled, I guess. (The exception is "Mrs McGinty's Dead". That one just felt overstuffed and convoluted. Too many characters, too little reason to care what was going on. Not one of Christie's worst, but it's not a book I ever feel the need to revisit.)