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A review by marmoo
The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
3.0
Falling more on the thriller side of the thriller/mystery spectrum, this early Agatha Christie has a plucky heroine, some memorable travel writing, and a convoluted whodunit. With several allusions to “The Perils of Pauline,” this novel is both satirizing and embracing the pulpy adventure serial. It makes interesting use of the epistolary format, though is sometime limited by the distance between the written account and immediacy of the action.
As you might expert of a novel that treats British colonial South Africa as a playground for English wanderlust, there are some jarring moments of racism sprinkled throughout. The gender politics of the core romance are also… questionable. (Still, I found myself more interested by those sometimes uncomfortable portrayals than I would be by a modern historical fiction that simply imports modern sensibilities into all the “good” characters and heaps the injustices at the feet of the “bad” ones.)
It’s not what I’d call one of Christie’s masterpieces, but there are certainly worse ways to spend an afternoon!
As you might expert of a novel that treats British colonial South Africa as a playground for English wanderlust, there are some jarring moments of racism sprinkled throughout. The gender politics of the core romance are also… questionable. (Still, I found myself more interested by those sometimes uncomfortable portrayals than I would be by a modern historical fiction that simply imports modern sensibilities into all the “good” characters and heaps the injustices at the feet of the “bad” ones.)
It’s not what I’d call one of Christie’s masterpieces, but there are certainly worse ways to spend an afternoon!