Review: The Murder on the Links

The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I don't remember reading this book before, though I also don't remember watching the adaptation with David Suchet, and I must have done, because I've seen all of those. Maybe it's not that memorable.

Hastings is very irritating in this one. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles , he was a Watson-style idiot foil for the brilliant detective, but here he is actually an impediment, both accidentally and deliberately, albeit not as much of one as he thinks he is being. Worse, he's "in love" with a woman who's much too young for him, whose name he doesn't know, who he's hardly spent any time with, who he doesn't even really like as a person, and yet he will (view spoiler)[lay hands on his friend Poirot to let her get away in the belief that she's a murderer (hide spoiler)]. And he meets her initially by chance on a train, and then she happens to be involved in the very next case he and Poirot are on.

Hastings also has what I call a "superhero job" in this one; he is private secretary to an MP, but it doesn't prevent him in any way from being involved in the plot as much as he likes and travelling wherever he feels like, whenever he feels like it. Like his job in the War Office in the previous book, it seems to exist just because the author thinks he ought to have a job, but there's nothing that suggests it's in any way real or impacts on his schedule whatsoever. Mind you, if I was Hastings' employer, I'd want him out of the office as much as possible too. It would create less work for everyone else to do, fixing up his mistakes.

The mystery itself is full of twists, perhaps too many of them, and at least one big plot hole. (view spoiler)[There's a second body that turns up a couple of days after the initial murder. It's either been lying undiscovered all that time in a shed which, inexplicably, the keen Surete man hasn't previously searched, or someone - and it's hard to imagine who - has hidden it somewhere else, nobody ever asks or answers where, and moved it, nobody asks or answers how or why. It's been stabbed with one of what turn out to be three identical daggers, but that wasn't the cause of death. (hide spoiler)] The final solution is clever, but I felt like it was based on inadequate evidence for even Poirot to deduce it.

The author has a bad habit of leaving question marks out of sentences which are questions. I didn't note that in the first book; maybe they had different editors, and that one didn't catch comma splices, while this one didn't catch missing question marks.

Overall, for me this fell short of expectations, and it's not going on my annual recommendation list. Too many inexperienced-writer errors (thin romance, superhero job, plot hole, coincidental meetings, correct conclusions from inadequate evidence).

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