Review: The Man in the Brown Suit

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This started out very promising. The two narrators have strong voices (different ones from each other), and the female narrator, Anne, seemed strong and sensible. In a setup reminiscent of Wilhelmina in London , she is the daughter of a long-deceased mother and a vague father who dies, leaving mostly debts, so she must make her own way in the world. Her way of doing so is to turn amateur detective, having come across a clue to a mystery but being unable to make the police take her seriously. This sends her off on a boat to South Africa, and on the boat she meets various people: a kind older woman, the other narrator (an MP), the MP's two secretaries, a clergyman/missionary, and Colonel Race, who's rumoured to work for the Secret Service.

We know from the prologue that there's a sinister mastermind called "the Colonel," who doesn't usually get his hands dirty, but gives criminal tasks to other people to do (fairly standard stuff, see, for example, Kate Plus Ten by Edgar Wallace). A wrinkle with this mastermind, though, is that he also always finds someone to frame for the crime. A supposedly Russian dancer who isn't actually Russian was one of his catspaws, and she has evidence of one of the frame-ups, and is planning to extort the Colonel.

Well, it's obvious what happens next. And thus kicks off the mystery, which Anne has stumbled into by happening to be in the right place at the right time - but she then takes action, which, while headstrong, isn't completely stupid.

What is completely stupid is that she gets decoyed into danger not once, but twice, with the same simple trick (like that idiot in Inspector French and the Cheyne Mystery ). She does bravely go deliberately into danger again by pretending to fall for it a third time (though the text says it's the second time, it's the third), after (view spoiler)[surviving the second incident by complete lucky chance and, by complete coincidence, connecting back up with her love interest, who she's seen for about 10 minutes at this point but is totally in love with. It's only the fact that they do spend some time together getting to know each other that saves it from my "thin-romance" tag, though, like Anne herself, it doesn't really deserve its narrow escape (hide spoiler)].

The identity of "the Colonel" was a complete surprise to me, and something of a cheat. (view spoiler)[We have had him as a viewpoint character, and he has misled us deliberately in his diary. Also, nobody ever even raises the question of whether Colonel Race might possibly be "the Colonel," even though that is literally his rank. (hide spoiler)]

So it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, Anne has an appealing voice and takes action as a protagonist. On the other hand, she makes some outstandingly stupid choices, has to be rescued not just by her love interest but by the author's heavy Hand of Fate, is the kind of female protagonist that all the men want, falls in love with someone she's barely met, and gives a speech about how women want to be dominated by men. On balance, it's... not great, with a lot of wasted potential. I'm dropping it down to three stars - not a recommendation - although it was teetering on the border of slipping into the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list.

This is an early Christie, and early Christie was not that great. It's a lesson to all of us that even the most admired authors usually wrote a few stinkers, or at least books that weren't even close to their later standards, at the start of their careers.

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