Cats among the pifeons. Review on Cat Among the Pigeons - Agatha Christie

I read Cat Among the Pigeons by Agatha Christie back in April and, I have to be honest, at this point I would be hard-pressed to tell you ‘whodunit’.  This is not one of her best works but it is very fun, like almost everything Christie wrote.

The story is quite outlandish: a fortune in jewels is smuggled out of an unstable Middle Eastern country in a schoolgirl’s tennis racquet, though the owner of the racquet has no idea what she carries.  The bulk of the action takes place at Meadowbank, the all-girls’ school where the tennis racquet and its owner reside during term time.  With several new teachers and new girls at the school, as well as a new gardener and suspicious visitors all milling about, there are plenty of suspects when murdered bodies begin showing up.  One clever student finally decides they need the help of an expert and so the famous Hercule Poirot arrives on the scene – in the final third of the novel.  He, of course, solves the mystery in his own precise and efficient manner though the cast of suspects is large and their motivations are wildly and unnecessarily complicated.

While the book is pretty ordinary over all, Christie excels at writing about Meadowbank.  The staff and their relationships are introduced with typically insightful details and the students felt like individuals, not just a mass of carbon copy school age girls.  They are allowed to be at very different stages of development, even the ones who are the same age, which is of course just what happens in real life.  Everyone in the story takes for granted that development varies by individual and that some fourteen year old girls may look and think like women while others are still entirely child-like.  I haven’t read enough Christie in the past few years to have really gotten a handle on her again and so I am always surprised and delighted by the frankness of some of her passages, particularly on topics like sex.

Written in 1959, the book’s spy element feels very much of its time but rather out of step with the dignified detection of M. Poirot.  Still, it adds an enjoyable dash of glamour to have Princesses, Sheikhs, and undercover intelligence operatives running about the story.  It is silly and fantastical but it also lets you know from the very first page that this is a story that is meant to purely entertain and bears even less relation to the real world than Christie’s other books.