The Man in the Brown Suit

From the book cover:

The newly-orphaned Anne Beddingfield came to London expecting excitement. She didn't expect to find it on the platform of Hyde Park Corner tube station. When a fellow passenger pitches onto the rails and is electrocuted, the 'doctor' on the scene seems intent on searching the victim rather than examining him...

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The Man in the Brown Suit is my fourth Agatha Christie novel. If you're a regular to this blog, you probably already know that I've pledged to read all of Agatha Christie's novels in order of their publication.

The Man in the Brown Suit is the first of four novels in Agatha Christie's Colonel Race chronology . Colonel Race is an ex-army colonel and former leader of the British spy agency MI5. (Look out for my reviews for the remaining Colonel Race novels - Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile, and Sparkling Cyanide.)


Back to The Man in the Brown Suit. I really enjoyed this Agatha Christie murder mystery; it isn't as formula driven as the other Christie books I've read to date. I'm actually starting to wonder if there's an Agatha Christie novel out there that I won't enjoy. I guess this is why her books are out sold only by the Bible and William Shakespeare!

The plot takes a lot of shocking turns, some of them don't make much sense, but at the end of the day the protagonist, Anne Beddingfield, is such a likable character, one can't help but look past some of the plot failures.

*SPOILER ALERT*

One of the aforementioned shocking turns, comes at the end when the protagonist discovers that one of the people she depended for protection is actually the villain. This point doesn't make sense because he has so many opportunities to do away with her but doesn't. It's almost as if Mrs. Christie was fighting the necessity of him being a villain. In fact by the end of the story, one of the protagonists displays a reluctance to fully accept that the villain is an evil person.

4/5