Harper €13.49
MURDER in the English style, complete with house parties, cosy vegetable gardens, proper tea in teapots - it has to be Agatha Christie.
But hold - is that a graphic novel? It is!
The story comes from the Agatha Christie stable, and trots along with the familiar gait: discontent with the growing permissiveness of society - it was published in 1969; approval of unimaginative, conformist, tweedy, caste-bound lives.
The victim is a liar and a fantasist, a young teenager who claims to have witnessed a murder long ago.
No sooner are the words out of her mouth than her head is in the apple-bobbing bucket, and that’s all she wrote.
Hercule Poirot, moustaches a-twitch, is soon on the scene and discovering a village awash with dastardliness.
The drawings owe a lot to the styling of the Agatha Christie’s Poirot TV series. They don’t make up for the lack of Christie’s own hackneyed but compelling descriptions.
This is one of a series of Christie’s most famous murder mysteries re-imagined as graphic novels.
It’s an idea that has its parallel in Belgium, where a series of Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu offered, well, a recherché charm.
It can only be weeks before someone brings out Finnegans Wake, The Graphic Novel, Penned by Shem.
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