Agatha Christie: Hallowe’en Party drawn by Chandre

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.
Publisher's site

Leaving Ardglass by William King

Lilliput

‘A DREADFUL cry pierces the air; a cry that still, on occasions, works its way into my dreams, and causes me to start up in the bed.
‘”Maaaam!”’
It’s the pivotal moment in William Hill’s novel of brown envelopes and priests and tribunals.
The narrator is working on his brother’s building sites in London. This brother is MJ Galvin, later to face accusations of offshore bank accounts and unethical relations with government ministers.
The book starts with the murmuring confidences of Monsignor Thomas Galvin, then dives backwards into 1950s London, when young Tomasín leaves Kerry to join his brother.
He works on the building of roads and suburbs and infrastructure. After he’s roughened his hands, MJ puts him to paying the truckers: get an invoice for £120, pay out £100 with a wink.
There are dead men working on the sites: the builder gets a contract for 40 men and employs 35, putting the wages of the five ‘dead men’ in his pocket.
Galvin’s friend is Deano, a kid who came from nothing and is studying to be a vet, working summers on the sites. “The brass plate on the front door this time next year,” Deano gloats.
But the brass plate is on his coffin after he plunges from the scaffolding when some fool removes a plank from under the tarp.
King, who is himself a priest in Dublin, then lays in a long dull account of a brilliant student for the priesthood, the road to the bishop’s palace, the prize stolen at the last moment by a sleeveen.
But in the opening half of the novel - those dark London stories lit by the chiarascuro of corruption and bitterness - this is a vivid story.