Christie, Agatha - The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

One of Christie's earliest books: a tongue-in-cheek treatment of The Perils of Pamela, or, rather of Anne Beddingfeld (alias Anna the adventuress), the attractive (but impoverished) heroine who tells of her involvement in international crime (i.e., diamond-robbery, gun-running and political agitation, all impossible to take seriously for an instant), as she travels to South Africa to unmask 'the Colonel,' one of those preposterous master criminals, and ends up falling in love with one of those "strong men who always 'felled their opponent with a single blow'". This one is suspected of strangling the Russian dancer in the country house of Sir Eustace Pedler, whose account of the voyage is very funny (although unfair on at least three occasions, a mistake she would not repeat in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd).