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Despite its lack of a bang-up beginning, "Black Coffee" is probably the better book. It takes place at the country house of a "leading scientist of the day," who asks the famed Hercule Poirot to safeguard a weapons formula from some unknown member of his large household. When the old gentleman is poisoned, the suspects include his breezy young niece, his spinster sister, his trusted secretary, his ne'er-do-well son, the son's beautiful Italian wife and a mysterious stranger named Dr. Carelli who claims to know her. The plot pretty much proceeds as you would expect, given this assortment of types. There are a few pallid reversals along the way. Early on, the spinster magnanimously tries to comfort the Italian wife for missing the sunny climes of her native land, which the young woman actually loathes. There are also, unfortunately, clues: A tin case of drugs has no dust on it.

What saves the novel is the ingenuousness of its atmosphere, which is straight from Christie. When the breezy niece teases Poirot's sidekick, Col. Hastings, about his old-fashioned rectitude, the whole exchange is sweetly old-fashioned itself. Even during her heyday, Christie was describing a world fast disappearing -- as she often reminded us. Her two most successful detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple, were old at the beginning of their 40-year-plus reign. (Poirot dates back to 1920, Miss Marple to 1930.)

The Victorian coziness Christie details is what Christmas is supposed to feel like. The day never lives up to these expectations, of course, making the corpses of family members strewn through the pages all the more welcome. There are few things as satisfying as reading about the horrible death of a tyrannical patriarch after partaking of a real-life Christmas dinner with just the family. But you're better off trying a real Christie than a Charles Osborne version. And there are probably a few old paperbacks of hers tucked away wherever you've landed for the holidays.

For the setting alone, you might try "Hercule Poirot's Christmas," in which such a patriarch gathers together various quarreling offspring for the first time in years. Naturally he ends up a bloody pulp. This book is a perfect example of how limiting clues can be. The puzzle is built very cleverly -- certainly it is the most successful of her mysteries so constructed -- but there is a resulting murkiness that is not found in her truly top-notch work. (All those men stroking their jaws! Throwing back their heads to laugh! You mean those were clues? And here I thought it was just the limited nature of the Christie style.)

My favorites are "Crooked House" and "There Is a Tide." A theater-reviewer friend likes "The Hollow" best. My cookbook-editor friend admires "Towards Zero" and "Murder in Retrospect." All of these books are classics. (I am confining myself here to the first American titles. Christie's mysteries have more assumed names than most criminals.) The prose is as easy to swallow as a nice cup of tea, and there are little O. Henry-type dramas along the way to amuse and distract you: One uncommunicative man in "There Is a Tide" assumes his wife married him for his respectable station in life, only to discover when he loses it that her feelings run deeper.

Instead of clues, we get a more seamless sort of information. Poirot tells us again and again in "Crooked House" what type of person kills: someone who boasts about it later. Christie trots out a character who exactly fits the description, but because of this person's position in the story, the possibility of guilt never occurs to us. Then the author reaches out to give the setup a single, graceful tug, and all of the game pieces turn over to form one recognizable pattern.

In setting up her schemes, Christie is ruthless. Ruthless with her characters: One reason she sent Colonel Hastings off to Argentina in mid-career is that giving Poirot a sidekick encumbered her -- she couldn't make him the murderer. Ruthless with romantic expectations: Love, like evidence, is often simply a matter of which way you're looking. And ruthless with reality: It obviously matters not an iota to her whether murderers actually boast a lot. Because each element of the novels is detached from everything but its place in the puzzle, the stories take on a really delightful suppleness and sinuousness. Her world was thoroughly made up from the beginning; in that sense it can never grow stale.

As you look through the cache of old Christie paperbacks, remember this: Pass up the thrillers; avoid the young sleuths Tommy and Tuppence at all costs; don't read anything written after 1963 except "Endless Night." And have yourself a murderous little Christmas.
salon.com | Dec. 23, 1999

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