The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie (1890-1976)

The Man in the Brown Suit is the fourth book I've read by Agatha Christie, the 'Queen of Crime.' I read Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile years ago and wasn't inspired enough to read any more of her novels but a couple of my children really liked The Secret Adversary so I eventually decided to read that. This is the first of Christie's Tommy & Tuppence books (she wrote five starring these two characters) and the setting involves the World War I sinking of the Lusitania. I did enjoy this book, probably because Hercule Poirot wasn't in it. I really don't like his character and it was interesting to read that even Agatha Christie got fed up with him and his idiosyncrasies.

I was trying to decide on a title written in the 20th Century as part of the Back to the Classics Challenge. I had a few books in mind but the other week I decided to clean our floor to ceiling bookshelves and discovered a whole lot of books that I'd forgotten or hadn't read yet. They included a row of Agatha Christie titles. 

I've always wondered why she has been so hugely popular - her books have been translated into over one hundred languages and she is the best-selling novelist of all time. I really didn't think Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile were notable at all. The Secret Adversary gave me some hope that I might actually enjoy some other titles.

Then along comes The Man in the Brown Suit and I think I've totally changed my mind about Christie. 

Published in 1924, this book was a pleasure to read. Fast paced and delightful - and no Hercule Poirot. 

Anne Beddington, an attractive young woman, is left orphaned and penniless when her archaeologist father dies. When she witnesses the accidental death of a stranger who falls and is electrocuted on an Underground platform, she also sees a man in a brown suit examine the body, pronounce him dead,  and then quickly leave. As she turns to go also, she sees the 'doctor' break into a run, dropping a piece of paper as he does so. With this piece of paper and its cryptic message, Anne embarks on a journey which takes her all the way to South Africa on a wild adventure. With a backdrop of political intrigue and murder, stolen diamonds, kidnappings and threats on her own life, Anne determines to solve the mystery of the man in the brown suit.

The book is written by two narrators: Anne, and Sir Eustace Pedler, MP and it is a thrilling story. I really enjoyed the humour sprinkled throughout this book, which was in keeping with Anne Beddington's personality, and the conclusion of the story was novel and unexpected.

It's an excellent introduction to Agatha Christie for ages around 14 years and up.

The Secret Adversary is a good introduction to Agatha Christie for a younger reader as it lacks the romantic elements of The Man in the Brown Suit.

'I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.'

Agatha Christie 

 

The BBC archives have a short video from 1955 in which Agatha Christie talks about 'her lack of formal education and how boredom during childhood led her to write 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles', which was completed when she was still in her twenties. She outlines her working methods and discusses why it is much easier to write plays than novels.'

 

This book is my entry in the Back to the Classics: 20th Century Classiccategory.

Mother Culure & Self-education

Step by Step...

It's been nearly four years since we first started using Ambleside Online, which was also when I began to read the Original Charlotte Mason Home Education series. Up until then if I started a book, I'd generally finish it before I'd start another. 

I began to notice how well my children were retaining with what they'd read over a period of months so I decided to try it for myself, although the idea didn't appeal to me at all.

So four years later I think I can say I've gone to the other extreme - I'm almost embarrassed to say that I'm still reading a book I started two years ago. 

I've been enjoying the Back to the Classics Challenge that I started at the beginning of the year. The challenge is divided into categories which has helped me choose books I might not otherwise have read. I'm also continuing with the Classics Club Challenge which is over five years.

These are the books I'm in the process of reading (and keeping):

Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks - nearly finished! I wrote a little about this book here and I'll write some more when I've finished.

Madame Curie by Eve Curie (the two year saga) - it was interesting to read in the book above that Oliver Sacks read this book and loved it when he was ten years old. He had the pleasure of meeting the author, Madame Curie's daughter, in her old age.

 My messy Commonplace...

Knowledge of the Holy by A.W.Tozer - Tozer is direct and no nonsense. This is another of my slow reads.

The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act if worship has taken place...

Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they themselves are idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voscamp - I didn't think I'd like this book but by the end of the first few chapters I was sucked in. Suffering, pain, joy, gratitude...I keep getting hit with beautiful thoughts. The writing is a grammar jungle but I love the heart of what she is sharing - and I needed to hear it.  Some quotes that I loved:

Joy and pain, they are but two arteries of the one heart that pumps through all of those who don't numb themselves to really living.

On observing a hummingbird:

Her long bill swills back July sun transfigured into nectar.

I watch her, become her, drink the sweet right out of now.

Beauty? Beauty requires no justification, no explanation; it simply is and transcends.

The weight of God's Glory, not illusory or ephemeral, but daily and everywhere, punctuates earth's lid and heaven falls through the holes.

Do I believe in a God who rouses Himself just now and then to spill a bit of benevolence on haemorrhaging humanity?

The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis - I usually find Lewis very readable but this has been hard going for me. I'm taking it paragraph by paragraph and I'm still having to re-read sections. 

The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie - pure pleasure. I sat up later than normal last night to finish it.

The Formation of Character by Charlotte Mason - I've been reading this for about 9 months and have written about it here & here and probably in other places as well. It's good.

Read Alouds

Ourselves by Charlotte Mason

I Can Jump Puddles by Alan Marshall - an Australian classic which we finished today.

Listening to:

Mansfield Park by Jane Austen - a re-read but it's not my favourite Austen. I just discovered Jane Austen's phrase which Charlotte Mason appropriated, 'warming the imagination.' I'd been wondering where in Jane Austen's writing it came from and I obviously didn't catch it when I read the book awhile back.

On the present occasion she addressed herself chiefly to Miss Crawford and Fanny, but there was no comparison in the willingness of their attention; for Miss Crawford, who had seen scores of great houses, and cared for none of them, had only the appearance of civilly listening, while Fanny, to whom everything was almost as interesting as it was new, attended with unaffected earnestness to all that Mrs. Rushworth could relate of the family in former times, its rise and grandeur, regal visits and loyal efforts, delighted to connect anything with history already known, or warm her imagination with scenes of the past.

Uniting Literary and Scientific Cultures - a personal application

My knowledge and understanding of physics and to some extent, chemistry, has been minimal. If my children needed help in these areas they went to Dad, not me. I revel in English, art, music and poetry. The only area of science I've felt comfortable with is human anatomy and physiology.

I've been addressing this lack in my own life as I think I now understand what has hindered me, in part, from acquiring scientific knowledge and understanding in the past.

As I've been reading...slowly...through Charlotte Mason's Home Education series over the past few years, her emphasis on the power of a literary presentation has made so much sense. Applying her principles has made a huge difference especially to one of my boys who struggled with anything presented in factual form. In many ways I've had the same struggle, but with my understanding of the need for 'literary padding,' I now have a way to correct my deficiencies. Charlotte Mason's ideas are not just for children, it seems.

What we have perhaps failed to discover hitherto is the immense hunger for knowledge (curiosity) existing in everyone and the immeasurable power of attention with which everyone is endowed; that everyone likes knowledge best in literary form...

Volume 6, pg 290

...it seems to be necessary to present ideas with a great deal of padding, as they reach us in a novel or poem or history book.
Volume 6, pg109

Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form.

Volume 6, pg xxx

With these thoughts in mind, I've chosen a couple of books related to physics and chemistry for my own personal reading:

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood by Oliver Sacks

Speaking of the great scientist, Humphry Davy, Sacks writes:

Davy loved to conduct experiments in public, and his famous lectures, or lecture-demonstrations, were exciting, eloquent, and often literally explosive.

His lectures...(were) delivered in a style and with a richness of language that nobody else could match...

Even Coleridge, the greatest talker of his age, came to Davy's lectures, not only to fill his chemical notebooks, but to "renew my stock of metaphors."

I've read elsewhere that Coleridge, the poet, said of Humphry Davy:

Every subject in Davy's mind has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts spring up like turf under his feet.

One of the reasons I've used Madame How and Lady Why, an old book on geology by a 19th Century author, is because it is a literary presentation of science.

It was interesting to read the following in Sacks's book:

There still existed, in the early nineteenth century, a union of literary and scientific cultures - there was not the dissociation of sensibility that was soon to come - and Davy's period at Bristol saw the start of a close friendship with Coleridge and the Romantic poets. Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the time; his notebooks mix details of chemical experiments, poems, and philosophical reflections all together; and these did not seem to exist in separate compartments in his mind.

In 1922, Charlotte Mason wrote in the final book of her Home Education series:

..the teaching of science in our schools as list much of its educative value through a fatal and quite unnecessary divorce between science and the 'humanities.'

Vol 6, Pg 223

Madame Curie by Eve Curie

I'll write more about this book at a later date, but this is a biography of Marie Curie (1867-1934) written by her daughter, Eve in 1937. It has been republished but it is available free online.

How could anyone find science dry? Was there anything more enthralling than the unchangeable rules which governed the universe, or more marvellous than the human intelligence which could discover them?

Yes, Madame Curie was a scientific genius so of course she never found science dry, but the scientific education she received at school was incomplete and she wrote later in life that:

"Literature interested me as much as sociology and science."

Every Saturday evening for many years, Marie (Manya) and her siblings gathered to hear their widowed father (a man of science who taught Physics and Mathematics) recite poetry or read aloud:

Manya was never to forget those evenings. Thanks to her father she lived in an intellectual atmosphere of rare quality known to few girls of her age.

So my love of poetry can be united with the language of chemistry. My interest in music and art does not need to be divorced from science. They are not separate compartments.

I don't learn about physics or chemistry in isolation but in unity with literature and like Coleridge I  "renew my stock of metaphors."