Patricia Highsmith - the perfect fit for the Terryfying Women square.

Agatha Christie - whenever there is a square I can fit a Christie in, I´m doing it.

Michael McDowell - It wouldn´t be a Halloween bingo without a McDowell.

Dorothy L. Sayers - I read quite a few Sayers for Halloween bingo in the past and I´m keeping my fingers crossed for the Dark Academia square being on my card this year. Gaudy Night is waiting to get read.

i think I’d better make it clear right away that there isn’t going to be any local colour in this story. I don’t know anything about archaeology and I don’t know that I very much want to. Messing about with people and places that are buried and done with doesn’t make sense to me. Mr. Carey used to tell me that I hadn’t got the archaeological temperament and I’ve no doubt he was quite right.

I need a book with a female main character, so I decided to reread Murder in Mesopotamia, which is narrated by Nurse Amy Leatheran:

"Dr. Leidner saw a woman of thirty-five, of erect, confident bearing. He saw a good-humoured face with slightly prominent blue eyes and glossy brown hair. She looked, he thought, just what a hospital nurse for a nervous case ought to look. Cheerful, robust, shrewd and matter-of-fact. Nurse Leatheran, he thought, would do."

Nurse Leatheran has just been engaged by Dr. Leidner to come out to his archeological dig and tend to his wife, Louise Leidner (dubbed Lovely Louise by her admirers. And her non-admirers). There's something not quite right at the dig, as described in this passage:

"Yes, individually they are all pleasant people. But somehow or other, I may have been fanciful, but the last time I went to see them I got a queer impression of something being wrong. I don’t know what it was exactly . . . Nobody seemed quite natural. There was a queer atmosphere of tension. I can explain best what I mean by saying that they all passed the butter to each other too politely.”

This is a wonderfully descriptive explanation of the tension.

My recollection of the adaptation is that it isn't one of the better ones, but the setting is wonderful:

While the book takes place at a dig in, I believe, Iraq, the adaptation was filmed at a dig in Tunisia.

Murder in Mesopotamia isn´t one of my favorite Christie´s. And it isn´t because the crime plot was a bad one, quite the contrary. I found the crime and the solution to be as equally as good as some of her other books.

It´s because the characters are incredibly bland and boring and the narrator of the story, Amy Leatheran, is the worst of them all. I got so annoyed by her mentioning that Richard Carey is beautiful, even though he apparently looks like the grim reaper based on her description of him. And Poirot hasn´t been as charming as he usually is.

Hastings can be a bit dense sometimes, but I really missed him this time around.

"That´s right. And be sure and shout it. Arabs don´t understand anything said in an ordinary "English" voice."

 

The racism in this book is staggering.