That’s right, folks, my birthday is coming! Okay, the actual date is a week from today. A passel of famous artistic folk consider themselves lucky to share the day with me, including Ludwig von Beethoven, Jane Austen, Noel Coward, Arthur C. Clarke and Margaret Mead. Frankly, this has been a year full of challenges, but if Catherine of Aragon could survive a marriage and divorce from Big Henry 8, I think  this December 16 baby can stick it out through my own little traumas. 

One of these is the sad fact that, although my family loves me, they refuse to give me books as presents. They say they don’t know what I want. (That’s a lie!) They say that the odds are good that whatever they buy me I will already have bought for myself. (Okay, now we’re getting somewhere . . . ) As a result, I’m stuck with gift cards and clothes and stuff for the house – yes, I know, a boy could do worse – but if I want any reading material, I’m on my own. 

The truth is, my book-buying impulse is a year-round thing. And today I’m here to tell you about the most recent urge I had – because it definitely counts as a present to myself!

Agatha Christie has been my favorite author for a very long time, decades and decades, in fact. I have re-read nearly all of her work multiple times (the only two books that I have read only once are The Secret of Chimneys and Passenger to Frankfurt.) In all this time, whenever I want to revisit Christie, I turn to my collection of tattered only paperbacks . . . my Pocket Books and Dells, plus a smattering of Bantams, Pans, and Fontana editions. A few of these have withstood so much handling that they reluctantly fell apart in my hands and had to be replaced. 

Most of the time, I fill in the gaps with any ordinary edition I can find. But recently, I started thinking about my collection as a collection, and I decided that, as the opportunity arose, I would occasionally find something a bit more special than usual to replace (or set side by side with) the damaged copy. I haven’t thought this through: these “newer” Christies  on my shelves have been impulse buys when the timing was right or something cool became available. Most of them have been used. 

It turns out that there are a lot of pretty copies of Christie floating around out there. Most of them have eluded me. But this year, HarperCollins released two special books that happen to coincide with the very first two Christies I ever read. To be honest, I wasn’t going to buy them. But one of them is rather lovely, and the other one happened to appear on my Amazon feed at fifty percent off on the most recent Prime Day Sale! Who could resist a chance to self-gift? Noel Coward would have raised his martini at me and said, “My dear boy – indulge yourself!”

SELF-GIFT #1

The very first Christie I ever read was Ten Little Indians (a.k.a. And Then There Were Nonei). The copy I bought was the 1965 Pocket Book tie-in to the George Pollock-directed film that transferred the ten doomed guests from a storm-tossed island to a snowy alpine schloss. It’s a problematic film, I guess, but I loved the jazzy theme music and all those murders (first time an adaptation killed everyone off onscreen) and the Murder Break towards the end where a clock ticked in the corner of the screen and all the murders got re-shown as the audience tried to figure out whodunnit. I mean – this was my introduction to classic mystery fiction, and it was pretty sublime. 

Through all these years, which included quite a few re-reads, I never thought to get another copy – until now. HarperCollins has released a limited hardcover edition with a bloody cover embossed with gold representations of each character.

The gimmick is that the solution has been placed in a sealed envelope and fastened to the inside back cover.  The next time I re-read And Then There Were None, I will use this edition – but I’m torn over whether I will ever unfasten the seal on that envelope. After all, I know all too well the narrative that lies inside; in fact, I can almost recite it by heart. 

SELF-GIFT #2

My second gift to myself is not a replacement per se – it is an addendum to the second Christie (and the first Hercule Poirot mystery) I ever read: Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Actually, my 1965 Pocket Book edition bore the American title, Murder in the Calais Coach, a far less effective title if you ask me, but you can blame Graham Greene for that. His novel Stamboul Train had been published two years earlier and was retitled Orient Express in America, probably due to our greater familiarity with that name for the train. 

Choosing Orient Express as my second read was a pure fluke: the paperback carousel at my local pharmacy was teeming with Christie titles, and when I went back to take my second dive, MinCC contained the blurb that interested my eleven-year-old brain the most. Outwardly, the novel is a much more “traditional” whodunnit than And Then There Were None, and it began my career as an armchair detective that lasted twenty years. (Nowadays, I rarely try to guess the solution to new mysteries I read.) Of course, the solution to Orient Express is anything but traditional, and I remember arriving at a certain revelatory phrase of Poirot’s and letting out a loud whoop! 

My frequently pawed copy of Calais Coach disintegrated several years ago and was replaced with a standard copy. This year, Harper Collins (in England) and William Morrow Paperbacks (in the U.S.) released a special version of this much-adapted work (at least seven film versions, including adaptations from Germany, Japan and China, a stage version by Ken Ludwig that I criticize less for its extraneous comedy than for the reduced passenger list that misses the point of the original mystery, a board game and two games, neither of which I have played). The new adaptation takes the form of a graphic novel, with text and artwork by illustrator Bob Al-Greene. According to Al-Greene’s website, this is the largest project he has ever taken on, and it consumed two years of his life. 

Every one of you will have your own opinion of whether you want to read a comic book – I collected them for fifteen years and would probably have been able to retire at 40 if my mother, in a fit of pique, hadn’t thrown away my entire collection. Let me tell you: this is no Classics Illustrated version of Orient Express. The graphic novel is 276 pages long (my two copies of the actual novel contain 240 and 265 pages, respectively.) It is not a word-for-word reprint of the novel, but its text is more faithful to Christie’s original work than any of the other adaptations. We don’t have to deal with the swashbuckling ladies man Poirot of Alfred Molina or Kenneth Branagh, or the bizarre inversion of the book’s denouement in the Suchet version. And while the sumptuous 1974 adaptation by Sidney Lumet is generally faithful to the novel’s plot, I have to say that I took to the Poirot of the graphic novel more readily than to the grossly made-up and affected character portrayed by Albert Finney. 

True, the comic book Poirot is completely bald, which took some getting used to. And his moustache is big – which we should all get used to because Suchet’s moustache was way smaller than the book described. But Comic Poirot’s head is beautifully egg-shaped, his manner super-punctilious, and his sense of humor as intact as his little grey cells. The text mines all the humor it can get out of Mrs. Hubbard and M. Bouc, makes finds menace in Mr. Ratchett,  both mystery and appeal in Mary Debenham, and sympathy for Pierre Michel. In short, the combination of text and illustrations brings the characters to life with surprising effectiveness.

Mr. Al-Greene’s work is beautiful, indeed. He is right at home in his selected mode of expression, not overburdening us with too much text or trying to “draw” a movie. The train comes to life on its journey, and so do the characters. Rabid Christie fans will rejoice in every beat of the story, every clue, and every important emotional turn. I would go so far as to say that this experience retains the mystery of the novel far better than most of the movies, where the interactions between the actors tended to give the game away far too early. In that sense, I felt as if I was reliving my earliest discovery of the novel -which happened to fool me completely at the time – and it was a lovely experience. 

Throughout my adult life, I have given Agatha Christie novels to young people. Whether they be nieces, students, or the children of friends, all have all fallen victim to my not-so-subtle attempts at indoctrination. It may have worked on only a few of them, but I’ll keep trying! I think this graphic novel might be the perfect weapon, er, gift, for that young person who is perhaps a reluctant reader, but whom you are dying to introduce to Christie. For rabid fans who are always looking for a different take on their favorite author – whether to extoll it or complain about it – I think you will be delightfully surprised by this. 

In short, if you have a rabid Christie fan in your life, I want to assure you that this would make the perfect birthday present!