After the Funeral by Agatha Christie
This is the 48th AC mystery I've read since I started trying to reread all her books in chronological order three years ago. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, and this current novel was published in 1953. There are 22 full-length novels left to go (published right up until she died in 1976) and 17 more books of short stories (some of which were/are only published in the UK, so I might not be able to get my hands on them). This list doesn't include plays or the two or so novels that were finished by other authors after her death.
I may read those too, but we'll have to see if I'm totally sick of her by the time I get to the end! I doubt it though because I've actually already read most of these books before. They never get old! However, I do, so I can't remember the conclusions to half of them even if I recall the characters and settings. It's convenient.
After the Funeral is post-WWII, so much of the world that provided the settings of Christie's earlier novels is fully on it's deathbed - the stately homes, the servants, the jet-setting leisured aristocracy, the Empire upon which the sun never set. In just a few years, all those Gothic Victorian mansions are going to be bought up by working class blokes who hit it rich as members of British Invasion bands, and they'll use the libraries to smoke hash and practice the theramin instead of poisoning the butler. All the characters in the book spend a lot of time complaining about taxation and the impossibility of finding affordable maids, and the family manse is going to have to be sold off to become some kind of institution since the old patriarch has died suddenly (was it or wasn't it murder???). I always love the history lesson and period atmosphere these novels provide, but the '50s were a gloomy decade in England and After the Funeral is a pretty straight-forward, middling quality, all-in-the-family style Christie mystery.
Next up is Pocket Full of Rye, and I do prefer a Miss Marple to a Hercule Poirot.
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