{"id":11709,"date":"2013-09-26T22:18:49","date_gmt":"2013-09-26T12:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=11709"},"modified":"2014-04-26T17:44:20","modified_gmt":"2014-04-26T07:44:20","slug":"cat-among-the-pigeons-by-agatha-christie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=11709","title":{"rendered":"Cat Among The Pigeons by Agatha Christie"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tfwbookclub\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"catamongthepidgeons\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The reason I became an avid reader of Hercule Poirot books as a kid is twofold.\u00a0 One, I love a good murder mystery.\u00a0 Two, David Suchet is amazing and watching The ABC Murders<\/em> on TV made me a fan for life.<\/p>\n

It’s only as I’ve gotten older and read more about Agatha Christie herself that I’ve gotten to understand the gradual change in the Poirot novels as the series progresses.\u00a0 With her growing resentment and boredom at having to write endless material starring the moustachioed Belgian, Christie became very comfortable with changing the formula of the earlier works and playing with the readers expectations.\u00a0 I suspect a lot of the time she did it to keep herself entertained.\u00a0 The first dozen or so novels would typically end with Poirot revealing the killer to be a jealous lover, an inheritance seeking nephew or the resentful butler.\u00a0 Over time, Christie really worked in just about every possible twist she could think of when it came to the identity of the killer.\u00a0 The police officer did it.\u00a0 The narrator did it.\u00a0 Everyone did it.\u00a0 You don’t find out who did it.\u00a0 Nobody did it because it wasn’t a murder.<\/p>\n

She would also begin to experiment with the format and tone of the series.\u00a0 The light hearted frivolity of the earlier books made way for darker stories involving drugs and depression.\u00a0 The lovable sidekicks, Captain Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp were cast aside as Poirot went solo and for a brief stint, worked alongside a kooky author named Ariadne Oliver.<\/p>\n

Cat Among The Pigeons<\/em> is probably one of the lesser known Poirot adventures and its for good reason.\u00a0 The twist in this particular book is that Poirot doesn’t even appear in the damn thing<\/em> for about two hundred pages.\u00a0 Instead the story begins with riots breaking out in the fictional Middle Eastern country of Ramat where an Arab prince and his expatriate pilot attempt to smuggle out a suitcase full of diamonds.\u00a0 The two never make it out of the country alive and the diamonds are lost in transit.<\/p>\n

Years later, the story settles in the Meadowbank School For Girls.\u00a0 A body is discovered in the school gymnasium and everyone is a suspect.\u00a0 Is it one of the students?\u00a0 Is it the co-founder of the school who is patiently waiting for her chance to be headmistress?\u00a0 Is it the shifty new gardener?\u00a0 Don’t ask Poirot.\u00a0 He only turns up after a second body is found.<\/p>\n

Cat Among The Pigeons<\/em> isn’t a bad book per se.\u00a0 It’s just not at all what I wanted when I decided to go back to reading an Agatha Christie novel on a whim.\u00a0 I definitely didn’t get my Poirot fix so after finishing this book, I picked up Lord Edgware Dies<\/em>.\u00a0 It’s got a dead body, it’s got Poirot, it’s got Hastings and it’s got Japp.\u00a0 Now I’m good to go.<\/p>\n

A Public Service Announcement To Poirot Fans:<\/strong>\u00a0 Don’t forget to keep a lookout for the final few episodes of David Suchet’s Hercule Poirot films.\u00a0 He finished filming the last five films<\/a> in July of this year.\u00a0 This includes Curtain<\/em> and we all know what happens then.<\/p>\n

Now that I think about it, I might watch the other four episodes and leave that one unwatched.<\/p>\n

\"poirot\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The reason I became an avid reader of Hercule Poirot books as a kid is twofold.\u00a0 One, I love a good murder mystery.\u00a0 Two, David Suchet is amazing and watching The ABC Murders on TV made me a fan for life. It’s only as I’ve gotten older and read more about Agatha Christie herself that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11710,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,230],"tags":[269,1675,267],"class_list":["post-11709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-book-club","tag-agatha-christie","tag-cat-among-the-pigeons","tag-hercule-poirot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11709"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14039,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709\/revisions\/14039"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}