Why Didn't They Ask Evans?

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“It’s as though we’d walked on to the stage in the middle of the second act and we haven’t really got parts in the play at all, but we have to pretend, and what makes it so frightfully hard is that we haven’t the faintest idea what the first act was about.”
Frankie nodded eagerly.
“I’m not even so sure it’s the second act—I think it’s more like the third. Bobby, I’m sure we’ve got to go back a long way…And we’ve got to be quick because I fancy the play is frightfully near the final curtain.”
“With corpses strewn everywhere,” said Bobby. “And what brought us into the show was a regular cue—five words—quite meaningless as far as we are concerned.”
“Why didn’t they ask Evans?”

This is one of Ms Christie’s attractive thrillers that feature a pair of amateur sleuths (with no sign of Miss Marple or Monsieur Poirot lurking in the background). In this case it’s the happy-go-lucky Bobby, the fourth son of a country vicar, and the thoroughly modern Lady Frances, better known to her friends as Frankie. The plot, which is generously seasoned with all manner of thrilling devices, could well have served as a template for all of Francis Durbridge’s Paul Temple mysteries. There’s (and trust me, there are no spoilers here, just teasers) the enigmatic words on the dying man’s lips, the business—in the theatrical sense of the word—with the photograph used to identify the body, the mysterious foreign doctor in his high-walled clinic situated in some out-of-the-way spot in the countryside, and a gang that’s apparently trafficking in morphine. Then there’s the staged accident to gain ingress to a house, the more-than-a-faint-whiff of The Woman in White about the mysterious Moira Nicholson, and the casual mention-or-two of a possible suicide by a seemingly neurotic millionaire. It was so good to read this again.
But that’s just my own humble opinion…what do you think? Do let me know! Read for the Agatha Christie Reading Group at Goodreads. A perfect cozy for #MysteryWeek

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