Black Coffee

I purchased this story in my quest to own and read each Poirot mystery. I was fresh off of "Cat Among the Pigeons", "And Then There Were None (Ten Little Indians)" and "Cards on the Table". I had such high hopes for this novel. However, I was thoroughly disappointed in "Black Coffee". I could not put my finger on what was "off" about this particular novel, until I got to the very end, and realized that this was a "re-envisioned" Christie piece. The voice is not Christie's, Poirot isn't his adorably peculiar self, and the fact that the murderer is realized so early in the book makes the ultimate reveal anti-climactic.If you love Agatha Christie, stay away from "Black Coffee" and stick to the stories that haven't been completed by someone else.

I agree with other reviewers; this novel fell flat. The characters were more like composites of other book appearances, and the writing was far from the usual Christie fluidity. What this book has are scenes, not a full storyline.I regret buying this book. It left a bad taste in the mouth of this life long Agatha Christie fan.

Obviously, I missed something when I read the blurb describing this book, and I feel this is a somewhat misleading representation on the part of Amazon. In spite of the fact the name Agatha Christie is clearly listed as the author on the Amazon "Buy it here" page and even in the book description on the same page this is actually an adaptation, by Charles Osborne, of Agatha Christie's play, Black Coffee. Although disappointed that it was an adaptation and not the real thing; nevertheless, I did somewhat enjoy the book. I found some of the characters and the scenarios not very realistic, and wondered if that is the way Ms. Christie intended or if that was Mr. Osborne's additives.A famous scientist has what he deems a very valuable formula, and believes someone in his household is trying to steal it. He calls upon our hero Hercule Poirot to assist him in getting the formula out of the house and to safety. Before that can be accomplished, the scientist dies. Is it a heart attack or murder? Poirot arrives and will no doubt solve the mystery. The finger of guilt seems to point to an Italian house guest. But wait, there are others with motives also.....aren't there? Clues are scattered throughout the book, and they aren't too difficult to decipher. Entertaining, but not one of those reread...reread..reread kind of books.I have always enjoyed reading about the exploits of the little Belgian detective with his egg shaped head and absurd mustache. His quirky mannerisms and unusual methods of crime solving always add a bit of spice to the stories. I found him portrayed as rather mellow and not quite as quirky as I remember him from other writings. His sidekick Captain Hastings came across as a bit dense and played a rather unimportant role....not the intelligent "partner" found in other Poirot stories. Some of the actions by the characters were so bold; but apparently not noticed by a roomful of other people. Not a very observant bunch of characters, but maybe that is how it was in the 1930s, and this is after all a work of fiction. The book is entertaining and an easy read.

BLACK COFFEE the novel suffers from Charles Osborne's timidity in adapting Agatha Christie stage dialogue into a prose fiction equivalent. Wearily the reader sits through every blessed thing that was said on stage (or so it seems) plus every stage direction, for most of which Osborne fails to achieve any sort of actual verbal equivalence, so that we never can figure out what exactly the characters are doing in that room at Abbot's Cleve. On the other hand, the one chapter where Osborne just went crazy and wrote the whole thing from scratch (chapter one, set in Poirot's tidy flat in London) doesn't work either, so it's not exactly a problem inherent in novelization, he's just not that good a writer perhaps.However he did get better, and the other two books he wrote are less painful than this one.In BLACK COFFEE, for example, the whole plot turns on a vase filled with spills used to help the fire in the huge fireplace, and whereas we would have seen the vase instantly on stage, and watched characters playing with the spills throughout the entire play, here we have no idea that they are present, much less what they are, until Poirot points them out to his sidekick, Hastings, in the play's penultimate moments. Fair play? I think not. We're being toyed with by a man who doesn't care if we have all the information or not, he's just slugging it out doggedly till the play's last scene.Strange chronology too! We forget that Hastings wasn't in on every adventure of Poirot's, and that when she turned to BLACK COFFEE in 1930, she was bringing him back after an absence of several years. Osborne's odd interjections suggest that this story takes place sometime after the events of LORD EDGWARE DIES, which of course came later, in the mid-1930s... I wonder why, it's puzzling. I'll have to go to my copy of the actual play to see if Christie had that pervy scene of Hastings (a married man, of course, though Bella is off in the Argentine) spying on glamorous flapper Barbara Amory as she lies sunbathing on what she thinks is a private, enclosed garden spot.

It was alright. Personally, I didn't really like the plot of the story. It has a murder for Hercule Poirot to solve, but then he also has to worry about something the killer stole. I'm not going to go to in detail about the story because I don't want to ruin it for those who want to read it. As someone who has read the Hercule Poirot series with such interest, I have to say that I was disappointed. Poirot and Captain Hastings, who does make an appearance in this book, were in certainly in character and didn't act any differently than I would expect them to. But the story was certainly not up their with titles like Murder on the Orient Express, or the Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was a little too simple and just not up there.Besides that, it was alright. This is why I had to take 2 stars.

This book convinced me, like no other, that the skills of a playwright or screen writer are infinitely different from those of a book author, and are rarely combined in one individual. Certainly, they are not combined here. I was quite looking forward to a "new" Agatha Christie; this is actually a "no" Agatha Christie. Apparently, the author had not ever heard that one needs to show, not tell, when writing a novel. Simply writing, "He was dressed in a lovely evening sui,t" or something to that effec,t is no substitute for, "His natty black suit, almost sparkling with cleanliness at the start of the evening, was showing its age, having picked up in its loosening weave every cat hair in the room." Or something of the sort. Sorry, but this is not worth the bytes it takes up, and certainly not wasting leisure time and eyesight over.

I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this one, because it’s essentially a novelisation of an Agatha Christie play by an author called Charles Osborne. Osborne is a novelist in his own right, but he’s also a biographer who’s written about Christie at length. It turns out that those fears were unfounded, because this doesn’t read like fan-fiction. It reads like the real deal.Osborne even mimicked some of the stuff that I’m not so much of a fan of, including Christie’s colonialist approach to the world and the casual racism that her characters seem to display towards foreigners, including a reference to poison being an Italian weapon. That actually made me laugh though, because an Italian once tried to poison me by putting bleach in my drink, but that’s another story for another time.All in all, I enjoyed this, and I’d definitely recommend it to fellow Agatha Christie fans. Although I do also want to both read and see the play itself.

This is a 1998 novelisation of a play Agatha Christie wrote early in her career and which was performed in 1930. It concerns theft of a formula for an explosive devised by scientist Sir Claud Amory, and then murder as he is poisoned by a member of his household, just as Hercule Poirot arrives, called in by Sir Claud to investigate the theft. This is a classic locked room mystery, but I found the characters uniformly rather irritating. As in a number of other Christie novels, nationalist stereotypes of the time against Italians in particular, grate rather. I found Captain Hastings' character completely pointless here - he contributes nothing whatsoever to the plot. Poirot comes across as rather more arrogant than usual as well. Overall, definitely not one of my favourite Christies, though it functions as well as ever as a lightweight page turner.

As always when I read Poirot stories, I see David Suchet and the rest of the cast on the UK tv series in my mind. That is a good sign, which when combined with the classic writing skills of AC, add to the enjoyment and always keep me intrigued till the end.

In order to make Poirot so brilliant, she must have had a lot of little grey cells. I felt the plot moved at a good pace, fast enough to enjoy but not too fast that you could lose track.