originally published 2015

revised 2025

I recently discovered a considerable, if old-fashioned, pleasure: spending an evening reading an entire Agatha Christie novel. I’d heard that Murder on the Orient Express had been intended as a single evening’s entertainment, but I’d always read Dame Agatha the way I suppose most people read her: a few chapters here, a few chapters there, and you’re done with the book in a week or so.

It’s rather a different experience to take a seat in one’s armchair early in the evening, crack open a fresh book, and, surrounded by quiet, read the entire novel, taking a break for dinner half to two-thirds of the way through. Stretched out to 250-odd generously leaded pages in the official Harper/Collins editions, Dame Agatha’s novels take perhaps four hours to read, and send you off to bed around midnight satisfied with the solution to the murder of the corpse you’d discovered three hours previously.

Why have we lost sight of this gentle means of entertaining ourselves? The chief culprit is, of course, television, which has been for over 50 years the chief source of in-home evening entertainment. It’s not called “prime time” for nothing. The eight channels of my youth have been succeeded by a dizzying array of streaming services, so that the low-tech set-up of you, an armchair, a lamp, your reading glasses (if required) and a slim volume of entertainment literature can’t compete with binge-watching something on Netflix.

I should hasten to add that I do mean a book. The paper, ink and glue kind. While electronic versions of Dame Agatha’s novels are easily procured (indeed, the first iPads came with a free copy of The Mysterious Affair at Styles), usually more economically than print versions, using an e-reader is denying yourself an important part of the experience. Holding a paperback open with the first and fifth fingers of your non-dominant hand (and eventually getting a cramp) is how murder mysteries were intended to be read. More importantly, the physical book in your hand makes you aware of your progress, as page after page shifts from right to left, and you see and feel how much is left to go. That helps you judge your bedtime (“only that much left? I can make it to the end before it gets too late”), and it keeps you aware of how much more evidence remains to be heard. When the pages held by your fifth finger begin seriously to dwindle (and, off-balance, the pages start to slip out annoyingly from behind your pinky), you know the dénouement will soon be upon you. That’s the signal for you to enter your final guess as to who the culprit is, and triggers an eager twinge of anticipatory adrenaline as M. Poirot requests that the principals be gathered to hear his solution.

So you can get the book for under a buck for your Kindle. Kindle, Schmindle. Not knowing (let alone feeling) how much is left to go sucks a good deal of the fun and excitement from the mystery-reading experience. Dame Agatha, remember, fully expected you to be holding the book while you were reading it.

Consuming the whole book in one evening offers numerous advantages, not the least of which is that you have an easier time remembering who’s who. Pick a mystery up every 36 hours, and you’re going to find yourself having difficulty recalling which one is the retired Indian Army colonel and whether it’s Mrs. Allerton or Mrs. Otterbourne who’s the eccentric woman in the turban. I mean no disrespect to Dame Agatha’s plots when I say that, with breaks in concentration, your brain may start interpolating clues from Murder on the Orient Express into The Mystery of the Blue Train. Read your novel all at once and all the material gets funneled into the same quick-recall part of your brain, allowing you to attempt to solve the puzzle properly, to say nothing of fully appreciating Miss Marple’s solution when you get to it.

Although inexpensive remainders are cursed with $3.99 in shipping fees, I highly recommend acquiring one of Dame Agatha’s novels, and then spending an evening with it. My guess is that the next morning will find your browsing the other tempting titles on offer by Amazon’s affiliated remainder booksellers.