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Hercule Poirot opsøges af en ung kvinde på ca 20 år, der "måske" har slået en ihjel. Da hun ser ham, beklager hun at han er "for gammel" og går igen uden at opgive navn eller andre kontaktoplysninger. Hercule Poirot bliver nedtrykt over den behandling og sætter mr
Tre unge har slået sig sammen om at leje en lejlighed. Frances Cary har lejet lejligheden og deler den med veninden Claudia Reece-Holland. Norma Restarick er den tredje pige i lejligheden. Ariadne Oliver opdager Norma på cafe med kæresten David Baker og tilkalder Poirot. David forlader cafeen og Ariadne følger efter ham og overlader Norma til Poirot.
David opdager Ariadne og får hende med til en lejlighed, hvor hun møder nogle af hans venner inklusive Frances. På vej væk fra lejligheden bliver hun slået ned.
Poirot søger oplysninger i nær og fjern, men undres over ikke at kunne finde et dødsfald, når nu Norma snakkede om "måske" at have slået en ihjel. Ariadne Oliver oplyser om et selvmord i en af lejligheder i det kompleks, pigerne bor i. En mrs Louise Charpentier sprang ud fra syvende sal og lidt boren fra Poirot fremskaffer en oplysning om at hun var Restaricks elskerinde på et tidspunkt. Kort efter bliver David fundet død og Norma har en kniv i hånden.
Poirot lader sig ikke narre og fastholder den tanke at Charpentier var farlig for nogen og derfra via et maleri af Restarick kommer han til den konklusion at både Andrew og Mary Restarick i virkeligheden er bedragere. Andrew hedder Robert Orwell og Mary Restarick er i virkeligheden den samme som Frances Cary. David Baker forsøgte at presse penge af dem og derfor måtte han dø.
Lægen, dr Stillingfleet, der har behandlet Norma, er blevet forelsket i hende og de gifter sig og flytter til Australien.
Et noget overindviklet plot, men ellers var det jo også for nemt?
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Fiction. Mystery. Historical Fiction. HTML: In this breathtaking Agatha Christie mystery, the Third Girl sharing a London flat with two others announces to Hercule Poirot that she's a murderer and then disappears. The masterful investigator must figure out whether the missing girl is a criminal, a victim, or merely insane. Three young women share a London flat. The first is a coolly efficient secretary. The second is an artist. The third interrupts Hercule Poirot's breakfast confessing that she is a murderer�??and then promptly disappears. Slowly, Poirot learns of the rumors surrounding the mysterious third girl, her family, and her disappearance. Yet hard evidence is needed before the great detective can pronounce her guilty, innocent, or insane....… (more)
User reviews
His rejection by Norma Restorick just won't leave HP alone. He
The title comes from the fact that Norma is the third girl in an apartment in London.
The excellent narration by John Woodvine proves irrefutably that David Suchet isn't the only one who can "do" Hercule Poirot. Required to present the voices of a considerable range of characters, he does it very well.
THE THIRD GIRL is one of the most satisfying Agatha Christie's I've "read" recently. In fact I think I'll have to put it in my top 10. There was plenty to enjoy about it from the characters of Ariadne Oliver and HP's secretary Miss Lemon, to depiction of the "new" British society of the late 1950's, with girls going out to work, and young people experimenting with drugs. The puzzle of what was happening to Norma Restorick held my attention right to the end although I had sort of half solved it by then.
I must comment though on one place where Agatha Christie did not "play fair" with the reader. For most of the time we know what Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver know, except for one instance, where he goes "off stage" as it were, and makes an arrangement with regard to Norma Restorick that we find out about only later. Ariadne Oliver becomes our mouthpiece when she reproves HP for not telling her what he's done.
Despite that, THE THIRD GIRL is an excellent read, written when Agatha Christie was 76.
Christie has created a complex mystery here for Poirot, along with mystery writing friend Mrs. Oliver, to figure out. It's difficult for two reasons: no one is sure if there has been a crime committed until well into the story and this is one of the few books in which Christie doesn't give the reader pertinent information until the crime is solved. Still a good read, but hearing Poirot talking about mods or rockers and counter-culture drugs is sort of...weird?
This book features two of my favorites- Hercules Poirot and Ariadne Oliver. When a
Enough said.
Love this lil Belgian man.
Read in 2008.
I thought perhaps my familiarity came from seeing the TV version and wasn't too clear how that differed from the book.
And then I discovered that nearly 4 years ago I had listened to
an audio version which I had much enjoyed.
For of
That really gets under his skin because he thinks his little grey cells are ageless even if his body is showing rather a lot of wear and tear.
This leads the reader into all sorts of useless calculations about how old Poirot really is. He made his first appearance in 1920 (THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES) as a retired, evacuated Belgian police detective. 40+ years on he has to be approaching 100 if not more. Charles Osborne, in an article about THIRD GIRL, suggest we are meant to see Poirot as about 80.
Despite the era change by the television producers this is a book set firmly in the Swinging Sixties. Girls are much less bound to parents and home than they used to be, as shown by these young things sharing a London flat, and living in an unsupervised fashion. So once again here is Agatha Christie reflecting social and economic change in English society.
And of course, there is a little romantic match-making by Poirot which almost escapes notice.
And is Ariadne Oliver a reflection of Christie herself? She is much younger than Christie was at the time of writing the book (76), as well as a bit more impulsive and scatter-brained than I imagine Christie to be. But she does a lot of research for her books and obviously has a fertile imagination.
Critics have written that Christie shows signs of Alzheimer's in her last novels, but I saw no signs of it here.
And this is by no means the last Poirot novel.
Christie will publish another 9 titles, by my calculation, and 4 of them will feature Hercule Poirot.
HALLOWE'EN PARTY (1969)
ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER (1972)
POIROT'S EARLY CASES (1974, short stories)
CURTAIN (written about 1940, published 1975)
In reality ELEPHANTS CAN REMEMBER will be the last novel she will write featuring her little Belgian sleuth, and POSTERN OF FATE (featuring Tommy and Tuppence) published in 1973 will be her last novel.
I've never been much of a fan of Agatha Christie's work; this means that, unlike the case with most of her mystery-writing contemporaries, there are still quite a few of her books I haven't read. So, every once in a while, I treat myself to what would be a trip down Memory Lane were it not for the
Third Girl is one of the later Poirot novels; as soon as I spotted the copyright date I knew not to expect too much, in that by this stage Christie was not as fully in command of all things as once she might have been (note my polished tact), and it seems that no one at Collins, her longstanding publisher, quite had the courage to tell her so. In fact, I noted only a single out-and-out plot howler (in one chapter Poirot recalls doing something that the preceding chapter's description tells us quite explicitly he did not do) and it doesn't impact anything else in the plot so doesn't matter. I think it was in At Bertram's Hotel, another late-order Christie novel, that one of these little forgetful glitches made the triumphantly revealed solution to the mystery in fact impossible. Third Girl, mercifully, doesn't suffer that problem; what it does suffer is a solution that depends on such a staggering implausibility as to leave one dumbstruck. No one expects Golden Age mysteries to bear more than a passing resemblance to real life; but at the same time you don't expect to be asked to accept something that quite simply couldn't happen in the world. In this instance, the artifice is that a young woman -- the "third girl" of the title -- has not noticed over a period of months that one of her two flatmates, both of them supposedly about her own age, is actually her hated stepmother with a wig on.
Some of the events along the path that leads to this calamitous revelation are entertaining in a slight way, so the couple of days I spent with the book weren't entirely wasted. Hm. I'm probably just saying that because this is supposed to be the season of good will . . .
A young woman, Norma, is sharing a flat with two others, she is commonly known as "the third girl"... Her father has
Norma is suffering from "madness" and delusions and goes to visit M. Poirot, saying that she believes that she has committed a murder, but abruptly leaves telling M. Poirot, that he is "too old" to help her.
M. Poirot cadges an invitation to meet Norma's family via Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, who then also becomes involved in the mystery....
Added into the mix is Norma's great uncle, who is known to M. Poirot from sensitive war "business" and may be missing some very important historical documents, the Uncle's secretary, Norma's boyfriend, Norma's two flat mates, & the upstairs neighbor who has fallen from her balcony to her death.....
I caught on to a good part of the mystery & who done it. I didn't like or dislike the characters, but this was a good steady read.
And I'm partial to Ariadne Oliver, so anything she shows up in is an extra treat. The attempt at modernity didn't bother me (it seemed apt, for the time period—youth were certainly openly trying drugs, and dressing in their own fashions, instead of aping the look of their elders). But mostly it just flowed, and breathed, and I wondered what happened next throughout (or what had happened, it's a mystery after all)—it held my interest—I was close to the solution by the end, but had only worked out about 1/3 of it, so there were still surprising payoffs.
(I've only actually guessed fully right on a Christie novel once before, out of about 80, so even randomly you'd think I'd do better. She has wonderful misdirection).
And I'd thought I'd read every single thing she'd written (save the romances), but I'm pretty sure this was new to me. Not one character or incident tweaked a memory. So it was a delight to get to gobble up a new Christie, after so long!
(Note: 5 stars = amazing, wonderful, 4 = very good book, 3 = decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful. I'm fairly good at picking for myself so end up with a lot of 4s).
- Ariadne Oliver: I know many people like her, but she's just not a character I enjoy reading about. Just too much of a female caricature.
- The storytelling: It was just rambling. It was dragging most of the time, it was not coherent, and every time when I thought the pace would get better and the case would finally pick up, the next chapter was about something completely different and slowing down again. Frustrating!
- Sexism: The portrayal of women in this novel made me angry. I know that there are questionable characterizations in many Agatha Christie stories, and usually I put up with them as the Zeitgeist of their time, but this was just too much. Describing every woman who does not act as is expected of her as hysterical? To write about suicide as something unavoidable if a woman leads her life in a certain way? To write lightheartedly about mental illnesses, drugs, psychological problems, and judge every single woman very severely regarding her appearance and her manner? Not ok!
And likewise, it is mentioned several times that it's not possible to distinguish young men from women anymore because they have shoulder-length hair and wear colors now. Seriously??
- The case itself: While I thought that the original premise was interesting and new - a young woman visiting Poirot because she thinks she has murdered someone, but isn't sure of it - the development of the case and the final solution just felt like a mix of previous cases, it was rather predictable after a certain point and I felt like I had seen it all before.
The case still did interest me from time to time and there were some chapters that were a little more exciting, so that is what the one and a half stars are for. But, it's safe to say that I'm not a fan of the later Poirot novels. I really prefer the classic ones, taking place in a village or a country house. This just had too much negative energy and I'm not reading these kinds of mysteries for that.
Of course I'll go on with my project of reading all the Agatha Christies, but next time I'm reading a late one, I'll know to be a bit more cautious about what to expect from it.
While the basis of the plot was ingenious, Christie's comments about life in the mid-1960s England felt dated and, to be frank, somewhat of the disgruntled elder who disliked the culture & attitudes of the youth of the time. But on the plus side, I always enjoy when Ariadne Oliver
While the basis of the plot was ingenious, Christie's comments about life in the mid-1960s England felt dated and, to be frank, somewhat of the disgruntled elder who disliked the culture & attitudes of the youth of the time. But on the plus side, I always enjoy when Ariadne Oliver
The mystery becomes even darker and more complicated when he finds out that the odd little duck has suddenly flown the proverbial coop. What's more: No one knows where she may have gone, nor does anyone seem to care that she's missing. So, the question is: Just what's her secret? No one's talking. But Monsieur Poirot suspects that the answer is going to be a killer...
Over the past several years, I've actually read a total of eight of Agatha Christie's books - this is the fourth book that I have read in her Hercule Poirot Series. In my opinion, this was certainly an enjoyable read for me, but still incredibly intricate and confusing in parts. This perhaps wasn't Agatha Christie's best book in my opinion, but in typical Agatha Christie style; I was completely in the dark when it came to revealing the 'who-done-it' moment in the story. Overall, I would give this book a B+!
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Omslaget viser en lilla ring med et billede af en pige i
Indskannet omslag - N650U - 150 dpi
Forum Krimi, Christie, bind 59
Oversat fra engelsk "Third Girl" af Poul Ib Liebe
Side 12: .. en Ofelia uden fysisk tiltrækningskraft.
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823.912 |