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Last week, I planned a trip to London around visiting tea shops. Tina read the August entries of Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries and made a delicious-looking white bean soup.

Book: The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
Genre: Adventure
Publisher: Warbler Classics
Publication date: 2022 (originally 1924)

Source: ebook borrowed from the library

Summary: This is the fourth year that I celebrated Agatha Christie in her birthday month. She was born on 15 September 1890.

Now that I’ve read a handful of Agatha Christie’s novels in the last few years, I thought I knew what I would get when I picked up her fourth novel, published 100 years ago this year, but I didn’t. The Man in the Brown Suit is told in the first person by a recently orphaned young woman who has a big sense of adventure and no fortune to fund it.

At first, it seems that Anne Beddingfeld is destined for a more boring life than she wants, but then she has three pieces of “good” fortune. She witnesses the death of a man on a train platform, relates it to the nearby murder of a woman, and comes into just enough money to follow a clue to South Africa.

After that, Anne befriends a rich and curious woman who keeps the adventure going. They follow the clues to discover the story behind the murder, the death at the train station, and the mysterious man in the brown suit who tended to the dying man.

Thoughts: It’s too much to hope that a book published in 1924 that takes us to Africa would be devoid of racism. Or even sexism. This has both. I suspect that I don’t know enough history to have caught all the incidents, but a glaring one is that almost none of the black characters are named. The one black woman who is given a name doesn’t speak English, so she is rendered voiceless in this novel.

According to Wikipedia, this novel was inspired by an around-the-world trip that Christie took with her first husband, Archie Christie. The tour promoted the British Empire Expedition of 1924 in London. This was similar to a World’s Fair, but as the name implies, focused on Britain and its colonies.

I think this would be a fun novel to update. If someone were writing it now, it would be a New Adult novel. I don’t think that I give too much of the plot away to say that, like many New Adult novels, there’s a romance. Or that stories involving stolen De Beers diamonds are just as relevant today as they were 100 years ago. A modern novelist could bring South Africans into the cast as fully formed characters.

Appeal: The Man in the Brown Suit is likely on no one’s list of favorite Christie novels, but I enjoyed the romp from London to South Africa to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Have you read this book? What did you think?