The Pale Horse

Father Gorman attends to one of his parishioners who, with her dying breath, asks for forgiveness and gives him a list of names with a wish that the evil be "Stopped ... it must be stopped ... You will see?" When Father Gorman was found murdered later that night, the police suspect that the murderer failed to find the crumpled list of names stuffed in Gorman's shoe and that the list was likely the reason he had been murdered. This list of names and a series of serendipitous events, happenstance conversations and fortuitous meetings put Mark Easterbrook, Dame Agatha Christie's ever-present amateur sleuth, onto the trail of a gang of ruthless murders for hire. But Easterbrook is terrified to discover that the murders seem to be committed by a coven of three odd witches dispatching their victims for a fee with a malevolent brew of witchcraft, psychic arts, black magic and the mere power of suggestion. "The Pale Horse" retains many of the characteristics of Agatha Christie's earliest cozy mysteries - country fêtes and bazaars, afternoon tea, parish vicars and their long-suffering wives and the obligatory parlour room confrontation with the suspects. Agatha Christie even allows herself a cameo appearance in the novel in the person of twittering author Ariadne Oliver. But "The Pale Horse" also has a much more modern flavour as an aging Dame Christie brings her craft into London of the early sixties - Soho, Chelsea coffee bars, discussions of avant garde productions of Shakespearean plays in ways the bard would never have imagined, a more graphic approach to violence and brutality and a somewhat grudging if critical acceptance of the popular culture of London's younger people. But the ending, whether you think of it as vintage mystery or new age police procedural, is classic Agatha Christie - a beautiful blind-side twist that no reader will see coming until it's right on top of you! Highly recommended and thoroughly entertaining! Paul Weiss

This 1961 novel is not a part of any of Christie's more famous series (Poirot, Miss Marple or Tommy and Tuppence) but does include some "old friends" from other books: the Dane Calthrops (THE MOVING FINGER), Rhoda and Major Despard (THE CARD ON THE TABLE) and Ariadne Oliver, the famous mystery writer who has appeared in several Poirot stories. The PALE HORSE is one of the novels that is as much romance and mystery.The story is told by Mark Easterbrook, a writer who had taken up residence in the Chelsea district of London while working on his latest book on Mogul culture. He stopped into a coffee shop for a quick meal and witnessed an argument between two young women that ended with one pulling out a handful of hair from the other. The unfortunate woman's unusual name - Thomasina Tuckerton - stuck with Easterbrook. He was surprised when he saw it a week later, in the obituaries.Easterbrook went on about his life, meeting with his friend, Ariadne Oliver, traveling to the country to visit his cousin, and going out with his long-time girlfriend Hermia Redcliffe. Meanwhile the police begin to investigate the murder of a priest who was killed on his way home from hearing a last confession. They found a list of names stuffed into the priest's shoe, including the name of the police inspector. The two threads of the story meet and continue to weave throughout London, out to the country, on to Birmingham and returning to London. On the way the path leads to witchcraft, deathrays, and murder for hire.The mystery here appears to be more a how-it-was-done than a who- done-it although Christie has once again lead us down the garden path to a surprise finish.

Nothing is more stupid, unanimous, superstitious, and pointless, than the universal habit of running down Agatha Christie as a writer. Even fellow crime writers who ought to acknowledge their debt to one of the absolute masters of the genre, are in the habit, when looking for any kind of literary respectability, to start by pooh-poohing her (thus Ruth Rendell, P.D.James, et caetera).In point of fact, whatever a great writer is, Agatha Christie was one. Some of her stories are forgettable, many formulaic: but she has written at least a dozen, probably more, that count as classics of the language. The fact is that her kind of excellence runs absolutely counter to modern concerns. She can write stylish prose if she really wants to; she can create vivid and fascinating characters if she really wants to; but most of the time she is not too concerned with either of these things. Her characters are simple and reducible to a few primary types - like those of Homer. Her plots are what she really lavishes attention on (this book has a wonderful vignette of an author singularly like Dame Agatha herself, cudgelling her brains in despair to make some sense of a character's silly but necessary actions), and they are superlative. Properly read, they both express human values and generate great emotion; her denouements are never purely revelations of past events, but always insights into the minds of murderers, accomplices, and victims, into the logic of their situations, into the pressures that drive human beings. It has been said that her stories exist only for the sake of the denouement; if this is true at all, it is meaningless, since denouements do not exist by themselves but are a function of everything that has gone on before, and only work if the whole work has been carefully crafted. Christie, of course, approaches storytelling not as an opportunity for self-expression, but as a skill to be learned and used: she is not out to impress her cleverness on us - indeed, she does not think she is very clever - but to make us like her stories; and so, even poor Christie stories are never less than carefully crafted.But in this book, written in the autumn of her life, she tries something different, which in some ways goes beyond anything she had done elsewhere (with the possible exception of her first out-and-out masterpiece, EVIL UNDER THE SUN). It is a book about the reality of evil, about evil in real human life, about the kind of people who would in fact make a living by hurting and destroying others - and of the forces that drive them. Her conclusion is bleak, sensible, and probably quite true: evil is a matter of inadequacy, of small men feeling their smallness. There is "no demonic majesty, no black and evil splendour"; those are almost a consoling disguise which decent ordinary people prefer to place on the reality of evil, petty, mean and indecent as it is, to escape the vision of its depressing and familiar ordinariness. This, ladies and g

The Pale Horse is the name of an organization whose business is murder, akin to the Mafia or other nefarious gangster-style groups. In the novel, a young historian-writer named Mark Easterbrook hears about the organization and attempts to uncover the instigators.The story unfolds in bits and pieces: the murder of a parish priest, a list of names of people already dead or marked for death, a pub converted into a home for three unusual women, and a local fete to raise money to restore the church tower all figure prominently in the story.We are also reintroduced to some characters from previous works: Mrs. Ariadne Oliver makes an appearance, this time without Poirot; Rhoda and Major Despard from "Cards on the Table" provide the entry for Mark Easterbrook as he is Rhoda's cousin; and Rev. and Mrs. Dane Calthrop from "The Moving Finger" also appear.The title for this novel is said to have been taken from Revelations 6:8 "And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him."