Murder

Opening line of a story Malcolm Lowry submitted to a Cambridge literary magazine: "The first murder I ever committed was in a windmill."

I've never been murdered myself.  I haven't even committed a murder!  And I'm not a huge faun of murder mysteries--I feel stupid if I don't guess who the culprit is. (If I do, on the other hand, the mystery wasn't very good.)

But I do like some Agatha Christie murder mysteries.  She was Catholic, I think, and Catholic writers often have a flair for the mystery genre.  She must have had "a mind like a steel trap." Once she created a real-life mystery by disappearing for several days and checking into a hotel under the name of her husband's mistress!  Her second marriage, to an archaeologist, worked better. (She said, "An archaeologist makes the perfect husband, because as his wife gets older he gets more interested in her!")

Her mysteries have a lot of wit.  I remember the movie of Evil Under the Sun where Diana Rigg told her surly teenage stepdaughter, "If you want to have fun, go play with the jellyfish." That's the sort of line only Diana Rigg could deliver!  She also wrote Tommy and Tuppence:  Partners in Crime, a cute series of mysteries about a married couple going into the private eye business. (I saw a cute TV version with gorgeous Francesca Annis.) I liked Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple in a British movie series.

But my favourite Agatha Christie mystery is And Then There Were None. (The original title was "Ten Little N*****s"!) There's a crackerjack movie version directed by Rene Clair, with actors like Walter Huston and Barry Fitzgerald.  Ten people arrive on a desert island and hear a recording saying that they've all committed crimes and they're all going to die...