Sparkling Cyanide - Agatha Christie [1]
The Moving Finger
A Murder Is Announced
They Do It with Mirrors
A Pocket Full of Rye
4.50 from Paddington
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
A Caribbean Mystery
At Bertram’s Hotel
Nemesis
Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
Tommy & Tuppence
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime
N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
Postern of Fate
Published as Mary Westmacott
Giant’s Bread
Unfinished Portrait
Absent in the Spring
The Rose and the Yew Tree
A Daughter’s a Daughter
The Burden
Memoirs
An Autobiography
Come, Tell Me How You Live
Play Collections
The Mousetrap and Selected Plays
Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays
* novelised by Charles Osborne
E-Book Extras
Essay by Charles Osborne
Charles Osborne on Sparkling Cyanide
Sparkling Cyanide…is one of those novels in which a crime is investigated some time after it has been perpetrated: in this case, on its first anniversary…
The murder of Rosemary Barton, for such it proves to have been, is not the only crime to come under investigation in Sparkling Cyanide, for her widower’s plans go sadly awry and his anniversary party ends with another death. Someone who was invited on both occasions but who failed to put in an appearance at either was Colonel Race. Race, the one-time Secret Service agent who was first encountered in The Man in the Brown Suit in 1924, is now over sixty. In Sparkling Cyanide he helps another investigator to discover the murderer; this will prove to be the last of Colonel Race’s appearances in the works of Agatha christie.
The reconstruction of a fatal dinner party and the methods by which one of the murders is committed had already been used by Mrs Christie in ‘Yellow Iris’, a Poirot short story…In Sparkling Cyanide the second murder involves a mistake made jointly by a group of people which strains the reader’s credulity rather dangerously. Up to that point, however, the story has been told with a compulsive ease and a conviction which place the novel among the author’s most successful. It is, however, difficult to believe that, after dancing, people would return to the wrong places at their table simply because a purse had inadvertently been moved one place to the left.
Especially impressive, though noticeable only if you take the trouble to re-read the passage after having finished the novel, is Mrs christie’s skating on extremely thin ice, in the second chapter where she quite blatantly reveals the solution but reveals so much else as well that you fail to notice what is being offered. As the sly author said to an interviewer many years later, ‘I don’t cheat, you know. I just say things that might be taken two ways’.25
It was with Five Little Pigs, two years earlier, that an Agatha Christie novel had first achieved sales of 20,000. Now, with Sparkling Cyanide, sales in the first year of publication reached 30,000. From this point on, every Christie title would become, to use publishers’ jargon, a ‘bestseller’.
Warner Brothers produced a TV movie version of Sparkling Cyanide in 1983, with Anthony Andrews, Deborah Raffin, and Nancy Marchand in key roles.
About Charles Osborne
This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world’s leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider’s Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
Book 1
Rosemary
‘What can I do to drive away remembrances from mine eyes?’
Six people were thinking of Rosemary Barton who had died nearly a year ago…
Chapter 1
Iris Marle
I
Iris Marle was thinking about her sister, Rosemary.
For nearly