Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - After the Funeral

This is my last Christie mystery for a while. After making my way through 4 over the course of about a month, I’m moving on to other projects. This change isn’t due to fatigue. As evidenced by my rating, I’m as enamored of Christie as ever. I found the second half of this book to rival some of her best work. However, there are a number of other books I want to get to and I’m more than satisfied with this first true venture back into Christie since I read some of her books as a child.

After the Funeral could not have more of a standard premise if it tried, and I love it. An old, rich man dies suddenly, seemingly of natural causes, leaving his savings to the rest of his family. At the funeral, one of them remarks that he must have been murdered, before she is herself brutally killed with a hatchet back at her home. It is up to Hercule Poirot to come out of retirement (again!) and solve the mystery.

A rich, sinister family brimming with motivation for murder is classic mystery fare, but Christie’s abilities shine as she makes the trope bend to her will. All her talents and shortcomings are on full display, and this is easily the most “standard” murder mystery I’ve read this far.

Unfortunately, like much of Christie’s other work, the first act of After the Funeral can somewhat drag. I definitely would not recommend this as a first Christie outing. The book starts with a large exposition dump that isn’t particularly well integrated into the rest of the story, and many of the first 40-50 pages or so are dedicated to introducing and learning about the characters, who are at first rather difficult to distinguish. The front of the book wasn’t much help either, as it didn’t have the list of characters I had grown used to from Christie’s other books. Instead it had a family tree which had two serious issues. One: it excluded important characters who weren’t part of the family, though they were rare. Second, the family tree itself had multiple issues. Deceased characters were not listed as such, and there was one instance of a spouse being incorrectly labeled as a blood relative. I kept expecting a twist to result from these tidbits, but alas, they were just wrong.

Unlike the last Christie book I read, A Murder is Announced, the slow intro definitely feels purposeful, and I feel it was necessary for the rest of the book being as good as it is. Once the murder investigation begins in full force, the rest of the book, particularly the second half, flies by at a rapid pace. I was continually amazed at how fast I was moving through the book. The characters are all varied and every scene feels purposeful. Poirot is as delightful as ever, if a bit underused, but the book hardly suffers from his absence. This is accomplished by every scene feeling relevant to solving the overall mystery. You can feel that important details and red herrings are constantly being presented; motives for murder are revealed and character drama abounds. Multiple people end up confessing to the same murder, and the reader has no idea what’s going on, and they’re frantically trying to finish the book to figure it out. This was the most exciting finish to a book I’ve had in quite some time, and it was a joy to experience.

The conclusion itself is quite excellent. When Poirot explains the whole thing, it does stretch suspension of belief a bit, and some of the red herrings are a bit disappointingly waved away. Despite that, I actually really enjoyed the reveal. As Christie always so artfully managed to accomplish, the culprit is a person I did not expect, through a method and for a reason I could scarcely have imagined. Her inventive mind is on full display, and the conclusion is helped by it feeling as though most of the mystery could be worked out by the reader while also neatly fitting into what we’ve been told thus far, again different from A Murder is Announced.

This is the type of book that solidifies your love for an author. The other three Christie books I read were some of the most significant detective books of all time and all loomed large within her canon. By contrast, this was a random Poirot book I found while looking for the others and thought sounded interesting. I was not disappointed. While I don’t feel as though this would serve as a great introduction to Christie, as it suffers from a slow start, I highly recommend this to any established fans of Christie. You might discover an overlooked gem.

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