Customer Rating: 
Summary: Mesopotamian Madness
Comment: I read this book when I was just a boy, barely old enough to speak the word "Mesopotamia." In retrospect, I wonder why American publishers carried over Christie's British title unchanged, when they seemed to have so little faith in us so often that every other title was changed in some way--"Death in the Clouds" became "Death in the Air," etc. The general idea must have been that we were dummies, and yet they let "Mesopotamia" slide in unchecked.
The book is a beautiful story about an enigmatic woman, Louise Leidner, definitely one of Christie's finest character studies. Biographers say that Christie based this character on an actual woman she knew in Nineveh and resented, a woman who called herself the queen of the dig and wouldn't give Christie the time of day. In fact this woman didn't like it much when Christie married her own pet toy boy Max Mallowan. She was a married woman all right, but she was used to deference and she was used to every other man in the expedition falling in line as her love slaves. Christie described this real life woman, Katherine Woolley, in her memoirs, and I've always wondered how she managed to write such a scathing, searching roman a clef about Woolley and then, after 1936, when she knew Woolley must have read MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA, she coolly accepted her hostess' hospitality one more time when in Iraq. What nerve! But there was always sort of a cruel streak, or at any rate a pragmatic streak, about Christie. She honestly didn't seem to care whose feelings got hurt as long as their life made a good story. Check out the way she totally exposed Gene Tierney's feelings to the world when she wrote THE MIRROR CRACKED FROM SIDE TO SIDE--or the Lindbergh family, for that matter, when she wrote the followup to MESOPOTAMIA the same year in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. She was a voracious tabloid reader, that seems clear, and it must have dated back to when she herself was in the tabloids every day and night due to her 1926 "amnesia" episode. Anyway Christie here creates not only Louise Leidner, the haunted "Katherine Woolley" figure, but Miss Amy Leatheran, a charming and engaging nurse with working class roots.
Did Amy Leatheran come into being as a possible rival to the nurse/detective characters then in place created by Christie's American competitors, Mignon Eberhart and Mary Roberts Rinehart (among others)? Hard to say, but I do wish that Leatheran had featured in more than just this one novel. I would have loved to see more books with her in it and I always think that, with all Christie's many backgrounds, she missed a trick by not having a hospital story (or a theater story, for that matter, but that's another kettle of fish). The truth is that Christie's mind was so profligate she could afford to "throw away" a guaranteed long running series of books and just dispose of their ingredients in a single novel, for she was blessed by a fecund imagination.
SPOILERS AHEAD! WARNING, WARNING, WARNING.
Okay, so when I was a boy I drew back at the surprise revelation of who killed Louise Leidner, and I expect many will find it far fetched that she married the same man not once but twice, and didn't recognize him the second time. Christie explains it as best she can, without getting too graphic, and you could read the book trying to see through her euphemisms into thinking, well Louise either didn't have marital relations with the guy the first time around, or the second maybe--and that would explain why she didn't recognize his--well, his you know what, but as I've grown older and had more romantic experience myself I can now totally subscribe to the theory that a woman will not necessarily recognize a previous lover. It's often the last thing on my mind when I have sex, either you've slept with them already or you haven't, and those bits of anatomy all tend to blur together, don't they, after the first few dozen. So I'm restoring the five star rating MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA has always merited. It's one of Poirot's greatest cases and a marvelous showcase for Christie's unequalled creation of character.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Adventure and Murder in an Exotic Land
Comment: This fabulous mystery by Agatha Christie has long been a favorite of mine. It outshines many of her other mysteries due to some wonderful atmosphere and a very likable heroine in Amy Leatheren. Hercule Poirot, though a major force in solving the mystery, plays second fiddle in this most entertaining murder mystery.
Murder in Mesopotamia is an adventure set in an exotic land where a murder occurs. The first half of the book almost has the feel of an M.M. Kaye mystery. Though one could not put Christie in the same class with Kaye in regards to romantic description of a time and place, there is certainly atmosphere to spare, and it is only when Hercule Poirot is introduced into the story that we see the classic elements of mystery fiction Agatha Christie invented come to the forefront.
Amy Leatheren is a young nurse asked to accompany an archaelogical expedition to the Middle East to look after Louise Leidner, the wife of the man heading the dig. Louise is a beautiful but frightened woman capable of both sweetness and offhand cruelty. What she is frightened of is quite vague but may be connected to tensions on the dig. On the suface it is friendly and familiar, but a dangerous unrest lies just beneath the surface.
Amy discovers answers to questions too late to prevent a particularly brutal murder and Christie's famous detective, Hercule Poirot, must solve the baffling puzzle of how the murder occurred. Amy has been asked to put on pen and paper her account of the events which transpired and this is her narrative. Soon she is acting as Poirot's helper and, to her delight and embarrassment, having the time of her life. There are both secret relationships and secret identities, and before too long, another murder.
Christie creates a wonderful atmosphere here. From the Tigris Palace Hotel in Baghdad to Tell Yarimjah, and from bazaars where people from various nationalities and backgrounds gather to tea and scones ovelooking the ruins she makes the archaelogical expedition come alive. You really get a sense of people moving about in a passion to discover this Assyrian city like Niveveh close to Hassanieh. You can almost see the beautiful and unusual Louise nearly asking to be murdered yet at the same time oblivious to the true danger that lies in wait.
While the solution is wildly intricate and implausible a fun and likable heroine and tons of atmosphere make for a great mystery read. A delightfully old-fashioned mystery fans of the genre will enjoy greatly.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: "I always look at 'the impossible' very carefully."
Comment: Married to an archaeologist working in the Iraqi desert, author Agatha Christie knew the Baghdad area well and was familiar with the procedures which archaeologists follow in doing excavations. An aura of reality therefore surrounds this mystery which she sets in Tel Yarimyah on a desert dig, not in the usual closed room of a country house. Amy Leatheren, a nurse, has been hired by Dr. Eric Leidner, the director, to be a temporary companion to his wife Louise. Louise, alternately described as a "female Iago" and as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," has received written death threats from her first husband, long thought to be dead, and she fears for her life.
The murder of Louise coincides with a trip through the east being taken by Hercule Poirot, and he is soon called in. Here the mystery becomes typical Christie. The body has been found in a closed room of Louise's living quarters, the door locked. All the suspects have alibis, and the servants on guard swear that no one has come into the area from outside. Poirot engages the help of Amy Leatheren in sorting out who likes and who hates Louise Leidner and who might not have a legitimate alibi. Red herrings galore keep the reader occupied--love affairs, flirtations, suggestions the treasures in storage room may have been tampered with, and jealousy.
When the murder is solved, Poirot gathers all the people from the dig into one room, where he goes through the evidence on a point by point basis, then announces a new twist for which there had been no prior evidence in the story. The characters, though wooden, have some interesting traits which keep the reader occupied, and the story is intriguing. Ultimately, however, Christie so manipulates her conclusions regarding the murderer that even Poirot admits there is no firm evidence to prove that X is really the killer, a weakness which undercuts the novel. Lucky for Poirot, the killer obligingly confesses, leaving no loose threads. Fun to read, this novel is interesting for its setting, though not one of Christie's best. n Mary Whipple
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mysteries)
The Sittaford Mystery (Agatha Christie Signature Edition)
Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot Mysteries)
Lord Edgware Dies
Customer Rating:
Summary: Poirot waits and pounces like a panther
Comment: Hercule Poirot is passing through Iraq just after a murder has been committed. Our suave hero interviews the suspects, surveys the environs, parries and thrusts here and there to bring out truth from suspects, and, of course, uses his highly efficient, superior, and discerning mental capacities to deduce the identity of the murderer. It's just another day of work for this short, Belgian detective. This particular story is narrated by Nurse Leatheran who gives the reader her detailed description of Poirot's quirky "foreign" manners and "twinkle" in his eye. I loved the author's depiction of a foolhardy, British, colonial sense of superiority set against Poirot's own elan and propriety as a "foreigner." The story moved quite quicky with twenty-nine short chapters which made for a book that was easy to put down and pick up again. Poirot is more refined and debonair than Maigret, Holmes, Gripstra, and DeKok together all together. For those who love a good "whodunit," this is a very good story by one of the world's greatest mystery writers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Near Perfect
Comment: I've recently reread Agatha Christie's "Murder in Mesopotamia". This is one of her best. Even knowing the solution I still enjoy the narrative and watching how she lays out the clues. Having Nurse Latheran tell the story is a nice change although I miss Capt Hastings.
One of the impressive features of this book is what Ms Christie does not include. There is just enough description of Iraq to set the atmosphere but not overwhelm us with local color. There is a bare minimum of archaelogical information when she easily could have piled it on. And thankfully she just not let Nurse Leatheran get involved in romances.
The plot is somewhat far-fetched but is definitely "fair play". The characters, especially the victim, have distict well-defined personalities. Hercule Poirot is pleasantly fallible, but fear not -- he does eventually arrive at the truth.
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