ACCC: February, 2022

 

Main read:    Death in the Clouds  (read by Hugh Fraser)
Side read:  A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes (read by Samuel L. Jackson)
( no poll this month)

I  tore through both reads in less then 24 hours. Enjoyed them both thoroughly.

 

Publisher's Summary
From seat number nine, Hercule Poirot is almost ideally placed to observe his fellow air travelers on this short flight from Paris to London. Over to his right sits a pretty young woman, clearly infatuated with the man opposite. Ahead, in seat number 13, is the Countess of Horbury, horribly addicted to cocaine and not doing too good a job of concealing it. Across the gangway in seat number eight, a writer of detective fiction is being troubled by an aggressive wasp. Yes, Poirot is almost ideally placed to take it all in - except that the passenger in the seat directly behind him has slumped over in the course of the flight ... dead.

Murdered. By someone in Poirot's immediate proximity. And Poirot himself must number among the suspects.

This title was previously published as Death in the Air.
©1935 Agatha Christie Limited (P)2003 HarperCollins Publishers

 

While I enjoyed Death in the Clouds, I did have one big issue with it. This is the second book in a row where the perp was the almost-too-good-to-be-true love interest of the innocent ingenue.  But otherwise, a delightful locked room mystery -- because how much more locked can you get than an airplane in flight!

 

Publisher's Blurb

Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction, Star Wars films), fresh off the success of his uproarious, Audie-nominated performance of the mock children’s book Go the F**k to Sleep, delivers a swaggering, darkly-humored rendering of Chester Himes’ classic first novel. 

Himes, described by The Sunday Times as “the greatest find in American crime fiction since Raymond Chandler”, was no stranger to the world of crime: in his late teens and early 20s, he served seven years in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery, the confession to which was beaten out of him by the police. He delivers the tale of his hopelessly naïve hero suddenly finding himself on the run from a hypocritical and far-from-heroic police force with lurid violence and brutal humor. There is no voice better than Mr. Jackson’s to narrate this hardboiled story of love and crime, set in a richly imagined, mid-20th-century Harlem.

©1957 Chester Himes (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Listening to A Rage in Harlem as read by Samuel L. Jackson was a pure delight; he made the book sing. The book itself was a merry chase through Harlem's underworld of crime, complete with car chases and gruesome murders and very much in the style of the 1950s' down and dirty he-man, macho crime fiction that was being written at the time.