Book Review: The Unexpected Guest

The Unexpected
Guest

Originally written as a play and later novelised by Charles Osborne, The Unexpected Guest is unexpectedly different from what we usually expect from Agatha Christie in that it starts with the protagonists devising ways to conceal a murder and pin the crime on a different person. You read it right! Michael Starkwedder (the unexpected guest of the story), after spending his life in the Persian Gulf, returns to his mother's homeland in Wales to buy a house for himself, but gets hopelessly lost for hours in the foggy night and lands his car in a ditch. Looking to get some help, he approaches the nearest house, only to find a dead body, one that of a Richard Warwick, who has been apparently shot down dead by his wife Mrs. Laura Warwick. But it's not just her who had a reason for killing Richard; other family members and even the servants seem to be nursing hatred against the man who was evil incarnate. Laura however insists she is innocent, but is she? Who actually killed Richard?

First things first. The denouement completely threw me off by surprise as I was never expecting it to end the way it did. (Sherlock Holmes 101 lesson learnt: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth!) Christie creates the maximum amount of confusion by making every character equally suspicious, and in fact I gleefully fell for the red herring that she employs tactfully to misdirect the reader away from the real murderer. Otherwise I wouldn't have enjoyed the book this well. Unfortunately, there isn't much to say about the characters and they serve the cause they set out to. But full marks to Christie for exploring all possible permutations and combinations in the crime mystery genre, and The Unexpected Guest is perhaps the only novel where the actual culprit skilfully evades police and is neither caught nor killed. A guaranteed good read!