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Sparkling Cyanide

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Overview

Agatha Christie's genius for detective fiction isunparalleled. Her worldwide popularity isphenomenal, her characters engaging, her plotsspellbinding. No one knows the human heart-orthe dark passions that can stop it-better thanAgatha Christie. She is truly the one and onlyQueen of Crime.

Sparlkling Cyanide

"Rosemary that's for remembrance" Six people are thinkingabout beautiful Rosemary Barton, who died nearly a yearbefore. There's the loving sister, the long-suffering husband, thedevoted secretary, the lovers, and the betrayed wife. None ofthem can forget Rosemary But did one of them murder her?

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Author Information

Bio of Agatha Christie

One of the most successful and beloved writer of mystery stories, Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie was born in 1890 in Torquay, County Devon, England. She wrote her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920, launching a literary career that spanned decades. In her lifetime, she authored 79 crime novels and a short story collection, 19 plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language with another billion in 44 foreign languages. Some of her most famous titles include Murder on the Orient Express, Mystery of the Blue Train, And Then There Were None, 13 at Dinner and The Sittaford Mystery. Noted for clever and surprising twists of plot, many of Christie's mysteries feature two unconventional fictional detectives named Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. Poirot, in particular, plays the hero of many of her works, including the classic, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), and Curtain (1975), one of her last works in which the famed detective dies. Over the years, her travels took her to the Middle East where she met noted English archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. They married in 1930. Christie accompanied Mallowan on annual expeditions to Iraq and Syria, which served as material for Murder in Mesopotamia (1930), Death on the Nile (1937), and Appointment with Death (1938). Christie's credits also include the plays, The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution (1953; film 1957). Christie received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for 1954-1955 for Witness. She was also named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971. Christie died in 1976.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

469.54 KB

Number of Pages

288

eBook ISBN

9780061149160

Excerpt from: Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie

Chapter One
Iris Marle
Iris Marle was thinking about her sister, Rosemary.

For nearly a year she had deliberately tried to put the thought of Rosemary away from her. She hadn't wanted to remember.

It was too painful-too horrible!

The blue cyanosed face, the convulsed, clutching fingers . . .

The contrast between that and the gay lovely Rosemary of the day before . . . Well, perhaps not exactly gay. She had had "flu"-she had been depressed, run down . . . all that had been brought out at the inquest. Iris herself had laid stress on it. It accounted, didn't it, for Rosemary's suicide?

Once the inquest was over, Iris had deliberately tried to put the whole thing out of her mind. Of what good was remembrance? Forget it all! Forget the whole horrible business.

But now, she realized, she had got to remember. She had got to think back into the past . . . to remember carefully every slight unimportant seeming incident . . .

That extraordinary interview with George last night necessitated remembrance.

It had been so unexpected, so frightening. Wait-had it been so unexpected? Hadn't there been indications beforehand? George's growing absorption, his absent-mindedness, his unaccountable actions-his-well, queerness was the only word for it! All leading up to that moment last night when he had called her into the study and had taken the letters from the drawer of the desk.

So now there was no help for it. She had got to think about Rosemary-to remember.

Rosemary her sister . . .

With a shock Iris realized suddenly that it was the first time in her life she had ever thought about Rosemary. Thought about her, that is, objectively, as a person.

She had always accepted Rosemary without thinking about her. You didn't think about your mother or your father or your sister or your aunt. They just existed, unquestioned, in those relationships.

You didn't think about them as people. You didn't ask yourself, even, what they were like.

What had Rosemary been like?

That might be very important now. A lot might depend upon it. Iris cast her mind back into the past. Herself and Rosemary as children . . .