Aghata Christie

“Murder is Easy” was the title of a murder mystery penned by Agatha Christie in 1939. It came out in America under the title “Easy to Kill.“ The book puts to work again one of the public’s not so well known crime fighters written about by Agatha Christie: Luke Fitzwilliam. Lots of interesting people travel on the British Rails. In this case Agatha Christie presents an elderly woman from the quiet village of Wychwood headed for Scotland Yard.

Miss Lavinia Pinkerton believes murder is taking place in her peaceful hometown. She also thinks it will be easy to take care of the problem once she has spoken to the authorities. Which she confides (in a rather garbled manner) to her cabin mate on the train, Luke Fitzwilliam.

After leaving the train, Miss Pinkerton unfortunately has a fatal accident, falling down an escalator. When the newspaper reports how Miss Pinkerton died in such a tragic accident on the way to make her report, Luke Fitzwilliam, a former police officer, decides he will take on the job of finding the person committing murder. So Agatha Christie sends her hero to Wychwood to scour the characters in this small village for the one resorting to murder.

Luke Fitzwilliam finds it easy to fit into life at Wychwood. He soon learns that three accidental deaths had previously occurred in the town. Another visitor to the village is Bridget Conway, a beautiful American with no apparent reason for being there. The belligerent, local Dr. Humbleby, dies suddenly, accidentally, and again mysteriously of blood poisoning from an infected cut.

The former policeman continues to have every reason to believe there is a multiple murderer among the town’s citizenry. Agatha Christie almost always wrote a romance into her mysteries. This story is no different since Fitzwilliam becomes intrigued by the lovely Miss Conway. Until he can convince himself that she is not the killer, he tries to hold his feelings in check.

The local Reverend Wake is performing more funeral services than anyone could want to do. It is becoming obvious to Fitzwilliam that Wychwood is a much more dangerous place than it appears. The doctor’s bereaved widow, Jessie Humbleby, loses touch with reality. Honoria Waynflete, the church organist, then finds her maid Amy Gibbs dead as well. Is this really a murder?

It is easy to see that Wychwood is a very dangerous place to live. Between the accidents that have happened and suicide, which seems to be on the rise, bodies are multiplying quickly. Due to his feelings for Bridget, Luke tends to downplay the fact that murder seems to have begun about the time she arrived in the village.

“Murder is Easy” has added its percentage to the more than two billion books Agatha Christie has sold worldwide, in more than 45 languages. She wrote eighty novels, short story collections, and more than a dozen plays. Agatha Christie wrote the mystery for the stage: “The Mousetrap,” which is the longest running play in the history of the theatre for good reason. Agatha Christie finds it easy to plot her mysteries with fascinating characters, providing them with intricate backgrounds.

All with possible motives to be guilty of murder, but also easy to believe each one is innocent. This is certainly the case in “Murder is Easy,” where the intricacies of the characters’ interactions, and illuminations about their pasts’ move the story forward at a rapid pace. Agatha Christie didn’t just write crime fiction, because the settings and themes of her novels cover an extraordinary breadth of place and experience. That the Agatha Christie novels are easy to read (and hard to put down) make her still one of the best-loved writers of all time.