Might have worked, but in the middle of the second party George himself dies, having drunk from a glass of champagne. This time, the police don’t believe in suicide.

In this book there’s no Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple – not even Tommy and Tuppence to solve the mystery. Some Anthony Browne, unheard of – we are told it’s not even his real name – is to be the clever one and solve the whole riddle. It’s not an easy one to solve (Agatha Christie is true to herself). Nearly everyone present at the first party had a distinct, strong motive to wish Rosemary dead, even including her husband (what a shame – granted, she was unfaithful, obtrusive, tactless and arrogant, but she was so beautiful!). But his own death a year after clears him – it’s assumed he’s got too close to the murderer and has been silenced so he won’t tell anyone.

But we know it’s never that simple in Agatha Christie’s books, don’t we? An attempted murder of Iris Marle, Rosemary’s younger sister, follows…

And then, as always, a totally unexpected explanation of the mystery.

“Sparkling Cyanide” is an excellent detective novel – not very long, but I don’t like very long detective novels: they tease my curiosity all the time while I read, and since it can take several days (I have work to do, apart from reading), I arrive at the end completely exasperated from the torture. Agatha Christie is usually merciful to the reader: her books can usually be consumed within an evening or two and still have everything in them to reward the reader for the effort.

She is not so merciful to her characters though. I felt terribly sorry for the beautiful Rosemary (though what a relief her death must have been to Stephen Farraday!) I felt sorrier still for George – a quiet, reliable, kind and honourable man, even if a little dull. And to subject the lovely Iris to the danger – now that’s a little too much! But we have a happy end finally.

I can safely recommend the book to all Agatha Christie’s fans: you won’t be disappointed.

The book has everything to be a good detective story: an intricate riddle, an unexpected solution (very unexpected), a nice gallery of faces and characters: rich and poor, vivacious and shy, proud and insecure, extravagant and simple. There is a long and painstaking (but not boring) procedure of looking for clues, questioning people who knew the victim and unravelling an extremely complicated chain of facts and emotions from a single sample of expensive lipstick dropped by someone not far away from the place where the body was found. Fragments from Doon’s letters inserted here and there into the narrative add exquisiteness and reveal Ruth Rendell’s ability to write in a much more refined literary style than the one commonly used for detective stories. They are “special extras” making the experience of reading this excellent book even more pleasant – like quotations from Shakespeare might have done.

The characters, different as they are, all have something in common. Few of them are exactly attractive; most are outright displeasing. They might not be in real life – there is nothing particularly nasty about any of them, mainly just typical human weaknesses – and it all comes down to the fact that the author emphasises their faults and says next to nothing about their virtues. Still, none of them – not even the murderer – will wake up any disgust or contempt in the soul of the reader. Sympathy is what I felt for them all – but I wouldn’t want to befriend any of them, except, perhaps, the victim. Too bad Ruth Rendell consistently makes a point of murdering the nicest person in every book.

The final explanation left me mildly shocked – mostly because I knew it was a book written in 1964. But I’ll leave it at that, just so I don’t spoil my readers the pleasure of reading and trying to guess the name of the murderer.

I do recommend the book.

Remembering Barbara Vine’s piece to be quite depressing, though a fascinating read, I expected Ruth Rendell’s one to be the same. Indeed, when the book begins with “The woman standing under the departures board at Victoria station had a flat rectangular body and an iron-hard rectangular face”, what can you expect? I must admit I expected this woman to be the one to be murdered – in a detective story someone has to be murdered – but I was wrong here. Anyway, the book captured me soon, but as it proceeded and the author made it look like the riddle was solved and the main difficulty was about acquiring proof, it became a little depressing and hard to read. I wondered why the author needed to make it so long, to stretch the unnecessary torture. Was it merely for the sake of a certain number of words?

I was wrong again. The way everything turned around and upside down on the last 5 pages making the it one of the most unexpected endings I’d ever come across rewarded me completely for my patience. I understood that everything in the book – every page, every word, every casually dropped hint – was of extreme importance, totally necessary to make the final solution neat and completely justified. In good detective stories every detail falls into place at the end – and this is a very good detective story.

The personality of the Chief Inspector Wexford is what you might describe as “warm and fluffy”, though not to the man he was chasing for fifteen months to prove himself true. If I ever planned on a murder, I wouldn’t want him to investigate it He is way too perceptive and sees deeply into every detail of the crime – and of course, like in all detective stories, he is not supposed to lose or be wrong, ever. Like other famous detectives, he seems to be almost a magician.

I’m now looking forward to reading other books by the same author, as I know they will give me a lot of pleasure at the end, even if I have to suffer a little on my way there.

However, if we bring ourselves to credit that, the rest of the novel is perfect. The characters are drawn with mastery; you can close your eyes and see Louise Leidner smiling at you with that special smile, at once charming and ruthless, which only women of a particular kind ever possess. You can see Amy Leatheran, the honest, compassionate and hard-working young nurse eagerly helping Poirot in his investigation to describe it later on in her written narrative. You can see Miss Johnson, plain and elderly, but devoted, companion of Dr Leidner’s — and you can’t help feeling sympathy for her hopeless love and desperate jealousy, which is doomed to end nowhere.

Male characters are done in the same detailed manner, but — perhaps, because the author is a woman, or, perhaps, because I’m myself a woman — I cannot see their inner passions and visualise them as clearly as I can do with female characters. Their feelings seem somewhat hidden beneath a cloak; their characteristic features — like Bill Coleman’s silly talkativeness or Carl Reiter’s shyness — look a little exaggerated. The most alive of them all is, perhaps, Dr Reilly, who is not one of the leading characters in the book, but adds a lot of charm to the episodes in which he participates with his dry, typically English humour, relaxing manner of speech and pleasant informality of ways. His daughter Sheila, who is surprisingly unlike her father in every way, adds a whiff of reality to the dreamy, fairy-tale-ish world of the novel: her rude, unpolished honesty won’t endear her to the reader, but she still makes one respect her in the same way as we might respect an enemy. It definitely takes some courage to talk the way she does, though you might just say her father has spoiled her. There’s a lot of truth in that, no doubt — and yet…

And, of course, there’s Poirot, who never seems to change — clever, cheeky and courteous, still staging the final disclosure of all secrets as someone might stage a play. He handles this case without his friend Captain Hastings. (Who needed to add him to the mix in the film? Amy Leatheran was just as good for the role!)

The environment, in which the events take place, teases my imagination. I have always had special feelings for ancient relics, excavations and people who dedicate their lives to archaeology, so the fact that almost everyone at the scene is an archaeologist has added to the charm of the book greatly. I’ve read it several times, and now I’m about to read it again.