Black Coffee

Fascinating–particularly from a literary point of view, as someone who is slowly reading all the Poirot novels (we'll get to Miss Marple eventually, haha!).

The actual mystery is precisely what you'd expect from Christie and Poirot. I think what interested me was that it really does read like an adaptation of the play: much of the characters' movements and dialogue absolutely seems like it could have come out of stage directions and a script. That's not a bad thing. For me, since I recently had the pleasure of seeing The Mousetrap, I found it really cool to be able to “see” in this novel the way Christie was envisioning Black Coffee. (And from my understanding, she wrote the Black Coffee script first, so I found it enjoyable to compare the two plays and see where The Mousetrap built upon Black Coffee.)

It's worth it for anyone who's serious about Agatha Christie, of course, but it's also a fun little mystery in its own right!