I read this book when I was just a boy, barely old enough to speak the word "Mesopotamia." In retrospect, I wonder why American publishers carried over Christie's British title unchanged, when they seemed to have so little faith in us so often that every other title was changed in some way--"Death in the Clouds" became "Death in the Air," etc. The general idea must have been that we were dummies, and yet they let "Mesopotamia" slide in unchecked.

The book is a beautiful story about an enigmatic woman, Louise Leidner, definitely one of Christie's finest character studies. Biographers say that Christie based this character on an actual woman she knew in Nineveh and resented, a woman who called herself the queen of the dig and wouldn't give Christie the time of day. In fact this woman didn't like it much when Christie married her own pet toy boy Max Mallowan. She was a married woman all right, but she was used to deference and she was used to every other man in the expedition falling in line as her love slaves. Christie described this real life woman, Katherine Woolley, in her memoirs, and I've always wondered how she managed to write such a scathing, searching roman a clef about Woolley and then, after 1936, when she knew Woolley must have read MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA, she coolly accepted her hostess' hospitality one more time when in Iraq. What nerve! But there was always sort of a cruel streak, or at any rate a pragmatic streak, about Christie. She honestly didn't seem to care whose feelings got hurt as long as their life made a good story. Check out the way she totally exposed Gene Tierney's feelings to the world when she wrote THE MIRROR CRACKED FROM SIDE TO SIDE--or the Lindbergh family, for that matter, when she wrote the followup to MESOPOTAMIA the same year in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. She was a voracious tabloid reader, that seems clear, and it must have dated back to when she herself was in the tabloids every day and night due to her 1926 "amnesia" episode. Anyway Christie here creates not only Louise Leidner, the haunted "Katherine Woolley" figure, but Miss Amy Leatheran, a charming and engaging nurse with working class roots.

Did Amy Leatheran come into being as a possible rival to the nurse/detective characters then in place created by Christie's American competitors, Mignon Eberhart and Mary Roberts Rinehart (among others)? Hard to say, but I do wish that Leatheran had featured in more than just this one novel. I would have loved to see more books with her in it and I always think that, with all Christie's many backgrounds, she missed a trick by not having a hospital story (or a theater story, for that matter, but that's another kettle of fish). The truth is that Christie's mind was so profligate she could afford to "throw away" a guaranteed long running series of books and just dispose of their ingredients in a single novel, for she was blessed by a fecund imagination.

SPOILERS AHEAD! WARNING, WARNING, WARNING.

Okay, so when I was a boy I drew back at the surprise revelation of who killed Louise Leidner, and I expect many will find it far fetched that she married the same man not once but twice, and didn't recognize him the second time. Christie explains it as best she can, without getting too graphic, and you could read the book trying to see through her euphemisms into thinking, well Louise either didn't have marital relations with the guy the first time around, or the second maybe--and that would explain why she didn't recognize his--well, his you know what, but as I've grown older and had more romantic experience myself I can now totally subscribe to the theory that a woman will not necessarily recognize a previous lover. It's often the last thing on my mind when I have sex, either you've slept with them already or you haven't, and those bits of anatomy all tend to blur together, don't they, after the first few dozen. So I'm restoring the five star rating MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA has always merited. It's one of Poirot's greatest cases and a marvelous showcase for Christie's unequalled creation of character.

Married to an archaeologist working in the Iraqi desert, author Agatha Christie knew the Baghdad area well and was familiar with the procedures which archaeologists follow in doing excavations. An aura of reality therefore surrounds this mystery which she sets in Tel Yarimyah on a desert dig, not in the usual closed room of a country house. Amy Leatheren, a nurse, has been hired by Dr. Eric Leidner, the director, to be a temporary companion to his wife Louise. Louise, alternately described as a "female Iago" and as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," has received written death threats from her first husband, long thought to be dead, and she fears for her life.

The murder of Louise coincides with a trip through the east being taken by Hercule Poirot, and he is soon called in. Here the mystery becomes typical Christie. The body has been found in a closed room of Louise's living quarters, the door locked. All the suspects have alibis, and the servants on guard swear that no one has come into the area from outside. Poirot engages the help of Amy Leatheren in sorting out who likes and who hates Louise Leidner and who might not have a legitimate alibi. Red herrings galore keep the reader occupied--love affairs, flirtations, suggestions the treasures in storage room may have been tampered with, and jealousy.

When the murder is solved, Poirot gathers all the people from the dig into one room, where he goes through the evidence on a point by point basis, then announces a new twist for which there had been no prior evidence in the story. The characters, though wooden, have some interesting traits which keep the reader occupied, and the story is intriguing. Ultimately, however, Christie so manipulates her conclusions regarding the murderer that even Poirot admits there is no firm evidence to prove that X is really the killer, a weakness which undercuts the novel. Lucky for Poirot, the killer obligingly confesses, leaving no loose threads. Fun to read, this novel is interesting for its setting, though not one of Christie's best. n Mary Whipple

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery (Hercule Poirot Mysteries)
The Sittaford Mystery (Agatha Christie Signature Edition)
Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot Mysteries)
Lord Edgware Dies

Hercule Poirot is passing through Iraq just after a murder has been committed. Our suave hero interviews the suspects, surveys the environs, parries and thrusts here and there to bring out truth from suspects, and, of course, uses his highly efficient, superior, and discerning mental capacities to deduce the identity of the murderer. It's just another day of work for this short, Belgian detective. This particular story is narrated by Nurse Leatheran who gives the reader her detailed description of Poirot's quirky "foreign" manners and "twinkle" in his eye. I loved the author's depiction of a foolhardy, British, colonial sense of superiority set against Poirot's own elan and propriety as a "foreigner." The story moved quite quicky with twenty-nine short chapters which made for a book that was easy to put down and pick up again. Poirot is more refined and debonair than Maigret, Holmes, Gripstra, and DeKok together all together. For those who love a good "whodunit," this is a very good story by one of the world's greatest mystery writers.

I've recently reread Agatha Christie's "Murder in Mesopotamia". This is one of her best. Even knowing the solution I still enjoy the narrative and watching how she lays out the clues. Having Nurse Latheran tell the story is a nice change although I miss Capt Hastings.

One of the impressive features of this book is what Ms Christie does not include. There is just enough description of Iraq to set the atmosphere but not overwhelm us with local color. There is a bare minimum of archaelogical information when she easily could have piled it on. And thankfully she just not let Nurse Leatheran get involved in romances.

The plot is somewhat far-fetched but is definitely "fair play". The characters, especially the victim, have distict well-defined personalities. Hercule Poirot is pleasantly fallible, but fear not -- he does eventually arrive at the truth.

I love Agatha Christie and I really like this particular story. It's a lot of fun seeing Hercule Poirot from the perspective of a totally different person, the nurse, Amy Leatheran. But the reader, Anna Massey, does a terrible job on some of the voices in this one. Poirot's French accent is so thick that you can hardly understand him sometimes. And in the last few chapters, that's a big problem, as it is almost exclusively told by Poirot. She does fine with the English voices, but since she's English, that's not very hard. Even the American voices are not quite right. If I hadn't really wanted to hear the story, I wouldn't have bothered with this recording.

CMB

MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA has atmosphere and an intricate plot and is a fascinating psychological study. In these respects it is like Christie's DEATH ON THE NILE (also starring Hercule Poirot) - but unlike that classic it has no extraneous characters and subplots; it does have, however, the most engaging of Christie's first-person narrators, a nurse named Amy Leatheren. And for those mystery fans who relish the "gather everyone in a room for an explanation of the solution"-type denouement, MURDER IN MESOPOTAMIA's is superb.

This is another one of those great classics. Easy and relatively quick to read. At first, I was a little worried about the approach of the book (the author pretends that a nurse with only simple writing skills wrote the book), but it actually is very readable. I couldn't put it down, and I was very surprised in the end, which rates highly for me when I read this sort of book.

This fabulous mystery by Agatha Christie was written shortly before the more famous Murder on the Orient Express and has long been a favorite of mine. It outshines many of her other mysteries, in my opinion, because her famous detective, Hercule Poirot, sort of plays second fiddle to the wonderful atmosphere and a very likable heroine in Amy Leatheren. This is a fun journey for the reader, as entertaining a murder mystery as any in the genre.

Murder in Mesopotamia differs from many of her other mysteries in that it has much less of a drawing room feel than an adventure set in an exotic land where a murder occurs. The first half of the book almost has the feel of an M.M. Kaye mystery. Though one could not put Christie in the same class with Kaye in regards to romantic description of a time and place, there is certainly atmosphere to spare, and it is only when Hercule Poirot is introduced into the story that we see the classic elements of mystery fiction Agatha Christie helped perfect come to the forefront.

Amy Leatheren is a young nurse asked to accompany an archaelogical expedition to the middle east to look after Louise Leidner, the wife of the man heading the dig. She is supposed to be a nervous case, full of "fancies" and such. But what Amy finds is something quite different. It will bring about events leading to an adventure she will be asked to put down with paper and pen. Murder in Mesopotamia is her acount of the events that transpired.

Louise Leidner is a beautiful woman capable of both sweetness and offhand cruelty. And she is frightened. Just what she is frightened of is unclear. The team on the dig has been together a long time. On the suface it is friendly and familiar. But there is unrest just beneath the surface, an uneasiness that seems dangerous. Once Amy discovers the reason for Louise's fear, she is found brutally murdered in her bed. It has happened in such a manner and time that no one could have made Louise Leidner's fears come to fruition. But her crushed skull and lifeless body say otherwise.

There is a wonderful atmosphere here. From the Tigris Palace Hotel in Baghdad to Tell Yarimjah, from bazaars where people from various nationalities and backgrounds gather to tea and scones ovelooking the ruins, and to the inevitable murder, Christie makes the archaelogical expedition come alive. You really get a sense of people moving about in a passion to discover this Assyrian city like Niveveh, close to Hassanieh. You can see the beautiful and unusal Louise, almost asking to be murdered yet at the same time oblivious to the true danger that lies in wait.

It is only when the conveniently close Hercule Poirot is asked to help that the story becomes familiar. But even Hercule Poirot can not stop the fun, and it is only the few pages where he initially questions the suspects that seem slow. Soon young Amy Leatheren is acting as Poirot's helper, and to her delight and embarrassment, having the time of her life. There are both secret relationships and secret identities, and before too long, another murder. It is the second killing which will lead Poirot to the truth. Whether he can prove it, however, is another thing entirely!

Agatha Christie's second husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist, and the two maintained a home in Baghdad. Christie's interest in this land and the history beneath it is quite evident in Murder in Mesopotamia. There are some complaints that the solution to Murder in Mesopotamia is too complicated and implausible. That is nonsense. This is a fun and atmospheric mystery read that is as enjoyable as anything Christie ever wrote. You will get lost reading this as I have, many times. It is murder and adventure in an exotic land, a famous detective with a likable heroine helping him out. No mystery lover can ask for more.

To be perfectly honest, the part of this book that had me the most interested was trying to find out what had Mrs. Leidner so upset. Once that mystery was solved, there was nothing left that kept me wanting to turn the page (aside from the fact that it was due back to the library soon.)

Before the end of the book, I was not certain who the murderer was, but I had suspected that person, despite the fact that the light of suspicion was not placed on that person throughout. Still, how the murder was carried out was a complete mystery to me and the why--well, it turns out to be one of the why's offered by those trying to solve the mystery.

Other reviewers have mentioned that the characters were pretty one dimensional, and I would have to agree with them. I didn't even really care too much for Amy Leatheran, the narrator of the story.

Also, it is worth repeating (as others have already noted) that this book does not in any way educate a person on Mesopotamia, its culture, or its people. Archeology is also only a backdrop and you will learn nothing of this "soft science" from this book.

WARNING: Some reviewers have given away both the cause of Mrs. Leidner's fears and the solution to the mystery--and without warning that their reviews contain spoilers.

Overall, this was an OK book, especially if you just borrow it from the library, but no one will fall in love with Christie reading it.

I hadn't read Agatha Christie in some 30 years before I picked this up, inspired by watching DVDs of the fine "Poirot" TV series starring David Suchet.

Yes, Christie's story is formulaic and contrived, and not particularly believable. This follows the same pattern you'll find in "Death on the Nile", "Evil Under the Sun," and many other popular titles. A murder occurs among a group of people in a closed environment (here it's an archeological dig in Iraq). One of the group must be the killer. Of course Poirot figures it out, in time to give his usual long-winded presentation before the group, in which he delves into the entire history of all the participants before revealing the killer's identity with a grand flourish.

Yes, it's formulaic and contrived.

But what a great formula!

Christie's writing sparkles, and it's the clarity and energy of her prose that makes her stories so enjoyable. Modern mysteries, such as those of Ruth Rendell and P. D. James, are much more sophisticated and realistic. Christie is much more a light read. But she's so much fun that it almost doesn't matter how much it stretches credulity. Poirot is a constantly delightful and charming character, the setting is well described, and Christie's writing keeps the plot humming along nicely.

After finishing this one, I read "Murder at the Vicarage", even though I had just watched two TV productions of the story. Although I knew "who dunnit", it was still a delightful read. These stories can be fun even if you know how they turn out.