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The Unexpected Guest
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Manufacturer: Thorndike Press
Author: Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Average Customer Rating:
Our Price:
You Save: $ 30.95 ( 100% )
Manufacturer: Thorndike Press
Author: Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Average Customer Rating:
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The Unexpected Guest Description
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780786222018
Format: Large Print
ISBN: 0786222018
Label: Thorndike Press
Manufacturer: Thorndike Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 215
Publication Date: 2000-01
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Studio: Thorndike Press
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780786222018
Format: Large Print
ISBN: 0786222018
Label: Thorndike Press
Manufacturer: Thorndike Press
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 215
Publication Date: 2000-01
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Studio: Thorndike Press
Editorial Review of The Unexpected Guest
Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time with her works outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible. She is regarded by generations of fans as the greatest mystery writer ever, and her novels are read and cherished the world over.
Clarissa, the young wife of a Foreign Office Diplomat, delights in tweaking the sensibilities of her more serious friends and for playing a game she calls "supposing" - imagining a difficult situation and figuring out how people would respond. But Clarissa's lighthearted game becomes deadly serious when she discovers the dead body of an unknown person in her own drawing room. If that wasn't bad enough, her husband is on the way home with an important foreign politician and the attendant scandal of the dead body would irrevocably damage his career at the very least. Therefore, Clarissa decides to dispose of the body and persuades her three houseguests to help.
But before she can get the body off the premises, a policeman arrives at her front door. The police received an anonymous tip about a murder in the house and have shown up to investigate. Now Clarissa must keep the body hidden, convince the skeptical police inspector that there has been no murder, and, in the meantime, find out who has been murdered, why, and what the body is doing in her house.
Originally written by Agatha Christie as a play in 1954, now rendered as a novel by Charles Osborne, Spider's Web is a compelling tale of murder and deceit sure to entertain and amuse the legions of Christie's fans worldwide.
Clarissa, the young wife of a Foreign Office Diplomat, delights in tweaking the sensibilities of her more serious friends and for playing a game she calls "supposing" - imagining a difficult situation and figuring out how people would respond. But Clarissa's lighthearted game becomes deadly serious when she discovers the dead body of an unknown person in her own drawing room. If that wasn't bad enough, her husband is on the way home with an important foreign politician and the attendant scandal of the dead body would irrevocably damage his career at the very least. Therefore, Clarissa decides to dispose of the body and persuades her three houseguests to help.
But before she can get the body off the premises, a policeman arrives at her front door. The police received an anonymous tip about a murder in the house and have shown up to investigate. Now Clarissa must keep the body hidden, convince the skeptical police inspector that there has been no murder, and, in the meantime, find out who has been murdered, why, and what the body is doing in her house.
Originally written by Agatha Christie as a play in 1954, now rendered as a novel by Charles Osborne, Spider's Web is a compelling tale of murder and deceit sure to entertain and amuse the legions of Christie's fans worldwide.
Customer Reviews of The Unexpected Guest
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Much better than BLACK COFFEE, the first book!
Review: I had just finished reading Black Coffee which is a similar adaptation by this author, and this one was SO much better! It had a great plot with attention getting plot twists. I did manage to guess one or two of the plot twists, but it's only because I'm getting familiar with Christie's style. I really enjoyed this one. It did NOT give away the killer the way Black Coffee did, which is always important to me. It made me think. No Poirot or Marple in this one, but it didn't need that to be absorbing.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Unexpected Guest
Review: All Agatha Christie is excellent. The only time I find AC lacking is when someone has adapted one of her plays as a novel. You can tell it was a play and it does not flow like Christie novels. However, you can't beat the real thing.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Guest
Review: Apsolutno jedan od najboljih napisanih komada velicanstvene gospodje Christie. Roman koji tece kao lavina. Od momenta kada otvorite prvu stranicu necete moci da stanete do samoga kraja.
Remekdelo.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A posthumous Christie with a vengeance
Review: After getting his car stuck in a ditch next to a desolate road hidden in thick mist, Michael Starkwedder walks to a cottage to get some help. To his surprise he notices that the front door of the cottage is ajar. Once inside the house he finds a woman with a gun in her hand, crouched next to a lifeless body. The woman, Laura Warwick, immediately admits to having killed her husband. Michael decides to help the woman to cover up her crime, but never expected to get involved so deeply into the intrigues of a guilt ridden family.
The Unexpected Guest is an original play by Christie and as such not based upon a novel or short story. The play opened at the Duchess Theatre, London, on August 12, 1958, and ran for 604 performances. It is considered to be one of the better Christie plays, but cannot be compared to her absolute masterpiece The Mousetrap. Charles Osborne, the nephew of Christie, did an excellent job in translating the play into a full novel. The original Christie touch is still present and by reading the book you can almost smell the theater curtains and hear the silent coughing of the audience. No question about this: Christie would have loved this adaptation.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Print the Play Instead
Review: Osborne adds nothing to our pleasure, and the way he expands tags of the stage directions is pretty irritating. I hope they paid him a lot of money to do these hack jobs on Christie's already perfect plays, because he sure killed whatever credibility he had as a poet, critic and essayist. HJe wrote a good book on Agatha Christie, but why go to him to turn the plays into novels? Surely a fiction writer would have been a better choice.
The Unexpected Guest wasn't even one of Christie's plays but when it is played properly on stage the character of Richard Warwick gets analyzed from many different perspectives until it becomes like Citizen Kane, a prism of a dead man's life. For better or worse (and usually for worse) he affected the lives of everyone around him--his wife, his mother, his retarded half-brother Jan, and others. I wonder what Christie originally intended to do with her tale's biggest loophole--what happened to Nurse Warburton, the corrupt nurse whom Richard Warwick bribed to give false testimony during the inquest into the death of the boy he ran over? I always imagine that, if the police dug deeper, they would find that "Warby" had been murdered also--shot to death, just like Richard. What do you fans think?
Review Summary: Much better than BLACK COFFEE, the first book!
Review: I had just finished reading Black Coffee which is a similar adaptation by this author, and this one was SO much better! It had a great plot with attention getting plot twists. I did manage to guess one or two of the plot twists, but it's only because I'm getting familiar with Christie's style. I really enjoyed this one. It did NOT give away the killer the way Black Coffee did, which is always important to me. It made me think. No Poirot or Marple in this one, but it didn't need that to be absorbing.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Unexpected Guest
Review: All Agatha Christie is excellent. The only time I find AC lacking is when someone has adapted one of her plays as a novel. You can tell it was a play and it does not flow like Christie novels. However, you can't beat the real thing.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Guest
Review: Apsolutno jedan od najboljih napisanih komada velicanstvene gospodje Christie. Roman koji tece kao lavina. Od momenta kada otvorite prvu stranicu necete moci da stanete do samoga kraja.
Remekdelo.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: A posthumous Christie with a vengeance
Review: After getting his car stuck in a ditch next to a desolate road hidden in thick mist, Michael Starkwedder walks to a cottage to get some help. To his surprise he notices that the front door of the cottage is ajar. Once inside the house he finds a woman with a gun in her hand, crouched next to a lifeless body. The woman, Laura Warwick, immediately admits to having killed her husband. Michael decides to help the woman to cover up her crime, but never expected to get involved so deeply into the intrigues of a guilt ridden family.
The Unexpected Guest is an original play by Christie and as such not based upon a novel or short story. The play opened at the Duchess Theatre, London, on August 12, 1958, and ran for 604 performances. It is considered to be one of the better Christie plays, but cannot be compared to her absolute masterpiece The Mousetrap. Charles Osborne, the nephew of Christie, did an excellent job in translating the play into a full novel. The original Christie touch is still present and by reading the book you can almost smell the theater curtains and hear the silent coughing of the audience. No question about this: Christie would have loved this adaptation.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Print the Play Instead
Review: Osborne adds nothing to our pleasure, and the way he expands tags of the stage directions is pretty irritating. I hope they paid him a lot of money to do these hack jobs on Christie's already perfect plays, because he sure killed whatever credibility he had as a poet, critic and essayist. HJe wrote a good book on Agatha Christie, but why go to him to turn the plays into novels? Surely a fiction writer would have been a better choice.
The Unexpected Guest wasn't even one of Christie's plays but when it is played properly on stage the character of Richard Warwick gets analyzed from many different perspectives until it becomes like Citizen Kane, a prism of a dead man's life. For better or worse (and usually for worse) he affected the lives of everyone around him--his wife, his mother, his retarded half-brother Jan, and others. I wonder what Christie originally intended to do with her tale's biggest loophole--what happened to Nurse Warburton, the corrupt nurse whom Richard Warwick bribed to give false testimony during the inquest into the death of the boy he ran over? I always imagine that, if the police dug deeper, they would find that "Warby" had been murdered also--shot to death, just like Richard. What do you fans think?