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Black Coffee (Hercule Poirot Mysteries) | 
| Author: Agatha Christie
Creator: Charles Osborne
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $7.99
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You Save: $7.98 (100%)
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Rating:  62 reviews
Sales Rank: 570183
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 290
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 4.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0312970072
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780312970079
ASIN: 0312970072
Publication Date: September 15, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Amazon.com Review
Subtitled A Hercule Poirot Novel, Black Coffee is actually an Agatha Christie play recrafted as a book meant to be read rather than seen on the stage. The story was first produced in 1930, and Charles Osborne has done little to it except string the dialogue and stage directions together in paragraph form. Christie loyalists will welcome and applaud his dedication to the original, but it does seem as though he could have given it a bit more flair. Still, Poirot himself, bumbling Captain Hastings, and obsequious George are all in good form and it is amusing to find them engaged in another adventure, with an interesting assortment of possible murderers, blackmailers, and innocent (if suspicious) bystanders. The novel opens as Poirot receives a summons at his breakfast table from England's premier physicist, Sir Claud Amory. Busy working on a new formula necessary for England's defense in the Second World War, Amory suspects a member of his household of espionage. Of course, by the time Poirot and sidekick Hastings arrive at the scientist's country house, he is suddenly and mysteriously dead. Amory himself turns out to have been not quite nice, and his family, regardless of his scientific efforts, is pretty pleased with the new state of affairs. Still, Poirot manages both to save the more amiable members of the household from themselves and to protect the secrets of the British Empire. The novel is warmly evocative of another time and place and a welcome reminder of vintage Christie. --K.A. Crouch
Product Description
Nearly a quarter-century after her death, Agatha Christie remains the most popular mystery writer of all time. Now, in a celebrated publishing event, fans and newcomers alike are treated to another Christie novel. Created in 1930 as a stage play and faithfully adapted by Charles Osborne, Black Coffee brings back beloved detective Hercule Poirot to exercise his "little grey cells" one more deliciously deductive time...
An urgent call from physicist Sir Claud Amory sends famed detective Hercule Poirot rushing from London to a sprawling country estate. Sir Claud fears a member of his own household wants to steal a secret formula destined for the Ministry of Defense. But Poirot arrives too late. The formula is missing. Worse, Sir Claud has been poisoned by his after-dinner coffee. Poirot soon identifies a potent brew of despair, treachery, and deception amid the mansion's occupants. Now he must find the formula and the killer...while letting no poison slip 'twix his low lips.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 57 more reviews...
 Like I love my men . . . October 10, 2008
Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States)
BLACK COFFEE the novel suffers from Charles Osborne's timidity in adapting Agatha Christie stage dialogue into a prose fiction equivalent. Wearily the reader sits through every blessed thing that was said on stage (or so it seems) plus every stage direction, for most of which Osborne fails to achieve any sort of actual verbal equivalence, so that we never can figure out what exactly the characters are doing in that room at Abbot's Cleve. On the other hand, the one chapter where Osborne just went crazy and wrote the whole thing from scratch (chapter one, set in Poirot's tidy flat in London) doesn't work either, so it's not exactly a problem inherent in novelization, he's just not that good a writer perhaps.
However he did get better, and the other two books he wrote are less painful than this one.
In BLACK COFFEE, for example, the whole plot turns on a vase filled with spills used to help the fire in the huge fireplace, and whereas we would have seen the vase instantly on stage, and watched characters playing with the spills throughout the entire play, here we have no idea that they are present, much less what they are, until Poirot points them out to his sidekick, Hastings, in the play's penultimate moments. Fair play? I think not. We're being toyed with by a man who doesn't care if we have all the information or not, he's just slugging it out doggedly till the play's last scene.
Strange chronology too! We forget that Hastings wasn't in on every adventure of Poirot's, and that when she turned to BLACK COFFEE in 1930, she was bringing him back after an absence of several years. Osborne's odd interjections suggest that this story takes place sometime after the events of LORD EDGWARE DIES, which of course came later, in the mid-1930s... I wonder why, it's puzzling. I'll have to go to my copy of the actual play to see if Christie had that pervy scene of Hastings (a married man, of course, though Bella is off in the Argentine) spying on glamorous flapper Barbara Amory as she lies sunbathing on what she thinks is a private, enclosed garden spot.
black coffee April 24, 2008
Leslie L. Lightner (Findlay, ohio United States)
I was not pleased with the writing style of this book. Adapted by Charles Osborne from a Christie play. It lacked the punch and pizazze typical of Agatha Christie's self written books.
 Proof that Opera Critics shouldn't write crime novels. April 12, 2008
Elisita (Sydney, AUSTRALIA)
This book is a pretty poor effort. It tries to pass off as an Agatha Christie novel, but rather it's an adapatation of a play she wrote - adapted by opera critic and historian Davbid Osbourne.
Quite simply, David is a pretty poor writer. He tries to copy Christie's deceptively simple style, but on page one you already know that it's a little off. Still, I was willing to overlook that had he managed to keep some tension and drama or something. No instead there are really odd characterisations (Captain Hastings becomes a total HIMBO...and is practially of no conequence at all).
Also however, what REALLY confused me was the fact that Osbourne identifies the murderer at the very START...I really didn't understand what on earth the point was.
Mystery is too easy to solve... April 3, 2008
A. Wolf (Hamburg, PA USA)
Frankly I couldn't believe my eyes when I read this. There, plainly, in print, the murderer was given away in the first 50 pages of the book! Maybe I wasn't supposed to figure it out, but the murderer's actions were described quite plainly. I was disappointed. But then I thought: Maybe it had to be this way because it was a novel adapted from a play. In the play, obviously, the murderer's actions would be described so the actors could act - it was up to the audience to pick up on it. And I was the audience, and I DID pick up on it. But honestly, a die-hard Christie fan like myself HAS to read this book because so many beloved characters are there: Poirot, Hastings, Inspector Japp, etc. So reading the book is like going back to old friends that you thought you bid adieu. The 3 books Osborne adapted as novels are like the "lost Agatha Christie novels".
A Double Shot of Murder February 17, 2008
R. Chaffey (Chicago)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
What a daunting task it must be to adapt a play by Agatha Christie and be successful at it! Agatha Christie herself took to writing plays because she disliked the way one of her novels had been adapted for the stage. Charles Osborne, a Christie biographer and renowned theatre and opera expert, does a comendable job in this novelization of the play "Black Coffee".
Hardly anything new is added to the story, except for a slight lengthening of the time frame and an early chapter to introduce Hercule Poirot. Osborne is true to the original text, using the lines Christie wrote as the dialogue between his characters, enhancing their conversations a little at certain places. The only other additions are seen through his descriptions, mostly taken from stage directions, but some creativity is granted in how characters say certain things and their physical descriptions.
For any Agatha Christie fan, it is a pleasure to have another of her 'novels' to read. Osborne tries very hard to match the rhythm and flow of Christie's writing, and does well overall, with only a few patches that sound stilted. It is obvious that some other reviewers haven't read the original Christie text to enjoy this story as it was originally meant to be enjoyed - performed on the stage, where secrets are not kept from the audience. But since copies of the play can be a little difficult to come by, Osborne's adaptation is a close second in enjoyment.
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