They Came to Baghdad in Appointment With Agatha

Jun 28, 2018 Wanda Pedersen rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2024, brit-lit, summer-of-spies, female-authors, read-in-2018, mysteries-thrillers, public-library, espionage, my-1001-books-in-progress, owned

2024 Re-read

I am still fond of this book and Christie fooled me again even on the re-read! She uses romantic attachments so skillfully to distract me from what's really going on. I liked Victoria even better this time around. Her lively imagination must be what Christie's mental life was like—always looking for material for the next novel. And I know that Christie was adventurous. You can clearly see her affection for the archaeological community is her gentle teasing of them, describing them as ...more

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Feb 10, 2024 Teresa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: agatha-christie

Very entertaining! Victoria, our heroine of the piece, was a great character. She wasn't afraid of anything and yearned for adventure. Things got very interesting when the scene moves to Baghdad. I didn't twig to who the 'bad guy' was and it was a huge surprise.
Another winner in the Christie library. ...more

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Oct 20, 2023 Jazzy Lemon rated it it was amazing

Shelves: classics, english-authors

Top work as always.

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Mar 03, 2024 Mike Finn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: crime, audiobook, crime-series, golden-age-mystery

I'm very surprised that 'They Came To Baghdad' has such a low profile amongst Chrisitie's novels. I'd never heard of it until it came up as the next book being read by the 'Appointment With Agatha' group. I found it very entertaining. Having read it, I'm amazed that it hasn't already been adapted for film or television many times.

It's a solid contemporary pre-Cold War thriller set in an exotic location and centred around a global conspiracy to frustrate the achievement of a lasting peace after W I'm very surprised that 'They Came To Baghdad' has such a low profile amongst Chrisitie's novels. I'd never heard of it until it came up as the next book being read by the 'Appointment With Agatha' group. I found it very entertaining. Having read it, I'm amazed that it hasn't already been adapted for film or television many times.

It's a solid contemporary pre-Cold War thriller set in an exotic location and centred around a global conspiracy to frustrate the achievement of a lasting peace after World War II.

'They Came To Bagdhad' is much more sophisticated than Christies fun but frantic early Tommy and Tuppence thrillers, 'The Secret Adversary' (1922) and 'Partners In Crime' (1929). They were light-hearted and very much in the spirit of adventure stories like Buchan's 'The 39 Steps' (1915) with plucky Brits of the right sort going up against the enemy. This is a different generation, living in a complex and rapidly changing world where doing the right thing often involves secrecy, violence and deceit.

It features an English spymaster who presents himself as a bland, easy-to-ignore, slightly put-upon businessman, a square-jawed English hero who dresses like the nomadic tribesmen he has befriended and who holds the crucial evidence that will expose the conspiracy, a charming but apparently lightweight young Englishman who is working in Iraq with a charity promoting international friendship and who is the male love interest, an enigmatic American woman who is the trusted lieutenant of an American billionaire, an expansive Iraqi hotelier who knows everyone and an absent-minded archaeologist running a dig in the desert who can never remember who is due to arrive on site when.

'They Came To Baghdad' is filled with spies, kidnappings, assassinations and treachery. Yet all of that is really just a backdrop for telling the story of Victoria Jones, who has now gone to the top of my list of favourite Christie female characters.

Victoria is a working-class woman in her twenties with limited education, no family, no career and no money. What she does have is a lively intelligence, a voracious curiosity, a willingness to take risks, an ability to think on her feet, a facility for telling lies that will help her get what she needs, an aversion to planning and an unshakeable belief that she'll figure something out when the occasion demands it.

I think she was the perfect character to capture the changing aspirations of young English women in the 1950s. I loved her brio, her humour and her refusal to be intimidated by the posh, the powerful and the erudite. I admired her determination to learn from the people around her, her bravery in the face of threats that filled her with fear, her passion for defeating her enemies and her irrepressible belief that things would work out in the end.

My enjoyment was increased by the small details of 1950s life that Christie took for granted like how British currency restrictions hobbled even the very rich, that air travel from England to Iraq involved an overnight layover and that the English in Baghdad acted as though the Kingdom o Iraq was still administered by the British Empire.

I recommend the audiobook version of 'They Came To Baghdad', which is admirably narrated by Emilia Fox. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/harpercollinsp... ...more

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Feb 12, 2024 Mary rated it really liked it

Shelves: espionage, british

In this stand-alone espionage novel, Victoria Jones is an unemployed typist with a talent for telling lies and embellishments. She meets a handsome young man in a London park, falls in love, and decides to follow him to Baghdad where he works for a nonprofit organization. Once there, she quickly gets caught up in strange happenings, not initially realizing that she has become a pawn on a global stage of dangerous political intrigue.

Victoria's quick thinking and problem-solving abilities help he ...more

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Jul 02, 2018 Laura marked it as to-read

3* The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Hercule Poirot #1)
3* The Murder on the Links (Hercule Poirot #2)
TR Poirot Investigates (Hercule Poirot, #3)
4* The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Hercule Poirot #4)
TR The Big Four (Hercule Poirot, #5)
TR The Mystery of the Blue Train (Hercule Poirot #6)
TR Black Coffee (Hercule Poirot, #7)
3* Peril at End House (Hercule Poirot, #8)
3* Lord Edgware Dies (Hercule Poirot #9)
5* Murder on the Orient Express (Hercule Poirot, #10)
TR Three Act Tragedy (Hercule Poirot, #11)
2* Dea ...more

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Jan 25, 2024 Maggie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: british, thriller, fiction, agatha-christie

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. While I read through Agatha Christie's novels with the Appointments with Agatha group, I'm putting a templated synopsis of each novel in my review. It has spoilers!

Book: 40 of Christie's novels
Setting: Baghdad
Detective and Companions: Victoria Jones, Mr Dakin
Crime: A third party secret organisation is plotting to sabotage a meeting in Baghdad between USA and Russia. A spy, Carmichael, who has discovered information about this organisation runs into Victoria's hotel room, stabbed in the chest, an ...more

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Jan 26, 2022 Roseli Gomes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Outro livro da Agatha que nos mostra espionagem e clima da Guerra Fria pós segunda guerra, outro livro que identificamos a ligação da personagem com a enfermagem e também com arqueologia e viagens...

Não é meu favorito, mas sempre darei 5 estrelas para Agatha ;-)

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