1960s Agatha Christie is really funny and interesting to me. She’s less concerned with truth about humanity, murder, theft, and all the crimes of her youth. Instead, she begins to wonder about what this new world will reap with its changes in mores and cultural values. People have sex, drugs exist beyond their use in poisons (but still plenty of poisons), and the role of the detective is much much different.
In this story, we also get a discussion of feminism of a kind. Specifically there’s a theory of witches she proposes, or has characters propose that maybe witches were never the histrionic caster of spells and hexes, the brewer of potions, but older women who stand on the outskirts of society and through their both direct and indirect exclusion from society they become more and more the hags of story and myth. Obviously, we’re less mystified by this because of the various (if limited) ways we have opened up a little more.
So this novel includes some of those elements. A country priest is murdered and a mysterious list of names is found hidden in his shoe. This list has a few familiar and few unfamiliar names and investigators are initially baffled. As the investigation opens we also get the narrative of a young writer. He learns from a local girl about some kind of pub called “The Pale Horse” that might be the sight of a kill for hire agency, might be a coven of witches, might be something innocent.
What’s curious about this novel is how much is feels like the last few Hitchcock movies from the late sixties and early seventies, like he’s really trying to make sense of changing things.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Pale-Horse-Agatha-Christie/dp/0062074113/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=pale+horse&qid=1565003650&s=gateway&sr=8-4)