- first published in 1961
- read this time using both a paperback and the Kindle edition
Synopsis (Agatha Christie website)
To understand the strange goings on at The Pale Horse Inn, Mark Easterbrook knew he had to begin at the beginning. But where exactly was the beginning? Was it the savage blow to the back of Father Gorman’s head? Or was it when the priest’s assailant searched him so roughly he tore the clergyman’s cassock? Or could it have been the priest’s visit, just minutes before, to a woman on her death bed?
Or was there a deeper significance to the violent squabble which Mark Easterbrook had himself witnessed earlier? Wherever the beginning lies, Mark and his sidekick, Ginger Corrigan, may soon have cause to wish they’d never found it.
My Take - there may be spoilers..
When I read this book some years ago and wrote my review, I "read" it as an audio book. My review is here.
I am reading it again for my Agatha Christie U3A discussion group. We will follow up our discussion with watching the ITV video with Colin Buchanan in it.
I was very impressed with a number of features of the structure of this story.
- the way Christie introduced the idea that witches could still exist today, She starts with the witches in Macbeth and then goes on to the idea that witches today could really just be ordinary old women. She prepares the reader to accept the idea that witches do exist and can be very powerful. When the 3 women at The Pale Horse are introduced the idea that they might be witches immediately comes to mind
- the idea of a list of people who have all die of relatively common diseases. Is there a connection between them. Why did Mrs Davis give Father Gorman this list?
- Characters in Agatha Christie novels: Ariadne Oliver, a friend of Hercule Poirot's. Mrs Dane Calthrop - a friend of Ariadne Oliver's (The Pale Horse) and Jane Marple (The Moving Finger)
- the final twist in the tale. Who was really the person who carried out "the service" of disposing of the unwanted person on behalf of the client
- the source of Mr Venable's wealth.
My rating: 4.6
Possible spoilers
The Pale Horse combined two ideas that Agatha Christie had been considering. One, a book "would start somehow with a list of names ... ". The other reintroduced Christie's earlier thoughts about "Voodoo etc., White Cocks, Arsenic? Childish stuff - work on the mind and what can the law do to you? Love Potions and Death Potions, - the aphrodisiac and the cup of poison. Nowadays we know better - Suggestion."
This novel is notable among Christie's books as it is credited with having saved at least two lives after readers recognised the symptoms of thallium poisoning from the description in the book. In 1975, Christie received a letter from a woman in Latin America who had thus saved a woman from slow poisoning by her husband and in 1977, a nurse who had been reading The Pale Horse correctly suggested that a baby in her care was suffering from thallium poisoning. In another instance, in 1971, a serial killer, Graham Frederick Young, who had poisoned several people, three fatally, was caught thanks to this book. A doctor conferring with Scotland Yard had read The Pale Horse and realised that the mysterious "Bovingdon bug" was actually thallium poisoning.
The title of this book comes from the Revelation of St John the Divine, chapter 6, verse 8. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him...” It was published in 1961 by Collins Sons in London, and in 1962 by Dodd, Mead & Co. in the US. It was adapted by Anglia TV in the UK in 1996 without Ariadne Oliver and by ITV in 2010 with the addition of Julia Mckenzie as Miss Marple and the omission of Ariadne Oliver, Colonel and Rhoda Despard and Mrs Dane Calthrop. It was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 and released in 2010. The latest adaptation of The Pale Horse aired in the UK on BBC One in February 2020, and is now available on BBC iPlayer. It was released in the US on Amazon Prime in March 2020.
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