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We are tricked into thinking each characteras they are developed might have actually killed himafter it turns out Laura couldn't have.This novel is well done to the twist at the end.For me is seems to lack a little of the pathos the play must have had. We are led astray from the beginning of this novel.The wife of the murdered man is first introduced with the gun in here handas the unexpected guest finds her with the dead man in his wheel chair.Richard Warwick as we meet him through the text is a man that seems to have deserved his fate.
It also seems rather stretched out in terms of font and book design. The main problem is that this a very thin disguise, for the novel reads more like one's recital of a play than an actual story. He manages to keep the same brisk pace and plotting as the original play.
While she adopted her own novels into plays, being unsatisfied with the adaptations done by others, Osborne has taken her plays and adapted them into novels. When Michael Starkwedder runs his car into a ditch and enters the Warwick residence on a foggy November evening, the last thing he was expecting to find was murder. Charles Osborne is perhaps working in the opposite direction that Agatha Christie did.
Starkwedder soon finds himself enmeshed in the mystery surrounding Warwick's murder, anxious to help out his beautiful widow who he doesn't even know.Osborne has done a commendable job, offering a slightly different interpretation to final lines, perhaps intuiting what was left unsaid by Christie's characters. Yet for those fans craving a "new" Agatha Christie work, "The Unexpected Guest" will not disappoint. "The Unexpected Guest" works extremely well as a play, but less so as a novel, at least in this adaptation.The plot and characters of "The Unexpected Guest" are the same, as is the dialogue, given virtually verbatim with few additions.
Osborne draws upon stage directions for how the characters move or look, and embellishes some of them from the mere sketch Christie offered.
I really enjoyed this one. It made me think. I had just finished reading Black Coffee which is a similar adaptation by this author, and this one was SO much better. It did NOT give away the killer the way Black Coffee did, which is always important to me. No Poirot or Marple in this one, but it didn't need that to be absorbing. 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.
This is easily read with only one setting (as in the play). This is one of Amazon's main annoying points -- books with multiple versions often have multiple listings with reviews, so it's difficult to get a clear picture without a lot of hunting. As expected, a typical Christie plot twist awaits the reader at the end. I won't seek out the other plays-turned-novels.Note: the listing on Amazon for the "Acting Version" has many reviews, which mostly refer to the novelization. Amazon's method of listing multiple versions of books also gets 2 stars. But getting there a long, tedious journey. The adaptation of the play doesn't work as a novel and I only stuck with it to see what Christie had in mind.
However, you can't beat the real thing. You can tell it was a play and it does not flow like Christie novels. All Agatha Christie is excellent. The only time I find AC lacking is when someone has adapted one of her plays as a novel.
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