Vstup do perekladoznavstva [Introduction to translatology]. Vinnytsia: Nova Knyha [in Ukrainian]. Kochergin, I. A new comment on the post “slider-revolution-3-bg” is waiting for your appr= oval.

Times Literary Supplement: ‘Christie springs her secret like a land mine.’ Sunday Times: ‘Vivacious and entertaining.’ 24.Five Little Pigs (1943) A staggering bestseller upon its publication—runningthrough 20,000 copies of its first edition—FiveLittle Pigs(published in the U.S. AsMurder in Retrospect ) concerns a murder committed sixteen years earlier. Carla Crale prevails upon Hercule Poirot to investigate the crime that sent her mother, Caroline, to prison for life (where she died). Caroline had been found guilty of poisoning her estranged husband, Carla’s father, Amyas Crale, the famous artist.

Poirot’s investigation centers upon five suspects, still living, whom he convinces to speak to him and to record their own memories of the long-agoincident. Brilliantly intersplicing the past and the present, memory and reality, the search for truth and ongoing attempts to thwart it,Five Little Pigs has no antecedent. Almost a decade before Akira Kurosawa’s famous film introduced the term “Rashomon effect” into the vernacular, Agatha Christie invited her readers to view a crime from multiple perspectives and to consider the vagaries of such an exercise.

Fortunately, however, the great Belgian detective does not deal in vagaries—HerculePoirot is in the business of precision, and he will reveal the identity of the true killer. Observer: ‘Mrs Christie as usual puts a ring through the reader’s nose and leads him to one of her smashing last-minuteshowdowns.’ Times Literary Supplement: ‘The answer to the riddle is brilliant.’ 25.The Hollow (1946) A murder tableau staged for Poirot’s ‘amusement’ goes horribly wrong at The Hollow, the estate of Lady Lucy Angkatell, who has invited the great detective as her guest of honour. Dr John Christow was to have been ‘shot’ by his wife, Gerda, to ‘expire’ in a pool of blood-redpaint. But when the shot is fired, it is deadly, and Dr. Christow’s last gasp is of a name other than his wife’s: ‘Henrietta.’ What was to have been a pleasant country weekend becomes instead one of Poirot’s most baffling cases, with the revelation of a complex web of romantic attachments among the denizens of The Hollow.

Of note: The phenomenon ofThe Mousetrap tends to distract from Agatha Christie’s other stage successes. An adaptation ofThe Hollow was one such triumph, premiering in Cambridge in 1951 and subsequently playing for over a year in the West End. Poirot, however, is not a character in the stage version—thediminutive Belgian with the oversized personality was replaced by a perfectly neutral Scotland Yard inspector.

In herAutobiography, Mrs Christie notes that she wishes she had made a similar swap in the novel—sorich are the characters inThe Hollow —butPoirot fans then (The Hollow was a tremendous bestseller) and today would have it no other way. San Francisco Chronicle(of the novel): ‘A grade-A plot—thebest Christie in years.’ 26.The Labours of Hercules (1967) Dr Burton, Fellow of All Souls, sipping Poirot’s Chateau Mouton Rothschild, offers up a rather unkind remark about his host that sets in motion Hercule Poirot’s obsessive, self-imposedcontest against his classical namesake: Poirot will accept twelve labours—twelvefiendishly complex cases—andthen, at long last, genuinely unshoulder the burdens of the hero: hewill retire, and leave the ridding of society’s monsters, the sweeping of its criminal stables, to others. The cases that Poirot engages are every bit as taxing of his mighty brain as were the famous labours imposed by Eurystheus, King of Tiryns, on the Greek demi-god’sbrawn, and they make for one of the most fascinating books in the Christie canon. (Poirot solves them all but, of course, retirement remains as elusive as ever.). Sunday Express: ‘Twelve little masterpieces of detection. Poirot and Agatha Christie at their inimitable best.’ Margery Allingham: ‘I have often thought that Mrs Christie was not so muchthe best asthe only living writer of the true classic detective story.’ San Francisco Chronicle: ‘A finely shaped book, richly devious and quite brilliant.’ 27.Taken at the Flood (1948) A few weeks after marrying an attractive young widow, Rosaleen Underhay, Gordon Cloade dies in the Blitz—leavingRosaleen in sole possession of the Cloade family fortune.