Thanks to you both! I will highlight those to not be skipped. I actually read Death on the Nile out of order recently because of the movie coming out (and also probably it was on sale, that's usually why I get books earlier than planned) and Hercule Poirot's Christmas because I was in a Holiday Murder Mystery zone there for a while. That's kind of a weird subgenre if I stop to think about it, but I like it.

I'm definitely planning on reading Why Didn't They Ask Evans because I remember one key thing from it and nothing else except that I liked it when I read it the first time. The Marple adaptation of that, btw, did not please me, even remembering so little about it.

I read a lot of Christie back in my teens ... enough that I found I was picking the villain in the first chapter. That probably indicates I read too much, but I enjoyed it at the time. I like the PBS versions with David Suchet as Poirot (haven't seen the Kenneth Branagh versions). I find I can remember a number of plots. And PBS did some Christie versions with episodes from her own life - in one of them she goes to Egypt and meets her second husband, the archaeologist. (She once commented that the great thing about marrying an archaeologist was that the older she got the more interesting he found her.)

I've watched some of Poirot with Suchet. There's an awful lot of that, too! 13 seasons or something?Putting off deciding if and how I want to approach all that.

There is indeed a lot of Poirot.

One of the Marple series, maybe the most recent one, had her reminisce in the first episode about her lover, a married pilot who died in the war. That is entirely not Miss Marple.

It was in Murder at the Vicarage with Geraldine McEwan, which was not the first episode for some reason. Neither series that I've seen started with Murder at the Vicarage, and both had Nemesis before A Caribbean Mystery and I just don't understand why. But that whole flashback/memory/whatever, that was very wrong. When Jane reminisced about the unsuitable man her mother put a stop to she went on to mention that she ran into him later in life and was super grateful because her mother was clearly in the right. Bah.

I bookmarked the recommended list because it has been more than enough years since I read these that it will be all brand new now. Some nice pleasant mysteries will be a nice change since I am nearing the end of The Expanse series. Granted I am loving the space settings and action of this series, but will need a drastic change of subject when I finish.

I read "Cat Among the Pigeons" quite a bit. The plot hinges on Hercule being able to differentiate the knees of a real teenage girl from someone in her twenties pretending to be a teenage girl. Which was a little weird.

I am more of a Marple fan, and the "lover" was just weird. Weird. But I still watched it, just not actual Miss Marple. Miss Marple is the spinster I aspire to be.

The other thing with Christie is that you WILL encounter very casual racism and classism. There is sort of no way round it. One of my very favorite plots was Ten Little Indians, also known as Ten Little N*ggers. And Miss Marple always talks about "you know how "those people" are"- and there is also always some sort of nefarious swarthy person in Poirot (although that was sort of interesting, because Poirot was sort of a different type of nefarious swarthy person).

Yeah, there is a lot of that. It's generally not at all important to the plot/mystery, which makes it, I dunno, weird. I actually saw less of that in the Miss Marple books than I was braced for, but I've been gobsmacked by offensive descriptions and language in the middle of several mysteries, not just Christie, I was otherwise enjoying and I always feel like they could have just not done that, you know. So unnecessary.

I remember being not too happy about Cat Among the Pigeons but I can't remember exactly why. I was planning on probably skipping that one because if that vague memory, but by the time I get to 1959, who knows what I may do? That's ages from now.

Ngaio Marsh has some appalling racism and homophobia.