I recently read Agatha Christie’s Poirot novel, Appointment With Death. I was very annoyed with how much it reminded me of the Hamish MacBeth novel, Death of a Gossip. First, because this is entirely the wrong way around. Death of a Gossip was published forty seven years after Appointment With Death. It’s just an accident that I happened to read them out of chronological order. Also, though I didn’t find Appointment With Death satisfying, it was a much, much better book than was Death of a Gossip. (If you’re curious, here’s what I wrote about Death of a Gossip and here’s what I wrote about Appointment with Death.)

(Spoilers follow, of course.)

I doubt that Death of a Gossip was based on Appointment with Death, but it is a weird coincidence that both of them feature the victim being a cruel older woman who likes to torment people with old secrets who is killed by a female American social climber during a private appointment the victim made with the female American social climber in order to taunt the murderer with the secret.

Admittedly, Lady Westholme (the murderer in Appointment with Death) reminded me more of the victim in Death of a Gossip than the murderer. And the murder was premeditated in Appointment with Death while it was… probably spontaneous (even though that introduces a bunch of major plot holes) in Death of a Gossip.

I can’t help but wonder if this similarity made me enjoy Appointment With Death less than I otherwise would have had the similarity to a bad mystery not occurred to me.

Come to think of it, there’s also a minor similarity to the Murder, She Wrote episode Showdown in Saskatchewan. That episode features a former officer of a prison who recognized someone who used to be an inmate there, and paid with his life for his extraordinary memory for faces.

It’s an interesting problem to consider that lesser books which steal from classics may hurt our enjoyment of the classics if we read them out of order.